By Jason Apuzzo. I saw The Social Network yesterday – and found it for the most part uninteresting. Despite some stand-out performances by Jesse Eisenberg, Justin Timberlake and Andrew Garfield the film failed to really grab me emotionally in any way. Part of the problem is that there doesn’t seem to have been anything particularly dramatic behind the rise of Facebook as a corporation. You could basically make the same movie about the rise of, say, Dunkin’ Donuts, to about the same effect.
[I hear Dunkin’ Donuts does over $5 billion in business per year, by the way. So don’t laugh.]
And so in lieu of spending hours writing a review about a film that didn’t grab me, on any level, I thought I’d post this video above that illustrates how David Fincher’s directorial style could quickly and efficiently be brought to bear in depicting the rise of other famous Silicon Valley ventures. Judge for yourself.
By the way, my understanding is that Mark Zuckerberg won’t be suing Sony, or any of the other people behind the making of The Social Network. They’re lucky, frankly. The people making the Google movie might not have the same good fortune.
By Joe Bendel. Ilich Ramírez Sánchez killed on behalf of just about every violent extremist movement of the twentieth century. Sheltered by the East German Stasi, he was most closely aligned with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). An ardent Marxist and notorious terrorist, Ramírez Sánchez is best known as the infamous “Carlos the Jackal” (though he preferred just plain “Carlos”). French director Olivier Assayas dramatizes his infamous crimes (and there are a lot of them) in his grandly ambitious five-hour, thinly fictionalized historical thriller Carlos, which screens in its entirety during this year’s New York Film Festival.
Soviet educated, the Venezuelan Ramírez Sánchez views the world through a radicalized prism. He is convinced “direct action” (meaning terrorism) is necessary to bring about supposedly progressive change. A promising volunteer for the PFLP terrorist network, Carlos steadily establishes a reputation for ruthlessness with a number of grenade attacks on cafes and an unsuccessful assassination attempt on Edward Sieff, president of Marks & Spencer and a prominent member of the British Jewish community.
Carlos forged alliances with the Japanese Red Army and extremist German Baader Meinhof/RAF splinter groups, acting more or less in concert. While he was not directly involved in the murder of the Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics or the hijacking of Air France Flight 139 (freed by the IDF’s famous Entebbe operation), he was personally charged with subsequent reprisal attacks. However, his greatest international infamy probably arose from his attack on the 1975 OPEC meeting, taking the cartel’s delegates hostage.
Ramírez Sánchez is an anti-Semitic mass murderer. His crimes have no justification. Wisely, Assayas does not really go down that road. While his Carlos has a certain animal magnetism and a voracious sexual appetite, the film never makes a martyr of him, unlike the terrorist agit-prop of Uli Edel’s Baader Meinhof Complex. Essentially Assayas shows Ramírez Sánchez going about his destructive business rather matter-of-factly, only occasionally paying lip service to some leftist cause, such as Allende in Chile. Yet, there are a handful of truly telling scenes, as when a former RAF accomplice remarks to Carlos how sick it is for Germans like himself to be killing Jews.
The five plus hours of Carlos are packed to the gills with violent intrigue. Yet, it’s all pretty well grounded in historical fact. Indeed, it is quite in synch with the facts established in Barbet Schroeder’s Terror’s Advocate, a documentary profile of Jacques Vergés, the attorney for Ramírez Sánchez, the PFLP, and just about every other terrorist of the twentieth century (who also briefly appears as a character in Carlos). Frankly, it would make a much better double feature with Assayas’s film than Edel’s love-letter to terror.
Edgar Ramírez is appropriately both charismatic and creepy as Ramírez Sánchez, nicely capturing the ferocity of extremism. There are also scores of effective supporting performances from its large but completely credible ensemble cast. Yet Carlos is much more a director’s film than an actor’s, seamlessly recreating complicated historical events around the globe and staging gritty action sequences with tick-tock precision.
Originally broadcast on French television, Carlos might be divided into three parts, but it truly is one unified film, entirely helmed by Assayas (unlike the three interlocking films of Red Riding). Truthfully, the 319 minutes is a long haul. As fascinating and absorbing as it is, most viewers will be desperately hoping for his capture by the final half hour. For those with short attention spans, there will be a two and half hour cut that will eventually screen at the Lincoln Plaza. However, if you are going to see a big epic film like Carlos, you should do it right and get the full experience. The full unvarnished and uncut Carlos screens this Saturday morning (10/2) during the 2010 NYFF.
By Jason Apuzzo. • The big news today is Lucasfilm’s announcement that the entire, 6-film Star Wars saga is going to be retrofit into 3D, and that the films will be released in series order (i.e., Episode I-VI) starting in 2012. This is fabulous news in my opinion, albeit not surprising. 2012 will mark the 35th anniversary of the original film, and George Lucas has been hinting for years that something like this was in the works.
This announcement will, of course, occasion a lot of uniformed pontificating about some of the bad 3D retrofits that have been released in the wake of Avatar. Two obvious factors mitigate such concerns here: 1) Lucas and his team have about 18 months until the first film is released, giving them a great deal more time than usual to do a high-quality retrofit – as opposed to the rush-jobs we’ve become accustomed to from this past summer; 2) Lucasfilm boasts the best technical staff in the industry, so we can assume the presentation will be state-of-the-art.
The Death Star trench run - soon in 3D.
Just for fun, I’ve put up a Star Wars student fan short (see above) I caught recently that was done in 3D. It was the winner of the “Best Animation” award from the recent Star Wars Fan Film Movie Challenge, sponsored by Lucasfilm. You’ll need your anaglyphic red/blue glasses for this one. [Make sure to get those, by the way, because I’d like to start showing more 3D stuff here at Libertas in the future.] Enjoy!
Incidentally, this means that the forthcoming Star Wars Blu-rays will subsequently need to be re-issued in 3D. They don’t call George a genius for nothing.
• In related 3D news, there’s a rumor circulating that Warner Brothers is pressuring Christopher Nolan to shoot the next Batman film in 3D – and also that Inception may get a 3D retrofit after all. Take that rumor for what it’s worth. Personally I doubt this story, because Nolan is currently The Man over at Warner Brothers, in the wake of Inception and his supervision of the Superman reboot. I would add that the vibe of the Batman series is more old-school retro/noir (largely contrary to the spirit of 3D) – although Nolan did shoot parts of The Dark Knight in IMAX, and he’s obviously fascinated with new technologies. As for Inception, there’s no point in doing a retrofit now anyway because it’s too soon for a re-release and there are too few home systems out there set up for 3D viewing.
For all the Wall Street excess that Stone’s new film depicts, the movie (spoiler alert — skip ahead to the next paragraph if you’d rather not know) in many ways offers a benign, even uplifting message about the Street. Sure, the fevered speculation drives one old-timer to take his life. But the movie ultimately tells the story of a young idealist — and one who gets the money and the girl to boot.
Even one of moviedom’s all-time unrepentant characters, the Wall Street sharpie Gordon Gekko, seeks, and (after a lapse) gains, redemption. Compared to the original, which sees said sharpie sent off to jail, this chapter of his story is almost.. heartwarming. Big business and the financial industry may have a deep skepticism for the current Democratic administration. But there’s little for them to dislike in a movie about them from the most outspoken of left-wing filmmakers.
This is why you need to read Libertas folks – we’re prescient here. What’s funny is that later in the article Zeitchik darkly intimates that Stone made such a “benign, even uplifting” film for crass commercial purposes – i.e., to sell out and make a buck! Unreal. Not even Oliver Stone can get his films cleared these days by the People’s Truth Commissions over at the NY and LA Times.
The bold designs of the new "Tron."
• Brett Ratner has just taken on Charles Robert Jenkins’ memoir The Reluctant Communist as his next project. This is great news, because this book is apparently one of the most harrowing accounts of life in communist North Korea that’s ever been written. The book deals with Charles Jenkins’ booze-driven defection as a U.S. Army sergeant to North Korea in 1965, a nation he would later refer to as “a giant, demented prison.” Jenkins would remain in North Korea for the next four decades – used by the communist regime as a propaganda prop – until the Japanese eventually arranged for his release. I think it’s very encouraging that Ratner is taking on this complex and interesting project, and we’ll keep an eye on how it develops.
• Do you recall Jessica Alba’s pseudo-nude shower scene in Machete? Of course you don’t, because you didn’t bother to see that film. Well, we learn today that Alba wasn’t actually nude in the scene when they shot it – she was apparently ‘digitally undressed’ in post! Forget 3D, this is the most promising development in digital technology yet! Imagine the possibilities. By the way, if you click over to this news piece – which 90% of our male readers will – you’ll notice that Alba also lost a little weight once the digital artists were through. So we have the perfect situation here: you ladies don’t need to take your clothes off on set, plus you get to lose a few pounds in the process. And everybody’s happy!
The article reveals some interesting details about the film that I’ve excerpted below:
“Secretariat” doesn’t shy away from politics — portraying conservatives and liberals honorably — and embraces Christian themes also are reminiscent of “Blind Side.” …
“Secretariat” even opens with a lengthy quote from the Bible, a portion of God’s speech to Job. A trailer that includes those lines is on Christian websites all over the Internet, and some of those sites contain the earliest reviews of the film and offer users a chance to see advanced screenings. The Bible quote is “transcendent,” Wallace told The Hollywood Reporter. “I wanted to capture that timelessness and majesty. The idea that courage prevails.”
At a screening for a group called Catholic Media Review that included remarks from Wallace, the invitation boasted, “Not only is Randall one of the most successful directors of all time, he is also a devout Christian.” A film reviewer there “highly recommended” the film to readers and noted “a definite subtext of faith which is as rare these days as it is welcome.” That subtext includes a dramatic singing of “Oh Happy Day! When Jesus Walked” at the movie’s climax, and horse groom Eddie Sweat (Nelsan Ellis) speaks reverently of God’s plan and being “lifted up.” …
“Blind Side” was the true story of an essentially homeless teenager adopted by a conservative Christian couple. Although the politics in “Secretariat” are less central to the story, they’re not ignored. Except for the eldest daughter, the [Penny] Chenery family members [owners of Secretariat] were political conservatives during the early 1970s, when the movie takes place. Chenery’s husband (Dylan Walsh) is portrayed as the obvious right-winger who isn’t thrilled with his wife’s decision to pull double duty after she inherits her father’s horse ranch, nor is he happy about his hippie daughter’s embrace of all that “commie crap” she’s getting from anti-Vietnam War protesters. His values are portrayed as old-fashioned, but they’re not belittled.
Politicos on the right side of the aisle no doubt also will appreciate the appearance of former Republican Sen. Fred Thompson in a good-guy role as well as the film’s statement against large inheritance taxes, portrayed as a looming threat that could derail the protagonist’s heroic efforts. One particularly political though short scene has the dad explaining to his children the concept of there being a cost to freedom. Wallace said Chenery, who makes a cameo appearance in the film, was “deeply satisfied” with the way he dealt with politics in the film.
You get the drift. Secretariat will be released October 8th.
By Joe Bendel. Russia might not be the most hospitable of homes for its ethnic minorities, but the simple forces of time and assimilation are far more responsible for the waning cultural identity and appreciation of the Merja Russians, ethnic cousins of the Finns. However, one Merjan writer’s efforts to preserve his cultural heritage takes him on a fateful road trip with his grieving boss in Aleksei Fedorchenko’s Silent Souls, which just screened at The New York Film Festival.
Though much traditional Merjan culture has faded from everyday memory, Miron knows his friend Aist is fully versed in their people’s traditional funereal rituals. The son of a well regarded Merja poet-laborer, Aist researches and records nearly forgotten Merjan lore as a private passion. More Nordic than Slavic, Aist is not a talkative man, but he will provide Silent’s narration. Indeed the rough hewn character of his (or actor Igor Sergeyev’s) voice makes him one of the most effective narrators heard on film in recent memory, even when subtitled.
From Aleksei Fedorchenko's "Silent Souls."
Miron and Aist will drive across the frozen west central Russian landscape to Lake Nero, the site of his honeymoon with his much younger, yet now tragically dearly departed wife Tanya. There they will build her funeral pyre in much the same manner the Norsemen did millennia ago. For company, they have themselves, their memories, and two caged buntings Aist recently purchased. Those birds are not just for show. Like everything else in Silent they might appear to be a causal impulse buy, but their significance will become apparent later.
Though relatively unheralded among NYFF selections, Silent is one of the strongest films of the festival. Elegiac in multiple ways, it is a powerful meditation on the death of an individual and the protracted demise of a culture, without ever becoming heavy-handed. While it is deliberately paced, it actually gets someplace, both geographically and cinematically.
Throughout Fedorchenko displays a deft touch. Though his symbolism is inescapable, it is always accessible rather than pretentious or obtuse. While in lesser hands, Silent’s ending might have been problematic, Fedorchenko’s methodical groundwork makes it feel logical and fitting, without outright telegraphing it clumsily. Fedorchenko and cinematographer Mikhail Krichman also take full advantage of the evocative landscape, presenting some striking winter vistas.
Whether it is engaging in salty talk with Miron or ruminating on what it means to be Merjan, Sergeyev brings a remarkable naturalness and genuine gravitas to the film as the protagonist-narrator. It is the sort of accomplished work that is often unfairly overlooked due to its lack of affectation.
Though it requires viewers’ full attention, there is great depth beneath Silent’s austerely chilly surface. An excellent film featuring a great lead performance, it is one of the unexpected highlights of the 2010 NYFF. It screened Tuesday (9/28) at the Walter Reade Theater.
By Patricia Ducey.Gone with the Wind it’s not. Heck, it’s not even My Best Friend’s Wedding. But You Again is a pleasant enough production from Disney’s Touchstone Pictures, with some truly funny moments – and a lot of real heart. It’s the kind of family movie that the broadcast networks used to make before TV was handed over to reality show contestants and serial killers. You Again is a chick flick perfect for a tween or teen (but maybe not the boys), or anyone who can remember the sting of high school bullies.
Director Andy Frickman casts his New York stage pal Kristen Bell as Marni, an ugly duckling outsider in high school who has grown into a successful and beautiful career woman. She handles her PR firm duties with grace and aplomb. But her hard won self-confidence starts to crumble when her Mom announces that Marni’s beloved brother Will (James Wolk) is to marry, and the bride-to-be is none other than Marni’s high school nemesis, Joanna (Odette Yustman). Joanna was the head cheerleader, the gorgeous Alpha Girl, who led the torment against acne-ridden dweeb Marni. When the wary Marni returns home for the wedding weekend, however, she finds a new Joanna -someone who may or may not remember her at all, and who may or may not have morphed into an angel. Soon Joanna reveals the cause of her life change: she lost both of her parents in a car crash, and decided to dedicate the rest of her life to something that would make them proud.
Mom Gail (Jamie Lee Curtis) and father (Victor Garber) and even the family pooch clearly adore Joanna, but Marni can’t help herself; her jealousy resurfaces once again. She tries to accept the new Joanna, but Marni still hasn’t tamed her inner loser. Ever suspicious, she eventually uncovers some evidence to justify some sweet, sweet revenge. We watch as Marni regresses, physically and emotionally, back to her high school days as her resentment overwhelms her mature career woman persona.
Kristen Bell and Odette Yustman in "You Again."
In that one improbable coincidence allowed any plot line, Joanna’s only surviving relative, Aunt Mona (Sigourney Weaver), arrives for the wedding weekend and turns out to be none other than Gail’s former high school nemesis. Gail soon learns that giving advice about jealousy is a lot easier than living it. So, on two levels, all these women will have to confront the green eyed-monsters still lurking in their hearts if they are to survive as a family. You Again is otherwise full of pratfalls and silliness, as well as drama, as it meanders toward the climactic rehearsal dinner.
You Again stands in stark contrast to the summer romantic comedy hit Easy A, which the critics loved, in that it doesn’t despise its audience. The family in You Again loves, and likes, each other. They’re human, though, and fall victim to their human foibles. These characters are surprised and disheartened by their own weaknesses – and do their best to conquer them. Sometimes they do make old grudges right, and the movie actually tells you why this is important. So if your daughter or niece wants to see a movie, steer her to You Again – not Easy A.
I chuckled when I checked the reviews of You Again—90% of the critics hated it, so I figured I would like it. The movie been called trite and sit-com-ish – and in some ways, that’s true. Marni’s family is intact, affectionate, and practically snark-free. Characters do tussle and fall into swimming pools. More than once. [By the way, Odette Yustman might just give Megan Fox a run for her money with her brunette good looks and mad rapping skills. Betty White also handles the Grandma Bunny duties well—and keep your eyes peeled for a few other cameos by ‘80s stars.] The dreaded patriarchy rears its head when Dad finally lays down the law and tells his squabbling women “enough.” Meh. I liked it. It may seem trite to jaded movie critics – but judging from the laughter in my theater, audiences liked it too.
