Category: Narrative

Nikita Ads Called Too Sexy; Attacking the CIA? No Problem!

Too racy?

By Jason Apuzzo. We reported recently here at Libertas about how the CW’s reboot of the Nikita franchise will be making the CIA the villains of the piece.  So far as we’re aware, we’re the only site currently making a fuss over this.

Variety (registration required) is now reporting today that the show is currently turning heads for a different reason – namely, the raciness of it’s advertising.

At Libertas, of course, we dive right in to such controversies.

As I mentioned in my earlier post about this show, what alerted me to this show to begin with was a gigantic, eye-popping billboard of star Maggie Q slapped up against a building here in LA.  The poster was the already quite racy one of her in a red dress (see here).  Now, apparently, the people at CW are trying to get huge billboards of Maggie Q in leather and tattoos (see left) into major markets like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles – and even here in LA not everybody’s going along with it.

Let me begin by stating the obvious: it would be spectacularly hypocritical of me to complain about the sexiness of this show’s advertising, given our regular featuring of pin-ups here at Libertas.  On the contrary: we love this sort of thing, as it speaks to the sort of freedoms we enjoy here in the West that are routinely frowned upon in totalitarian societies (both of the Islamo-fascist and communist variety) elsewhere in the world.

Plus, the girls look cute – which should be reason enough.

Cheerleaders.

With that said, even I think that putting up 50ft. billboards of Ms. Q in leather and tattoos in public places like malls, where families and children may gather, is probably a bit much.  And for safety reasons, I don’t think it’s too good of an idea to put these billboards near freeways.  The one of her in the red dress (see here) is more than enough to get the point across.

What bothers me more is that this new show apparently goes The Full Stallone in taking a nasty swipe at the CIA.  Why aren’t people more bothered by this?  Let me put it this way: why are we so prudish about the sex component to this series, yet so completely untroubled by what the show is depicting in terms of our own government?

Attacking our intelligence services is such a terrible idea at this point in time, as those services struggle under the combined weight of low morale, rampant anti-Americanism overseas and budget cutbacks.  And here’s another problem: shows like this do, eventually, get syndicated in foreign markets … and what kind of effect do you think they have, particularly among those already inclined toward hating America?  [Foreign distribution rights to Nikita have already been sold to the UK and Australia.]

Much as with The Expendables, I really wanted to like this show.  It had the potential of being a kind of sexed-up version of 24 – or a weekly Salt, if you will – and in fact that’s what the show should have been.  Instead, they had to make America’s intelligence services into the enemy, into ruthless murderers bent on assassination.  What a shame.

The only silver lining here, I suppose, is that the CW is giving us a better-looking show this fall called Hellcats.  The show is apparently based on the book, Cheer: Inside the Secret World of College Cheerleaders.  I’ve put the trailer for the show below.  This cheeky comedy-drama’s premise is described this way:

Hellcats revolves around Marti, a pre-law college student from the wrong side of the tracks. When budget cutbacks and her mother’s constant carelessness cause her to lose her scholarship, she joins the Hellcats, the college’s competitive cheerleading team.

Perfect!  A series about a young gal forced into a life of cheerleading due to tragic circumstances.  [Is Roger Corman running this network?]  Between the new terrorist-fighting Hawaii Five-O and this, I think we’re set now.

Posted on August 19th, 2010 at 11:33am.

Review: Mao’s Last Dancer & Artistic Freedom

By Joe Bendel. For fifty-plus years, Mainland China’s Communist government has experienced bitter factional rivalries and instituted enormously destructive campaigns for ideological purity.  While the pendulum has swung back and forth from relative stability to institutionalized insanity, it has remained an authoritarian state where artistic freedom is simply impossible.  That is why twenty year-old ballet dancer Li Cunxin defected to America in the early 1980’s.  It was a bold decision that would define Li’s bestselling memoir and Oscar-nominated director Bruce Beresford’s subsequent big-screen adaptation, Mao’s Last Dancer, which opens this Friday (8/20) in select theaters nationwide.

As a young boy, Li was slight but flexible as enough to be accepted at Madame Mao’s ballet academy.  Diligently training to build his strength, his natural talent blossomed -even in the didactic productions foisted on the academy by their ideologue patron.

Eventually Li was entrusted to study with the Houston Ballet as part of a cultural exchange program.  Primed to expect unspeakable misery, Li slowly discovers America is not as he was led to believe.  Acclimating to the new environment, he actually finds he dances better in the land of class enemies because he “feels freer.”  He also falls in love with Elizabeth Mackey, an aspiring dancer.  Then his life really starts to change.

Li indeed decides to defect, news the Chinese government does not happily receive when he ill-advisedly delivers it in-person.  In fact, they forcibly detain him in the Consulate, with the intention of whisking him out of the country against his will.  However, Li’s friends refuse to leave quietly (fortunately Texans can be an unruly lot), precipitating an international incident.

Dancer is a truly inspiring crowd-pleaser of a film, but it is not an overly-sanitized or conveniently simplistic reduction of a complex, real life story.  In fact, the guilt-wracked Li, fearing dreadful repercussions for his family, frequently quarrels with Mackey, eventually even divorcing her.  Yet, as a result, Li emerges as a flesh-and-blood human being.  We can also forgive the film for indulging in its manipulative coda, having more or less earned its triumphant freeze frame.

As wildly improbable as it might sound, much of Dancer was shot on-location in China.  Reportedly, once shooting was underway, the authorities began demanding changes to the script, but to his credit, Beresford rebuffed them.  As a result, there are indeed scenes of Madame Mao (who remains an official non-person in China), played by a truly eerie dead-ringer for the Gang of Four leader.  We also watch as Li’s mentor at the academy is purged for perceived ideological offenses, such as teaching the techniques of counter-revolutionary defectors like Nureyev and Baryshnikov.  (Granted, the film also seems to imply contemporary China may be loosening up, at least to an extent.)

Amanda Schull & Chi Cao.

Perhaps Dancer’s greatest challenge was casting credible dancers for its key leads roles.  Again, fortune smiled with the discovery of the considerable acting chops of Chi Cao (currently Principal Dancer with the Birmingham Royal Ballet) and Chengwu Guo (a member of the Australian Ballet) as the adult and teen-aged Li, respectively.  Both prove to be charismatic performers, with Chengwu making a surprisingly strong impression, even with his limited screen time.  (Hopefully, they will both be allowed to return home, despite their participation in the film.)

Dancer also boasts two Twin Peaks alumns – including Kyle MacLachlan, making the most of a small supporting role as crafty immigration attorney Charles Foster.  It is Joan Chen who really delivers the film’s emotional punch though, as Li’s spirited mother Niang.  Even thoroughly glammed down for the role, she still remains a radiant beauty.

Dancer is a well-rounded, fully satisfying bio-picture.  The product of Australian filmmakers, it refreshingly refrains from kneejerk political cheap shots, even implying then Vice President Bush played an important role securing Li’s freedom.  It also vividly captures Li’s passion for dance, which is the fundamental cause of nearly every event that unfolds in the film.  Emotionally engaging and politically astute, Dancer opens this Friday (8/20) in select theaters nationwide.

Posted on August 18th, 2010 at 11:58am.

Review: Cairo Time

By Patricia Ducey. Time in Cairo is slow. Very slow. Glances are exchanged. Background concertos are heard. Sparks, however, are not ignited, ever, between Juliette (Patricia Clarkson), an American magazine editor and Tareq (Alexander Siddig of Syriana), her supposed Romeo in Cairo Time.

This is not Shakespeare, or even English Patient (a great weepy if ever there was one). This is one nuanced love affair.

Juliette and Tareq represent archetypes of the East and West, yet they are actually more alike than different: both inhabit internationalist circles – Tareq just recently retired from the U.N., where he came to know Juliet’s husband (a UN operative in Gaza), and Juliet herself a feminist women’s magazine editor. Not much of a culture clash here. At a few points in the film Tareq lightly (and rightly) scolds Juliet for her easy outrage over a few social problems in Egypt. This hints at further story is to come, perhaps a real discussion of custom and culture, but nothing develops. (The Last King of Scotland, by contrast, brilliantly portrayed the deadly consequences of feckless liberalism in its main character.)

Juliette arrives in Cairo to await her husband’s arrival from Gaza so they can enjoy a long dreamed of vacation together. He is delayed, though, by trouble in the refugee camp he manages – so he asks his old friend Tareq to see after his wife until he can join her. Juliette seems anxious, tentative and tongue-tied from the start – odd behavior for a successful magazine editor. We wonder why – middle age crisis, bad marriage, illness? – but we never find out. She loves her husband, children, and her job. Tareq tries to draw her out but she rebuffs him. Later, though, she mystifyingly shows up at his men-only coffeehouse to visit him – not once but twice.

This fog of ambiguity never clears, and slows the movie down to a crawl. Juliette wanders the streets alone, inexplicably tossing aside her husband’s warnings about women traveling alone. Naïve, self-destructive? One can only ponder. This behavior does reveal the only people who seem to know who they are, sadly: the bands of leering men on the Cairo streets who consider her, a Western woman alone on the street, as something south of “available.”

Juliette finally takes action after her husband is delayed again and again. She hops a bus to the border and to Gaza to find him, but the Egyptian police stop the bus and send her back to the hotel; they realize the situation in Gaza is dangerous.  As Juliette follows the police, her seatmate – a young Egyptian woman – stuffs an envelope into Juliette’s hands and implores her to deliver it to her lover back in Cairo. Again, hints at a story: tension, mixed up in politics, danger – but this too goes nowhere. She gives the letter to the young woman’s lover.

Non-doomed lovers.

The narrative of any melodrama demands some rupture of the moral code. English Patient’s doomed love story was played out on the canvas of a World War, when the old world order was collapsing in England and the Middle East. The lovers in English Patient violated every norm of class, race, gender and sexual orientation and died in agony for their transgressions. Patricia Clarkson’s protagonist, on the other hand, is a modern Western woman and thus is left with no moral code to rupture whatsoever. What will she lose if she betrays her husband, what would happen if she did betray him with Tareq? Not much. Tareq is an Egyptian Muslim who is kind of secular, kind of not. We are not quite sure what his moral code is either, or if he has one. Perhaps this is why the greatest doomed love stories take place at least pre-1950.

Canadian writer/director Ruba Nadda has underwritten both the characters and the story. The characters’ physicality – walking, talking, eye gazing, walking, talking – as well as their sparse dialogue reveal little. Clarkson and Siddig do their best but have little to work with.

My inner writer asks, what do these characters want? Apparently not each other. Or at least not very much. Perhaps Juliette will remain faithful to her husband, perhaps not, but it is of no real import to a woman in the grips of such anomie. Tareq was content pre-Juliette and is content post-Juliette.  I am not asking for these characters to outrun a fireball or gun down CIA assassins – I just want to know why their lives and loves matter.

Posted on August 10th, 2010 at 9:36am.

Bollywood Courts Controversy: Tere Bin Laden

By Joe Bendel. “Banned in Pakistan” sounds like a heck of recommendation for a film. Yet, in the case of Abhishek Sharma’s Tere Bin Laden (a bit of wordplay roughly translating to “Without Bin Laden”) it is hard to understand why they bothered. A mildly amusing satire, Tere tweaks the American response to the September 11th terrorist attacks far more than its Al-Qaeda mastermind, but evidently the Pakistani authorities feared any comedic representation of Bin Laden would be provocative.  American audiences can judge for themselves today as Tere opens at select theaters nationwide (see listings here).

In a bit of a departure for Bollywood, Tere is set in Pakistan and stars the Pakistani popstar Ali Zafar as Ali Hassan, an aspiring journalist who dreams of making it big in America. Unfortunately, his departure is delayed by the 9-11 terrorist attack. When his flight finally leaves, his odd behavior (possible only in a slapstick comedy, given the obviously tense circumstances) is misinterpreted as a hijacking attempt. As a result, Hassan is barred from America for life.

Our young protagonist perseveres though, toiling away at a low rent news station, trying to raise cash for a new set of identity papers. Covering a rooster-crowing contest, Hassan spies a poultry breeder named Noora who is the spitting image of Bin Laden — okay, maybe that is a bit daring on the filmmaker’s part.

Peddling a fake bin Laden interview.

However, when the reporter bamboozles the eccentric Noora into making a counterfeit Bin Laden video, made up like his notorious double, the jokes really are not directed at Bin Laden, but primarily at his target -Hassan’s promised land of America. When the bogus tape hits the airwaves shortly thereafter, the American military naturally starts carpet-bombing Afghanistan out of sheer panic. Frankly, this is the sort of satire you can find in any number of American films. Of course, the Bollywood musical numbers are a different story, the best being Zafar’s mellow groover, “Bus Ek Soch.”

Ironically, the most endearing character of Tere is the likably goofy faux Bin Laden, played by Pradhuman Singh, who shows a flare for physical comedy and chicken wrangling. Zafar, who reportedly was once held for ransom by self-described Bin Laden supporters, is also reasonably engaging as Hassan. One can also understand why he might be gun-shy with satirical material that cuts too close to the bone.

The outrageous positions Bin Laden’s double finds himself in (chasing chickens with a grenade super-glued to his hand, for instance) may well help bring the mass murderer’s public image down to earth. If so, Tere could be a force for good. Still the Kumbaya ending, suggesting everyone can come together and work things out if America only reaches out to her enemies, is hardly an accurate reflection of the world as it is.

Ultimately, Tere plays it safe in choosing its targets. That it still found itself deemed “anti-Islam and anti-Pakistan,” with many censors apparently unable to distinguish between Bin Laden and a character clearly impersonating him within the context of the film, is probably more telling than anything in the film itself. For those intrigued by its backstory, Tere opens today (8/6) at the Big Manhattan (formerly ImaginAsian) Cinema for a one week run, with the possibility of extending, and in other theaters nationwide.

Posted on August 6th, 2010 at 3:09pm.

Hollywood Round-up, 8/4


By Jason Apuzzo. • In the buildup to The Expendables, new clips of the film are being released (see above), and Sly Stallone is talking a little bit more freely about the political situation in Hollywood.  Here’s what he says today, in an interview conducting with Aint It Cool News readers:

[I]t’s a minor miracle the last RAMBO would even be released, but I took a gamble there … [for people who] desire to see an action film unfold that wreaks of pride and manly individualism that has unfortunately fallen out of vogue. I believe that everything is a cycle. And once again America will have its cinematic heroes reflect the incredible honor it is to be defending the most extraordinary country the planet has ever known. Just give it time, everything is a cycle.

I sincerely hope he’s right – that these things proceed in cycles.  Suffice it to say that if he’s right about this, then we’re long overdue for a correction toward more pro-American, pro-freedom material.  We’ll see.  Most of the action on the pro-freedom front seems to be coming from independent filmmakers, not from within the Hollywood system.

"Transformers 3"s Rosie Huntington-Whiteley .

• The debate rages on over the merits of 3D cinema.  Today J.J. Abrams and Joss Whedon are more or less weighing in against 3D.  What’s interesting here is that nobody was having this debate right after Avatar.  It’s the recent run of crappy 3D conversions that have been causing doubts.  I continue to say: filmmakers should shoot natively in 3D, or not use the technology at all.

• Communist China is apparently eager to have Inception playing in its theaters. It’s no wonder; the film’s basic subject matter is brainwashing!  It doesn’t surprise me in the least that they would be enthusiastically courting this film, and otherwise banning Salt.  In related news, the LA Times’ Patrick Goldstein notes the age-difference in critics who love/hate Inception – with older ones hating it.  I guess I’m breaking the mold here, because I’m under 40 and I hated it, too!

• The Jack Ryan reboot Moscow may have a director: Lost’s Jack Bender. In related Cold War movie news, you may not have known that until his recent meltdown Mel Gibson and Lethal Weapon screenwriter Shane Black were apparently collaborating on a picture called Cold Warrior, which would have featured Gibson as “an ex-Cold War spy who comes out of retirement and teams up with a younger agent to stop a Russian terrorism threat.”  There’s also news today that Joel Silver may be trying to lure Gibson back to revive the Lethal Weapon franchise.  I can’t begin to describe what a bad idea that would be.

• Transformers 3‘s Rosie Huntington-Whiteley appears on the cover of LOVE Magazine today. Yowza.  Where does Michael Bay find these actresses?  Oh, right – from the pages of Victoria’s Secret catalogues.

"Mad Men"'s curvy Christina Hendricks in GQ.

• Hollywood Elsewhere’s Jeffrey Wells asks a fascinating question today: “[W]hat about the next generation of Hollywood Republicans? Are there any industry righties from among [the] under-35 set? A movement without young blood is no movement at all.” How true!  Boy would I love to answer this question in detail for Mr. Wells, whom I suspect would be fascinated by the answer.  Let’s just say that it’s to the benefit of certain people’s media careers that you never hear about the younger crowd – or about anyone currently involved in actual filmmaking, for that matter. You’ll always here about them here at Libertas, though, because that’s our entire mission: to promote and support pro-freedom filmmaking.  Plus we have great pin-ups.

• And speaking of which, Tron‘s Olivia Wilde, who is quickly establishing herself as a go-to sci fi babe, apparently just shot a nude scene for Jon Favreau’s Cowboys & Aliens in which she stands “naked in front of a bonfire in front of 500 Apache warriors.” Hey, this sounds like my kind of film!  Maybe Favreau read this.

• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … Mad Men‘s Christina Hendricks does an interview and photoshoot for this month’s UK GQ. We’re big fans of Mad Men here at LFM (see here), and are pleased to see this retro-curvy bombshell is popping up (and out) everywhere these days …

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

Posted on August 3rd, 2010 at 1:42pm.