Category: Articles

Michael Moore Voted to Academy Board of Governors

By Jason Apuzzo. As reported at Deadline Hollywood, Michael Moore (along with Kathryn Bigelow, and Lawrence of Arabia editor Anne Coates) has been elected to the Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Board of Governors.

Forgive me, but the election of this Riefenstahl-in-a-fat-suit is repulsive.  Utterly contemptible, divisive – and richly evocative of the climate of fear that currently pervades an industry in which dissent from the left-liberal line is not tolerated.  I could not be more disgusted by this.

What most people don’t know is that at least one of the Motion Picture Academy’s Board of Governors is a conservative.  But I can’t say who it is – because of course, I don’t want this person getting in trouble.  That’s the way this town really works.

I don’t even know where to begin on this one, folks.  The ongoing ruination of what was once a special institution continues unabated, apparently with no adults around to stop it.

[Update: The LA Times’ Patrick Goldstein links to this post today (7/7) in his own piece on Moore’s election.  I’d like to respond to one point in Patrick’s article:

Inside the industry, reaction was more muted, with one screenwriter musing: “If the academy has any brains at all, they’d better frisk Moore before every meeting to make sure he doesn’t try to bring a hidden camera. If you thought Wall Street and General Motors were fat targets for muckraking, that’s nothing compared to the academy.”

This is actually the first thing I thought of when I heard about Moore’s election – not so much that he would bring a camera into board meetings (a droll idea, by the way), but that he would grandstand in public over matters that might otherwise be kept in-house.  The basic métier of people like Moore is to turn everything into a public, political controversy – essentially a circus spectacle, with him as ring master.  It’s all too easy to imagine this sort of thing happening in the case of, say, the awarding of honorary Oscars.  An acquaintance of mine on the Board, for example, was involved some years back in the controversial decision to give Elia Kazan an honorary Oscar.  What would Moore have made of that?  Would he really have kept his mouth shut?]

Posted on July 7th, 2010 at 12:55pm.

The World Cup

The Italians in their moment of triumph, 2006.

By David Ross. Every four years conservatives go into nativist-moron mode. I’m not speaking of presidential politics but of World Cup politics, and of the favorite conservative meme that soccer is a subversive plot to deprive us of our precious bodily fluids (see here and here and here). Libertas, for one, loves soccer. Like a Max Ophuls tracking shot, it has a beautiful, hypnotic fluidity, in comparison to which American football is like a bumper-to-bumper mess on a Southern California freeway. Among conservative organs, only Powerline has blown the vuvuzela on behalf of soccer. Relatively bright bulbs, those Dartmouth-educated lawyers.

The present World Cup has been high entertainment due to the creeping parity in the world game and the amusing fallen souffle of the French team, though the tournament has not been long on individual genius. Argentina’s Lionel Messi, clearly the best player in the world, could not figure out how to integrate his talents, while the other big guns were probably a bit overrated to begin with. Argentine coach and former world superstar Diego Maradona offers a surprisingly subtle theory in explanation of the general fizzle. Breaking with p.c. cliché, he suggests that today’s stars are not too selfish, but not selfish enough. They have absorbed too much of the wussy zeitgeist, as it were, and lack the bravado and ego of the matador. Continue reading The World Cup

The Mercury Men Invade America

By Jason Apuzzo. Yesterday we posted about a forthcoming web series called Red Storm that looks exciting.  Today we wanted to introduce LFM readers to another forthcoming web series that’s gotten a fair bit of pre-release hype, called The Mercury Men.

The Mercury Men is a 1940s-style adventure serial about a lowly government office drone who finds himself trapped, when deadly alien visitors from the planet Mercury seize his office building and use it as a staging ground for a nefarious plot. Aided by a daring aerospace engineer from a mysterious organization known as “The League,” the office drone must stop the invaders and their doomsday device, the Gravity Engine.

The Mercury Men was recently featured in Sci Fi Magazine (right next to another feature about Libertas Contributor Steve Greaves), and just today the Mercury Man blog announced that director Chris Preksta and star Curt Wootton will be at the forthcoming San Diego Comic Con speaking on a sci-fi panel on Saturday, July 24th at 4:15 PM.  They’ll also be screening a few minutes of footage from the series. Continue reading The Mercury Men Invade America

Hollywood Round-up, 7/6

The lovely Gloria Stuart turns 100.

By Jason Apuzzo. • Twilight: Eclipse has taken in $175 mil domestically so far, and $280 mil worldwide – and it’s not even through its first week.  So it’s a hit, and a big one, and now I’m going to stop talking about Twilight for a while because I’ve hit the saturation point.

• DC Comics is already doing a second print run after more than 60,000 copies of the Wonder Woman issue #600 (the re-boot we’ve been discussing here at LFM) got gobbled up. A DC source tells Nikki Finke that downloads of the free issue preview have been “phenomenal.”  No surprises here – she’s a popular character, despite what some may say.  And is the new costume really ‘anti-American’?  I still think that’s debatable, unless you’re looking to be offended by everything.

• You get the sense James Cameron’s been let out of a cage, or something. Now he’s going to be directing Black Eyed Peas videos in 3D. This must be driving the studio brass at Fox nuts as they tap their fingers waiting for the Avatar 2 launch date.

• Kevin Smith begins shooting his ‘political horror movie,’ Red State, this August with a cast of no-names. Or since it’s a Kevin Smith film, is it a cast of no-brains?

• The fix is in.  You’re going to like Christopher Nolan’s Inception (see here and here) … or else!  Wake me when someone writes a review of this film that doesn’t look like it came out of the Warner Brothers press packet …

The French poster for "Piranha 3D."

• … and in any case the summer’s most anticipated film (by me) is not Inception, but Piranha 3D.  The French poster for the film has been released … and frankly it looks better than the American one.  Why?  The French one focuses on the sex.  The American one focuses on the fish.  [The French really understand these things.]  And otherwise here are some great screen grabs from the film’s fantastic trailer.

• News comes today that George Miller’s Mad Max reboot will actually involve two films that will be released back-to-back: Mad Max: Fury Road and Mad Max: Furiosa. Miller is an uber-lefty, but this is a great franchise – and I love the new titles.  Hopefully this will work, and not be like the limp reboot of Death Race 2000.

• The Wrap has just figured out that Hollywood isn’t producing any new stars these days. Um, yeah!  We want to congratulate them on this striking new insight.

• With a Russian spy ring being caught recently, a lot of people are drawing comparisons to Angelina Jolie’s new film, Salt. It’s true – the timing couldn’t be better for the release of that film … provided you’re going to Salt to see a realistic depiction of contemporary Russian spycraft, and not Jolie’s legs.

• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … somehow I missed that actress Gloria Stuart turned 100 on the Fourth of July! Happy Birthday!  Govindini and I met Gloria a few years ago at an Academy event, and I actually ran into her at a Beverly Hills post office a few years ago, as well.  What a charmer.  She looks phenomenal, and has that old-school Hollywood graciousness in person that is so rare nowadays.  We wish her the very best.

And that’s what’s happening today in the wonderful world of Hollywood …

Posted on July 6th, 2010 at 3:03pm.

The Conversion of David Mamet

David Mamet.

By David Ross. David Mamet is our leading playwright as well as an incisive, cerebral film director. He made a splashy conversion to conservatism in 2008, publishing a hoot of an essay called “Why I am No Longer a Brain Dead Liberal” in The Village Voice.

I was pleased but not surprised.  All artists of real aspiration must eventually come to terms with conservatism, great art being rooted in the same values and perspectives that conservatism is rooted in – rooted in the assumption, for example, that human beings are more than automata of history, accidents of chemistry, points on a graph, sheep in need of a governmental shepherd.

In the latest issue of Commentary, Terry Teachout, the dean of conservative cultural critics, ponders the impetus and meaning of Mamet’s conversion (for subscribers only, unfortunately).

He traces the crux of the matter to a passage in “Why I Am No Longer a Brain-Dead Liberal”:

I do not think that people are basically good at heart; indeed, that view of human nature has both prompted and informed my writing for the last 40 years. I think that people, in circumstances of stress, can behave like swine, and that this, indeed, is not only a fit subject, but the only subject, of drama.

Teachout comments: Continue reading The Conversion of David Mamet

Red Storm: The Return of The Red Menace?

By Jason Apuzzo. There are a lot of independent film projects we’re hearing about all the time here at LFM.  Something we wanted to show you today, during this extended Fourth of July weekend, is a trailer for the forthcoming web series Red Storm.  We’ve embedded the trailer for this series above.

The filmmakers keep things mysterious, but the series appears to have as its premise a scenario that seems straight out of the new Red Dawn film, coming this fall from MGM.  Some sort of massive occupying force – Chinese communist? Russian fascist? – invades and occupies America, and a hearty band of freedom fighter-rebels fight back.

It’s interesting, of course, that this sort of invasion anxiety is reappearing in American filmmaking, as we’ve discussed previously.

The imagery used in the trailer is effective, ominous and compelling.  Marching armies (Chinese? North Korean?) … nuclear testing … the protestor stopping the tank in Tiananmen Square … the 9/11-style imagery of a crumbing building, shattered by explosions, raining debris on cars below … with those cars being passed by what look to be Chinese tanks. Continue reading Red Storm: The Return of The Red Menace?