By David Ross. Who is the mad genius who so thoroughly inhabits the mind (and accent) of Werner Herzog and brings us these marvelous children’s stories, told for the first time with proper attention to their horrifying subtexts — their terrible occlusions?
On a more serious but related note, let me recommend the informative documentary Virginia Lee Burton: A Sense of Place (2008), which tells the story of the author and illustrator of Mike Mulligan and several other classics of children’s literature. Burton was the most inventive artist ever to devote herself exclusively to children’s literature. Her every page is a little cosmos of detail; detail coalesces into pattern; pattern comes alive as rhythm. Among modern American illustrators and cartoonists, only Saul Steinberg more completely transcended his job description and ascended into the sphere of high art (New Yorker subscribers should have a look at Adam Gopnik’s brilliant essay on Steinberg; Updike was another ardent, life-long admirer).
By Jason Apuzzo. Lately we’ve been showing you some exciting new indie sci-fi films (see here, here and here), several of which were crowd-funded, that show how new advances in visual FX are drastically expanding the imaginative possibilities of independent filmmaking. We’ve also discussed how these films can not only dazzle us visually, but engage contemporary social anxieties associated with war and invasion.
Today we want to tell you about another exciting project called The 3rd Letter (see the film’s trailer above) from acclaimed filmmaker and ILM visual FX artist Grzegorz Jonkajtys. [Jonkajtys’ recent ILM credits include Pan’s Labyrinth, The Mist and Terminator: Salvation.] Jonkajtys had an extraordinary short film called “Ark” shown at Cannes at few years ago. The film turned a lot of heads, and now he’s hooked up with producer/co-writer Philip Bastiaan Koch on The 3rd Letter (originally titled “36 Stairs”), an extravagant-looking, 15 minute short film that’s apparently about to hit the festival circuit hard.
The 3rd Letter takes place in a dystopian future in which human beings depend on bio-mechanical alterations in order to withstand the detriorating climate. [Shades of BP?] Set against a polluted, megalopolis world, the tragic tale of Jeffrey Brief (Rodrigo Lopresti) unfolds. When faced with the imminent loss of his health insurance, Brief unwittingly unravels a dark truth (involving population control – shades of Soylent Green?) that apparently pushes him to extreme measures …
Here’s some of what Jonkajtys says about his film in a recent interview:
Tell us how you designed this distinctive dystopian world. It looks like a bureaucratic nightmare – like something out of 1984 or THE TRIAL.
I wanted to bring certain aspects of what’s happening in the contemporary society and push it a bit further. The world Jeffrey, the main character, lives in is not set in any particular time or place. We will see a lot of stylistically and periodically mismatched designs, equipments and architecture. With this approach, on an extremely limited budget, it’s easier to find the props and sets rather than build everything from scratch. Plus, it serves the story, creating a kind of conglomerate of periodical and modern elements. Jeffrey’s haircut and clothing (designed by Gus Harput) is very much inspired by Winston’s character from the film 1984.
Of course, the movie is also very relevant. It deals with things like the health insurance industry. How do you avoid becoming too preachy?
The movie is all about Jeffery’s case. The most important aspect of the story is how he will react in the situation he has found himself in – what his choice will be. The insurance situation is only a setting that serves this story. I think it’s good that it is so relevant. More people can relate to it.
It’s not clear to me precisely what the nature of the film’s social critique is regarding the health industry and/or government controls. Basically the film looks like classic sci-fi dystopia stuff. Suffice it to say that since government and the private insurance industry are slowly merging into one, creating what is almost sure to be a ‘dystopian’ situation – with freedom and individual consumer choice evaporating into thin air – this film certainly appears grounded in what we’re going through today.
Our future health care bureaucracies?
Visually The 3rd Letter looks completely fabulous, very much in keeping with Jonkajtys’ prior work (I’m also a fan of his short “Legacy”). The film was shot on a Canon EOS 5D Mark II, and the VFX shots really expand out the film’s world, considering that it was apparently just shot around Jonkajtys’ basement and a few practical locations. I’d also like to note, again, that this ambitious-looking project was at least in part crowd-funded (see the film’s Kickstarter page, with a reported 47 backers providing the film’s modest $7K budget).
I’ve been up to ILM a few times to visit, but never had the pleasure of meeting Grzegorz. From what I read about him, his family – he originally comes from Poland – seems to have had some terrible encounters with communism and fascism. His father was apparently deported to Kazakhstan in 1940 with his family after the Nazi invasion. His grandfather was also apparently arrested by the Soviet military police, and never heard from again. I can only imagine that these sorts of emotional, family experiences would sharpen Jonkajtys’ perspective on the benefits of freedom.
We wish him the very best with this project. You can follow the film’s progress on its Facebook page.
Not only is the Angelina Jolie Russian spy thriller Salt opening later this month – a film which, incidentally, has already been banned in China; not only is the Red Dawn remake being released later this year (presumably); not only is Mao’s Last Dancer coming out later this summer, but so too on July 23rd is a new French Cold War thriller called Farewell being released starring (among others) Willem Defoe, and Fred Ward as Ronald Reagan. The film deals with one of the crucial Cold War espionage coups that delivered vital intelligence to America and the West. The film opens July 23rd in New York and Los Angeles, spreading to other markets all the way through September. Farewell showed at the Toronto and Telluride film festivals earlier this year, and has already received glowing reviews from Todd McCarthy (formerly of Variety), as well as Stephen Holden of The New York Times and Jeff Stein of The Washington Post. You can watch the trailer to the film below.
Farewell tells the true story of a disenchanted K.G.B. colonel named ‘Sergei Grigoriev’ (the real colonel was actually named Vladimir Vetrov) — eventually code-named ‘Farewell’ by Western spy agencies – who decides that he can no longer serve the Soviet state, and consequently chooses to funnel classified information to French intelligence agents.
This intelligence apparently included information on what the Soviets knew about our air defenses, how much the Soviets were spending on defense, what defense technologies they were stealing from the United States, and also a list of highly placed K.G.B. agents who’d infiltrated government and industry in the West. The leaking of this information, when later combined with President Reagan’s public commitment to create the ‘Star Wars’ missile defense system, were crucial elements in the winning of the Cold War.
The French angle on this story is twofold: the courier for the secret information was Pierre Froment, an otherwise innocent employee of a French multinational corporation. And the information itself was eventually transmitted to Ronald Reagan by then-French President François Mitterrand.
The trailer for the film certainly looks compelling. Here’s some of what Todd McCarthy said about the film while he was with Variety: “A harrowing, richly human and well-acted espionage tale. … It’s juicy, fascinating stuff, well orchestrated, and finely thesped. [Director Christian] Carion keeps things simmering on medium-high heat throughout.” Continue reading New Anti-Soviet Film Farewell Depicts Spycraft That Won the Cold War
[Editor’s Note: Today we combine our recent space/invasion theme here at LFM, and Steve Greaves’ ‘Loving the Cold War Lifestyle’ series, with a brief look back – and forward – at the classic British TV show “UFO.”]
By Steve Greaves. Fans of the Supermarionation series Thunderbirds and the live-action Space:1999 alike will be intrigued to know that Gerry Anderson’s influential British TV series UFO is currently on track for a Hollywood summer tentpole updating. [See the opening titles of the original series above.] Producer Robert Evans and British network ITV are slated to team up on the project, which will find the year 2020 as the new backdrop for the business of SHADO – the crafty organization that combats alien invasion threats from on high with an arsenal of labs, gizmos, purple wigs and cool vehicles that traverse every frontier. Here is the new film’s website.
Scenes from the original British TV series "UFO."
Anderson himself was appalled by the miserable remake of his fantastic Thunderbirds franchise, as would be anyone who saw it, but the rumor is that he’s optimistic about the new UFO getting off the ground in style. The original series, which ran for just one season in 1972 in the US, was ahead of its time – especially for TV – and was notable for its special effects, art direction and vehicle design. Perhaps the most important legacy of UFO is that it directly influenced the look and approach to the better-known and more widely enduring Space:1999, which was Anderson’s series that ran from 1975-77 and starred Martin Landau.
Now, one key factor sure to be absent from any new UFO launch that anchored the many other-worlds of Gerry Anderson is the music of Barry Gray. Gray scored or wrote themes for virtually all of Anderson’s shows from the puppeteering days forward, including Fireball XL5, Stingray, Captain Scarlet, Joe 90, Supercar, Journey To The Far Side Of The Sun, Thunderbirds, and – of course – UFO and Space:1999. The groovy, jaunty flavor of Gray’s music was part of what made these shows something fun and exciting to tune into, not to mention that his themes are among the catchiest in this universe or beyond. One listen to the head-bobbing Joe 90 theme will set you straight [see here and here].
By Jason Apuzzo. Recently here at LFM we’ve been showing you some examples (see here and here) of up-from-the-bootstraps indie film productions that are taking advantage of low-cost VFX software to tell large-scale stories. We’ve also noted how several of these films seem to be picking up on the ‘invasion of America’ theme, a theme that will no doubt be kick-charged in a big way when MGM’s Red Dawn remake is eventually released.
Today we wanted to mention another such production, a science fiction comedy that’s been getting hyped lately (see articles in Wired and in the Hollywood Reporter’s HeatVision blog), called Iron Sky. Iron Sky is an example not only of what low-budget filmmakers can accomplish using high-end visual FX packages, however, but is also the latest example of how to finance a film through “crowd funding.”
Towards the end of World War II the staff of SS officer Hans Kammler made a significant breakthrough in anti-gravity. From a secret base built in the Antarctic, the first Nazi spaceships were launched in late ‘45 to found the military base Schwarze Sonne (Black Sun) on the dark side of the Moon. This base was to build a powerful invasion fleet and return to take over the Earth once the time was right. Now it’s 2018, the Nazi invasion is on its way and the world is goose-stepping towards its doom.
So there you have it – goose-stepping Nazis from outer space. Iron Sky is being co-produced by companies in Finland, Germany and Australia. Currently they’re in pre-production, with shooting set to begin in October in Germany and Australia, and this will apparently be followed by a year in post-production. And here’s the kicker: the budget of the film is actually $8.5 million, with at least some of the money being raised from the public.
Nazi invaders from outer space.
So how did the filmmakers pull this off? Basically, in 2008 they released the slick, cheeky teaser trailer below (at the very bottom of this post) – which by now has had almost 2 million views on YouTube. They simultaneously began soliciting on-line donations from fans, using the “crowd funding” strategy that is becoming increasingly popular as a way to boostrap indie film productions outside the studio pipeline. Then, twelve indie financiers got involved to close the funding gap. Continue reading Space Nazis Invade in Iron Sky + Crowd Funding of Films
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.
