Category: Narrative

The Black Tulip Exposes Life Under the Taliban

By Jason Apuzzo. There was an interesting article recently in The New York Times about a brand new film called The Black Tulip, from first-time feature director Sonia Nassery Cole – an Afghan expatriate whose day job involves running the Afghanistan World Foundation, a charity focused on refugees and women’s rights. Ms. Cole apparently fled Afghanistan as a teenager in 1979 (after the Soviet invasion), and gained notoriety at that time by writing a letter to then-President Ronald Reagan – who subsequently invited her to the White House. President Reagan would subsequently put her in contact with the Afghanistan Relief Committee, providing her with a network of philanthropic contacts that would eventually help Cole direct The Black Tulip on location in Afghanistan, in the midst of the current war.

Sonia Nassery Cole.

The Times article details the extraordinary hardships and complexities associated with getting this film made in contemporary Afghanistan – the most shocking of which reportedly involved militants locating the film’s original lead actress, Zarifa Jahon, and cutting off her feet. Jahon was subsequently replaced by Ms. Cole herself – although, it’s fair to mention, this incident has been disputed by Latif Ahmadi, head of the Afghan Film Organization – and Jahon herself currently resides in a remote part of the country, apparently unavailable for comment. In any case, Ms. Cole certainly had to deal with threats of violence, crew defections and shortness of funds, yet her film unspooled in Kabul yesterday – with a possible appearance at Sundance ahead. Afghanistan has apparently already submitted the picture as its entry for best foreign film at the next Academy Awards.

Check out the trailer for the film above.  WARNING: THE TRAILER ABOVE CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILERS.

We look forward to getting a look at the film when it inevitably arrives in the States in the months to come, and we otherwise wish the irrepressible Ms. Cole the best with her film.

Posted on September 24th, 2010 at 10:22am.

The Cold War Returns with a Sci-Fi Twist in Pioneer One

By Jason Apuzzo. A special hat-tip goes today to my LFM colleague Joe Bendel for covering an interesting new web series called Pioneer One that just appeared on Vimeo and YouTube, and is also showing right now at the New York Television Festival. Pioneer One is essentially a crowd-funded webseries that went from concept to finished pilot in three months, on a budget of about $6000.

The premise of Pioneer One is this: a mysterious object falls from the sky, spreading radiation over North America. Fearing terrorism, Homeland Security Agents are dispatched to investigate and contain the damage. Without giving too much away, let’s just say that what they find there involves elements of sci-fi, contemporary anxieties associated with terrorism, and the political history of the Cold War. And while the politics of the series seem a bit murky, based on what I’ve seen thus far it’s safe to say that the series’ creators take a dim view of Soviet communism.

You can read Joe Bendel’s full review of the Pioneer One pilot episode here, and I’ve embedded that full, 30+ minute episode below. If you just have time to watch the series’ brief trailer, you can catch that here.

All summer long here at Libertas we were covering a variety of subjects – sci-fi alien invasions (see here), a return of Cold War/anti-communist themes (Salt, Mao’s Last Dancer, Farewell, etc.), and crowd-funded indie sci-fi projects (Iron Sky, The 3rd Letter, Mercury Men) – all of which categories, interestingly, Pioneer One fits into.

Having watched the full pilot episode, my feeling is that the team behind Pioneer One has a great premise they’re working from – one that only becomes clear by the end of the episode. Writer Josh Bernhard and director Bracey Smith are doing a very nice job, cleverly providing a sense of scale and suspense to the story, even if the pacing of this first episode is perhaps a bit relaxed. I hope this series takes off (it already has, to a great extent – the pilot has been downloaded and streamed over 2 million times) because if it goes where I think it’s going … it should be a great deal of fun. Bravo to the whole team behind Pioneer One.

[UPDATE: Congratulations to the team of Pioneer One for winning the “Best Drama Pilot” award at the New York Television Festival.]

Posted on September 21, 2010 at 4:34pm.

LFM Review: Easy A

By Patricia Ducey. The threshold question any movie review has to answer is, should you see this movie?  [Sigh.] There are some things to like in Easy A, but I can’t give it a nod.

First, the good: Easy A is a teen movie without much actual sex—the kids are still for the most part as innocent as, well, real kids.The story reflects on literature, like The Scarlet Letter or author Mark Twain, as well as the late John Hughes’ (more accomplished) teen oeuvre. Patricia Clarkson and Stanley Tucci steal every scene they are in as our teen heroine Olive’s adorably loopy parents—they leave the Focker folks in the dust. Director Will Gluck intentionally pokes fun at their obnoxious PC-ness: every time they trill “no judgment” you know they are going to indeed judge someone. The dialogue, although self-consciously snarky, at times sparkles with wit, and Gluck and his cast have mastered their comic timing. Emma Stone as Olive and Penn Badgley as Todd, the couple in romantic jeopardy, are too old by a decade for the roles, as per usual – but are affecting. That’s the first two acts.

Now, for the not-so-good: this movie is totally bereft of values or character and thus fails as a story or as a lesson. And the stock character of The Princess, a feature of most every high school movie, has now been transformed into a Christian Princess – thereby exploiting what is increasingly becoming the new “Other” in filmdom: Christians.  At least director Will Gluck has had the presence of mind to state in recent interviews that he regrets this decision.

Then why did he do it? The Pew Center reports that 78.5% of Americans identify as Christians. Why would a purportedly capitalist enterprise like a Hollywood movie studio continually insult the majority of its audience? The only answer to this seemingly contradictory impulse is ideology.

I cringe at the thought of the story meetings on this one. Here once more the Hollywood myth machine offers us its alternative to the Judeo-Christian ethic: identity politics. Look at any police procedural on TV these days, for example, and watch out for the White Christian Male. He’s probably guilty of something. In teen movies, if you are a smart kid or gay, you are good. If you are Christian, you are bad. This is your lesson for the day. [And it’s an irrelevant lesson, if we’re supposed to be avoiding stereotypes of minority groups altogether.]

Gluck could have utilized the technique employed by movies from Lawrence of Arabia to TV’s 24: vary things up. For example, do not use Muslims solely as terrorists – but include Muslim characters as counterterrorism agents or ordinary people. In Easy A’s case, why not have one of the Christian kids decide to stick up for Olive, because it’s wrong to ostracize someone? You know, she could say something like: her faith compels her to walk her talk, ‘hate the sin but love the sinner,’ etc. That way you would get a villain, and some truthfulness, that this movie has abandoned.

As the trailer above reveals, Olive agrees to fake a sexual encounter with Brandon, a gay student, so that he can gain some high school cred with the bully boys. She agrees, as a misguided teen might. Surely she will come to her senses and right this wrong and support Brandon in his quest for real acceptance by the last reel? Sadly, no. She accepts a gift card from him in “payment” for her deed. As word gets around, more boys approach her and pay her for their own fake deflowering. Why does she do it, why does she accept money for it? Her family is well off; there is no set-up explaining that she needs the money. She just takes it, like any prostitute would. There goes the parallel story with Hester Prynne, who did not ask for or accept a penny from anyone. The rest of the class gradually ostracizes her, led by the evangelical Marianne (Amanda Bynes) and her Christian club mates. And you can guess what is coming—the Christians themselves are a bunch of hypocrites! Continue reading LFM Review: Easy A

Never Let Me Go: ‘Devastating, Dystopian’

By Jason Apuzzo. I’m not sure we’re going to have time today to review director Mark Romanek’s new adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s dystopian novel Never Let Me Go – which recently debuted in Toronto and opens in limited release nationwide today, starring Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley and Andrew Garfield (the new Spider-Man) – so I thought I’d post an excerpt from Andrew O’Hehir’s interesting review over at Salon.

From Salon:

You could describe “Never Let Me Go” as set in an alternate-history version of postwar Britain, but as with all really good alternate histories, the changed universe really isn’t the point. Director Mark Romanek captures the slightly seedy and rundown reality of ’70s and ’80s British life in astonishing and even tragic detail; this is more like a period piece than a science-fiction movie. In fact, it resembles a Merchant-Ivory tragedy about doomed love in a war zone, except that the doomed love involves human guinea pigs and the war zone is not some tropic zone but the alleged good intentions of medical science.

Carey Mulligan and Keira Knightley in "Never Let Me Go."

There’s no way to write about “Never Let Me Go” without at least dropping hints about the ultimate destiny of Kathy (Carey Mulligan), Tommy (Andrew Garfield) and Ruth (Keira Knightley), the romantic triangle who meet as children in a dreary, peculiar boarding school called Hailsham House. If you don’t want to know any more about that, stop reading now. This is really never a secret in the film, although it’s concealed at first under a mask of horrifying euphemism — as an adult, Kathy becomes a “carer,” who works with “donors” until they reach “completion” — and I had read Ishiguro’s unforgettable novel and knew what was coming. Still, there’s a scene about 20 minutes into the movie when a sympathetic teacher named Miss Lucy (Sally Hawkins) finally spells out what the Hailsham children need to know about their future if they’re to have “decent lives,” as she puts it, and Romanek dramatizes this hammer-blow, life-changing moment with such power that I don’t want to undermine it.

Screenwriter Alex Garland, who is himself a novelist, sticks close to both the letter and spirit of Ishiguro’s novel; this movie is a veritable clinic in precise literary adaptation. He incorporates snatches of dialogue and even voiceover (read by Mulligan) straight from the book, without swamping the human drama or overwhelming Romanek’s astonishing visual evocation of a bygone Britain. His innovations are limited, but they help set the stage in important ways: The big medical breakthrough came in 1952, we are told in an opening title, and by 1967 life expectancy exceeded 100 years. This came at a price, of course, and “Never Let Me Go” asks us to consider that price in all its dimensions. Continue reading Never Let Me Go: ‘Devastating, Dystopian’

ATTN: Mr. Democrat Challenges the Iranian Regime

By Jason Apuzzo. I wanted Libertas readers to have a chance today to see an extraordinary short film by Iranian filmmaker Farbod “Fred” Khoshtinat called, ATTN: Mr. Democrat. The ‘Mr. Democrat’ of the title is an ironic reference to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who actually claims to preside over a democratic republic in Iran.

Fred Khoshtinat with Hillary Clinton.

Khoshtinat is a multi-talented filmmaker who edited the music video sequences in a poignant movie I really admired this past summer called No One Knows About Persian Cats (see my review of that here).

ATTN: Mr. Democrat is a short film that created a big splash recently by winning the State Department’s ‘Democracy Video Challenge,’ in the Near East and North Africa category. Khoshtinat was given the ‘Democracy Video Challenge’ award for this short this past week by Hillary Clinton.

Dissident filmmakers like Khoshtinat will always have a ‘virtual home’ here at Libertas. We wish him the best in his future endeavors, and hope the success of his film opens up another tiny crack in the Iranian regime.

Posted on September 17th, 2010 at 12:43pm.

Living with the Infidels Episode 5 – “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang”

PLEASE NOTE: Living with the Infidels Episode 5, “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,” features adult language and situations. If that might offend you, please don’t watch the webisode. Otherwise, enjoy.

By Jason Apuzzo. Here is Episode 5, the final installment of Living with the Infidels. We hope you’ve enjoyed the series. This episode may be the best. It is genuinely hilarious – in large measure because it’s dominated by the terror cell’s raging narcissist, Psycho Ali, who delivers the funniest riff on a terror video I’ve ever seen – Four Lions included. Watch him as he struggles to find his ‘actor’s moment.’ Enjoy!

Posted on September 16th, 2010 at 10:15am.