By Jason Apuzzo. I’m curious as to what readers think of this trailer for Showtime’s forthcoming war-on-terror themed series, Homeland. The series, from what I’ve read, involves a CIA officer (Claire Danes) convinced that a recently-rescued American POW (Damian Lewis) may be a brainwashed al Qaeda sleeper-agent charged with carrying out a terrorist plot here in America. The series also stars Mandy Patinkin as the CIA officer’s mentor.
The eagerness with which the networks always want to depict Americans as the ‘true’ villains never ceases to amaze me, even when it’s done in this convoluted form.
By Jason Apuzzo. I’m curious as to what people think of the new trailer above for NBC’s forthcoming show The Playboy Club, as well as the clip below from ABC’s forthcoming series Pan Am. Both series are set in the early, swingin’ 60s – and both are looking an awful lot like Mad Men … in fact, almost embarrassingly so. Christina Hendricks and January Jones would seem to be owed some residuals, here.
It seems fairly clear that the major network Mad Men cash-in has begun, except that whatever ironic detachment and/or sophistication with which Mad Men approached the 50s/early 60s seems to be jettisoned here in favor of abject lifestyle propaganda and product placement (even of an obsolete brand, in the case of Pan-Am).
Due to their overall flavor of pandering, my sense is that the networks are going to have a difficult time selling these shows – although I certainly could be wrong. In any case, it’s fascinating to me that this is the turn popular entertainment is taking during the Obama era. Obama has always struck me as a 50s-style, Adlai Stevenson-type person in terms of his tight, disciplined personal demeanor, academic-style liberalism and Illinois background. Perhaps we are, in sense, going back to the late 50s/early 60s these days. Reader feedback is encouraged. Continue reading Ring-a-Ding-Ding: Pan Am, Playboy Club Trailers Begin the ‘Mad Men’ Cash-in
By Joe Bendel. They were much like Yugoslavia’s version of Czechoslovakia’s Plastic People of the Universe, except they had a much easier time of it with the Tito regime. They only faced a few drug busts, which they do not claim to be altogether unwarranted. Indeed, the hard rock band was a unifying force for the youth culture, but attempts by various nationalities to claim them as their own contributed to the band’s eventual break-up. The rise, fall, and multiple reinventions of the Yugoslav hard-rock band Bijelo Dugme is chronicled in Igor Stoimenov’s documentary, White Button, the closing film of the 2011 Bosnian-Herzegovinian Film Festival.
Yugoslav rock heroes.
Musically, White Button (who adopted the “Bijelo Dugme” moniker essentially to prove names don’t matter in rock) is probably best compared to Led Zeppelin. Both bands represented the early cusp of Heavy Metal, but were still very much in touch with the blues and R&B roots of the music. In terms of popularity, they were the Beatles, the Stones, the Bieber kid, and the Grateful Dead, all in one. Their ethnic heritage was mixed, but they all originally came together in Sarajevo.
Evidently, it was good to be a rock-star, even under Tito. Though Stoimenov largely glosses over their relationship with the state, it seems they must have been tolerated as an instrument to keep the Balkan country from Balkanizing. (Also, it would have been the height of hypocrisy for the government to act against Bijelo Dugme at a time when Tito was criticizing the Husek puppet government for cracking down in Czechoslovakia.)
What Bijelo does best is old time rock & roll. The band turned the Yugoslav music scene on its ear in more ways than one. For instance, their graphic designer recalls how they pushed the envelope using sexual imagery to sell records (see exhibit A below).
It is not always a triumphant story, though. Like any legitimate rock band, they lost a drummer to drugs and personal demons along the way. They also took an ill-conceived detour into the New Wave that the film never shies away from examining in humiliating detail. They would have better luck when Goran Bregocić, the Brian Wilson of the group, looked toward traditional Roma and Macedonian music for inspiration.
Bijelo Dugme album cover.
Oddly, the film ends exactly when Bijelo Dugme disbands, declining to cover the band members’ experiences during the war. However, the accompanying short, Damir Pirić’s Rock ‘n’ War, fills that gap, but from the perspective of the working rock bands of Tuzla rather than the White Buttoners.
Rock concerts “for peace” are a tiresome cliché here, but when the Tuzla rockers organized them in hopes that cooler heads would prevail in the weeks leading up to war, one has to give them credit for trying. Indeed, there is a lot of dramatic footage in the short (sixteen minute) doc. Hearing one band shred through and utterly re-contextualize Neil Young’s “Keep Rockin’ in the Free World,” is frankly kind of awe-inspiring.
Bijelo is a droll, cleverly assembled Behind the Music film, while R ‘n’ W is raw and poignant. They both rock hard, though, closing this year’s festival on a high note. A sold-out screening, the BHFF appears to be growing nicely, bringing films by and of interest to Bosnians to a wider audience beyond the local expat community. Here’s hoping for a third day next year.
By Jason Apuzzo. Pixar has released a new trailer for Cars 2, which I’ve embedded above. I’m curious as to what people think of it.
I’m particularly interested in readers’ thoughts on Larry the Cable Guy’s ongoing performance as Mater. Here’s my question: is the ‘appeal’ of Larry the Cable Guy as a media personality real or imagined? Hollywood seems to assume Red State audiences just love this guy, that he is some sort of touchstone for middle American identity. Is that true?
By Patricia Ducey. One day in 1967, a Palo Alto high school student asks his history teacher how the German people could have missed the signs of the ongoing genocide being perpetrated by the Nazis. This innocent question ignites an idea, and teacher Ron Jones launches a classroom “simulation,” or experiment, to illustrate how good Germans -how anyone – could fall prey to totalitarian thinking.
Forty years later, Philip Neel, one of the students who participated in that experiment dubbed The Third Wave, has produced a documentary, The Lesson Plan, featuring interviews with students who participated, and with teacher Ron Jones himself.
Jones reorganized his classroom that week into a simulation of a prototypical fascist youth group. He enforced physical discipline and uniformity in the students’ posture and speech per his first-day dictum, “Strength Through Discipline.” He meant it to end there, he now avers, but students were eager for more. He added more simplistic, effective sloganeering on the following days: strength through community, through action, through unity and finally through pride. Strength through Community meant, for instance, that students were to share grades. Top students helped the lower students. Jones was heartened by the increased level of participation of the weaker students, while he banished to the library for the remainder of the semester some more successful students – who of course resented lowering their grades so students who did not do the work could get higher grades. Similarly, anyone who spoke against The Third Wave faced a mock trial and banishment. At Jones’s urging, students secretly “informed” on other students who spoke against the Third Wave, and the car club guys appointed themselves as Jones’s bodyguards. Jones found out only at the reunion that a few of these guys beat up a student journalist who was writing a non-flattering article on The Third Wave. When an outsider student asked a Third Waver to explain what they stood for, he could not give an answer.
By Joe Bendel. Would you buy a second-hand heart from this man? Yankele Bride genuinely wants to make love connections, even for those who cannot afford to pay. Of course, the dodgy contraband in the storeroom is another question altogether. 1968 proves to be a tumultuous year for Bride and his adolescent assistant in Avi Nesher’s The Matchmaker, one of the highlights of the 2011 Israel Film Festival in New York.
Bride was literally scarred by his time in the concentration camps, yet he still believes in love. He is a realist though, telling his clients he “gets them what they need, not what they want.” Despite his many dubious enterprises, he scours the neighborhoods looking for the marginalized in need of his match-making help. That is how Arik Burstein initially encounters him. Fatefully, Burstein’s attempt at a practical joke at Bride’s expense backfires when it turns out he is a long lost classmate of his Romanian émigré father, Yossi. Before he knows it, young Burstein is working as Bride’s assistant, which largely involves trailing prospective clients to make sure they are on the up-and-up.
Although romance is Bride’s business of choice, he must settle for a close but chaste friendship with Clara, the love of his life, who remains profoundly haunted by her Holocaust experiences. In contrast, Burstein struggles against his attraction to Tamara, his best friend Benny Abadi’s sultry hippy cousin, who finds herself spending her summer with the Jewish Iraqi family.
