LFM Presents: Cold War Updates!

By Jason Apuzzo. To complement our new Invasion Alert! series, today we are introducing a new series here at Libertas called Cold War Updates!

Have you noticed that the Cold War is back? At the movies at least, the Cold War seems to be returning in a big way. As LFM’s own Govindini Murty reported in her recent Human Events article on “The Cinema’s Surprising New Anti-Communist Films,” both Hollywood and the indie film scene have been producing films large and small about the communist threat in the past year – whether of the Chinese, North Korean, ex-Soviet or even homegrown-American variety. And these trends are not only continuing – they’re actually accelerating.

It seems that each week new films, TV shows, documentaries and even video games are being green-lit featuring sexy spies, villainous Russians, jaded CIA operatives, the space race, unguarded uranium stockpiles, communist oppression … all that good stuff we remember from that nobler and altogether sexier period – the Cold War era – with its Bond girls, martinis, microfilm, Whittaker Chambers, Dean Martin, JFK … and Ronald Reagan.

I personally, for example, am currently working on a 7-hour, 3D IMAX film adaptation of the epic Bobby Fischer-Boris Spassky World Chess Championship match of 1972!

(Just kidding.)

Anyway, what do all these new films portend? I’ll leave that for readers to decide (although in days to come I will be advancing certain theories), but I’ve decided to put together this regular Cold War feature to cover these new developments – or as many of them as we can. So grab a martini, plug in your Fender Telecaster and enjoy!

Two brief notes: there will likely be some occasional crossover of this series with Invasion Alerts!, as some of the new sci-fi films coming down the pike appear to have Cold War themes in them.

And of course, it goes without saying that Cold War Updates! will always feature the sexiest women around. Would you expect anything less from Libertas?

• The next James Bond film – called James Bond 23, for the moment – is apparently ready to go, with Sam Mendes still attached to direct. How do we know this? Because his ex-wife, Kate Winslet, says so! I love this as a way to break major film news – let the ex-wife handle it! MGM may be breaking new ground here. In any case, the film supposedly already has its composer, and there’s even some interesting speculation today about who may be playing the new villain – namely, British stage veteran (and Mendes crony) Simon Russell Beale.

• Salt Producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura recently provided an update about Moscow, the forthcoming reboot of the Jack Ryan series, starring Star Trek‘s Chris Pine. Here is Bonaventura, talking to IGN:

“It’s a really interesting challenge and Chris is an amazing actor” explained di Bonaventura. “So I’m confident we found the right guy.”

However, the producer claims the bigger challenge will be attracting a young audience to the film… “Tapping into Ryan’s was always a sophisticated world – it’s slightly adult. How do you bring those adults who expect that kind of sophistication and yet how do you also bring a young audience to it? That’s an interesting business challenge and a creative challenge – how do you weigh what’s in front of you and put it all together”

My take on this, for what it’s worth, is that the younger audience will come – provided you don’t gratuitously pander to them. (The folks doing Tron, incidentally, may be discovering that too late – if we’re to believe how poorly that film is tracking.) In any case, I’m looking forward to what Bonaventura’s cooking up for this reboot – this being one of the few series that actually deserves being brought back. Incidentally, Chris Pine will soon be starring (with Angela Bassett and Reese Witherspoon) as yet another CIA spy in Fox’s McG-directed This Means War.

• A poster is already out for producer Joel Surnow’s quasi-controversial new miniseries, The Kennedys. What do you think? It seems to play it straight. The series stars Greg Kinnear is JFK, Katie Holmes as Jackie, Barry Pepper as Bobby Kennedy, and Tom Wilkinson as Joe Kennedy. Chris Diamantopoulos apparently plays Frank Sinatra. I don’t know if anybody plays Dean Martin, but somebody should. In any event, our best wishes to Joel on this 8-part series that airs on the History Channel next year.

• There are new interviews out today with Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp for Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Tourist. (There are also new photos from the film here and here.) I’m liking everything I’m seeing about this film right now, although I’m alarmed that the film is apparently tracking poorly (much like Tron). I do think there’s an audience for an old-school, Hitchcockian thriller like this, but they’ll need to market the film to people who are above the age of 16. Do the studios know how to do that anymore?

• Speaking of JFK, Leonardo DiCaprio is apparently going to be doing a JFK-assassination conspiracy thriller, to go along with the J. Edgar Hoover movie he’s already doing with Eastwood (which starts shooting early next year). DiCaprio seems to be living the Cold War lifestyle these days, having already done things like The Aviator and Shutter Island with Scorsese – with whom he also may now be doing a Sinatra biopic. What’s going on here? The weirdest thing recently was DiCaprio palling around in Moscow with Vladimir Putin, where DiCaprio had travelled for some sort of tiger preservation conference. It’s hard to get a fix on DiCaprio sometimes; he has an old-school style and taste about him, while simultaneously acting-out the usual liberal fantasies (eco-activism, etc.) in his public activism. It will be interesting to see where all this leads under Eastwood’s tutelage.

• I’ve seen no new news about the Top Gun sequel, but elsewhere in the world of Tom Cruise it appears that Jeremy Renner is being groomed to take over the Mission: Impossible franchise as Cruise is eased out. What that means is that the series will soon be dead.

• I loved the idea that the classic Cold War spy TV series The Man From U.N.C.L.E., starring Robert Vaughn as Napoleon Solo, was going to get remade as a movie (set in the 60s)… until I learned that the leading candidates to do it are apparently Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney. I’m now “opening channel D” and calling for help. And speaking of projects set in the 60s, the new X-Men: First Class is also set in the 60s at the height of the Cold War, and more plot details are emerging about that film now (spoiler warning after jump).

• HBO just greenlit a new Cold War spy drama, set in Berlin, about “a missionary who becomes involved in the CIA.” We’ll keep an eye on that one.

• Distribution has been set up for the ‘Aussie Red Dawn‘ movie Tomorrow, When the War Began in the UK, Scandinavia, Russia, Portugal and South Africa … but predictably not here in the U.S. yet. Expect that to change.

• On the video game front, you’ve probably already heard by now that the Cold War-based Call of Duty: Black Ops had a huge debut (the biggest in the history of gaming), and is projected to earn something like $1.4 billion, but don’t forget that John Milius’ anti-North Korean commie Homefront video game will also be debuting soon, on March 8th. The timing on that couldn’t be better, alas.

• I’m annoyed to report that the obnoxious Eugene Jarecki, director of Why We Fight (definitely not the Capra version), has a documentary about Ronald Reagan in this upcoming Sundance Film Festival. Personal note here: I have three acquaintances who are working on no less than three different Reagan movies right now, and I implore all of you dudes to hurry up! before people like Jarecki are allowed to define The Gipper in perpetuity. They’d love to do it if they could.

• On the DVD front, the famous (and infamous) Red Scare thriller My Son John is finally getting a release, courtesy of the Warner Archive Collection. (It will also be available via Netflix streaming.) I have mixed feelings about that film, largely because its gifted star, Robert Walker, died before he could complete his performance – which seemed to be an interesting expansion on what he’d just done in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (and footage from Strangers was ultimately used to complete My Son John). Had Walker been able to finish the film, I think it might’ve been a lot better than it currently is, even if the film nonetheless has its moments (particularly those between Walker and his mother, played by Helen Hayes).

• AND FINALLY … it somehow seemed fitting that our first Cold War Update! pinup would be an actual Russian spy – the increasingly cheeky (so to speak) Anna Chapman – who’s currently paying her bills by posing for Russian Maxim … which should, incidentally, tell you everything you need to know about how very different the new Cold War is going to be from the old. (There’s a lot of money to be made this time!)

And that’s what’s happening today in the Cold War!

Posted on December 3rd, 2010 at 2:59pm.