Category: Shorts

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.

Werner Herzog Reads Children’s Stories

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).

[Editor’s Note: on a related note, LFM Editor Apuzzo recommends Klaus Kinski reading “The Selfish Giant” by Oscar Wilde (auf deutsch) from the 1962 film Der Rote Rausch.]

Posted on July 15th, 2010 at 10:35am.

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

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?

Explorations of Free Speech and Alienation: Two Short Films on Iran

By Govindini Murty. Today we commemorate the one-year anniversary of the Iran democracy protests.  I’ll be commenting at greater length later on some of the fine recent films by Iranian filmmakers that have explored Iran’s current social and political issues.  For now, though, I wanted to show you two interesting short films on Iran.

The first film, titled Iran: A Nation of Bloggers, is a fast-paced, informative two minute short about how Iranians have embraced blogging in order to express themselves freely to the rest of the world.  It was directed by Aaron Chiesa as a project for the Vancouver Film School.  (I have fond memories of Vancouver Film School from my early days as an actress when I was living in Vancouver, as I acted in some of the school’s short films.)  The short features striking animation reminiscent of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (in fact, I think a couple of shots were used from Persepolis) – and a catchy, exotic, pop-music sound track.  You can watch Iran: A Nation of Bloggers above.

The second film is Exile Paranoia, a ten minute short by Iranian filmmaker Nassrin Nasser.  The film explores in a haunting, meditative manner Nasser’s own feelings of alienation and confusion as she seeks to get a visa/passport to leave Iran and come to the West.  Exile Paranoia moves at a dreamlike pace that is the opposite of Iran: A Nation of Bloggers, but I like the contrast.  And while Iran: A Nation of Bloggers features black and white animation done in the radical-chic, populist style that dates back to Soviet constructivist art (and that was most recently seen in Obama’s “Hope” poster), Exile Paranoia is a softer, more intimate film that explores one woman’s emotions in a poetic, understated style.  I like the subtle use of color in Exile Paranoia – from white to cream to green to blue – and the dream-like, computer-composited shots of night-time Tehran.  I also find it interesting to see a brief glimpse of life from the viewpoint of an Iranian woman filmmaker.  Whether I would agree with her feelings about the West or not (the one Western male in the film is portrayed as a cold jerk, but maybe that’s just what this filmmaker has experienced), it’s still interesting to see life from her viewpoint.

Posted on June 29th, 2010 at 9:26pm.

Controversial Anti-Chinese Government Films Released

"Buried," from director Wang Libo.

By Jason Apuzzo. LFM contributor Joe Bendel recently reviewed the controversial and award-winning documentary 1428, which is currently showing at The Los Angeles Film Festival.  1428 depicts the botched and inhumane handling of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake by the Chinese communist regime.

Now comes word that another recent documentary about the Chinese government’s appalling mismanagement of a deadly earthquake – in this case, the 1976 Tangshan Earthquake that killed over 200,000 people – has been made available for free (in 12 parts) on YouTube.  The title of this documentary from director Wang Libo is Buried (2009), and amazingly the film was one of the prizewinners of the 2009 Beijing Documentary Film Festival.

Joe Bendel writes in his review of Buried that the film “methodically assembles a damning indictment of the Chinese government … Unless Wang fabricated Buried out of whole cloth, he presents an airtight case of government negligence and craven bureaucratic cya-ing.”

We encourage LFM readers to check out this extraordinarily courageous film from Wang Libo.

IN ADDITION … we wanted LFM readers to get a chance to see the Oscar nominated short China’s Unnatural Disaster, that was shown earlier this year on HBO.  This utterly heartbreaking documentary film gives you a sense of what life is like under China’s brutal regime.  You will see, for example, a parent’s official letter of ‘compensation’ after the Sichuan earthquake from the Chinese government: $317 for each dead child.  It turns out, however, that even this ‘compensation’ is tied to a pledge to “obey the law and maintain social order.”  Those willing to cooperate with the government (i.e., keep their mouths shut and stop complaining) have their ‘compensation’ packages upped to $8,800 per dead child.

Btw, I’m so glad Obama bowed to Chinese President Hu Jintao, aren’t you?

Posted on June 23rd, 2010 at 11:09am.