Good to go: Tom Cruise, back when he was Tom Cruise.
By Jason Apuzzo. I wanted to update people on a story that we covered previously. Apparently the screenwriter on the proposed Top Gun sequel, Christopher McQuarrie, has come out and said: “There is no Top Gun 2 in which Maverick is not the starring role.” It had previously been reported that Cruise’s Maverick character would only have a relatively minor role in the sequel.
We’ll see how this plays out. I’ve already expressed my thoughts on this proposed project here.
[UPDATE: Tony Scott has confirmed that if a sequel happens, he will be directing it. Scott also told the Wall Street Journal the following about the proposed project:
“It’s not a reboot, it’s not a reinvention, it’s not a remake,” Scott insisted. “The world of ‘Top Gun’ today is very different. It’s really computer geeks sitting in Nevada playing war games. It’s the end of an era for fighter pilots, but those fighter pilots then become test pilots, and the planes now that they go to fight are drones, but while they’re perfecting [the drones], they fly them.” … “David Ellison is the guy that inspired me,” Scott said. “He’s a pilot. People kept talking about ‘Top Gun 2’ and talking with Jerry [Bruckheimer] and talking with me [about the possibility of doing it], but it wasn’t until David came and he showed me these visuals of what the Air Force is doing today that I said yes, I want to be involved. So it’s not a reboot at all. It’s a totally new movie.”
We’ll continue to keep you updated about this as we learn more.]
By Jason Apuzzo. Kevin Smith, movie maestro of white trash, has just put out this teaser poster for his new horror thriller about homophobic Christians, Red State.
He’s apparently hoping to debut the movie at Sundance.
I think the poster more or less speaks for itself.
[UPDATE: Smith is apparently intending to score the film with speed metal and country music. Perfect. What we have here, apparently, are the makings of a white-trash version of Machete – i.e., a hyper-political exploitation thriller being used to revive the career of a director whose career is gradually hitting the skids.
I doubt this strategy will work any better than it did for Robert Rodriguez, though.]
It is hardly a coincidence that Beyond takes place during the eventful year of 1953. Of course, that was the year Stalin died. Three months later, Soviet troops invaded East Germany to suppress an outbreak of strikes and demonstrations. However, life appears peaceful in the fictional provincial collective of Stalina. Both Hans and Rainbowmaker have eyes for Marie, the film’s ethereal narrator. Yet Rainbowmaker’s grandfather, a strict Party leader, brings the isolated community to grief.
From his cowl-like cloak to his prayer-like invocations to the recently deceased Stalin, Rainbowmaker’s grandfather is an unambiguous figure of orthodox faith. He also appropriates whatever he pleases from the collective and purges members at will. However, his greatest specialty appears to be encouraging children to inform on their parents. Unlike more allegorical films produced behind the Iron Curtain, there is absolutely no question what he represents. In fact, Stalin’s apologists are probably watching Beyond in Hell for the rest of eternity.
Yet the blistering Beyond cannot be dismissed as mere post-Wall score-settling, given the eerie rendering of the hyper-Communist community and Kipping’s occasional flights of surrealist fantasy. This is an angry film, but an artful one as well. It also features some surprisingly compelling turns from the then-young trio of Stefanie Janke, Thomas Ewert, and Sebastian Reznicek, as Marie, Hans, and Rainbowmaker – the pre-pubescent love triangle.
There may truly be no more viscerally anti-Communist film than Beyond. However, Kipping’s in-your-face Christ-like imagery might put off some Christian audiences. Indeed, there are strong visuals throughout the film, the cumulative effect of which is a damning indictment of the GDR. Accordingly, anyone with a scrap of interest in the Communist and immediate post-Communist eras should make a special effort to see Beyond when it screens Tuesday (11/2) as part of Wende Flicks at Anthology Film Archives.
By Jason Apuzzo. With a little help from Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, we wanted to wish our Libertas readers a Happy Halloween!
I searched the web to find something classic to show everybody on Halloween, and discovered to my pleasant surprise that an old favorite of mine from the 1950s – The Hideous Sun Demon – was available in its entirety over at YouTube. The Hideous Sun Demon (1959) is an atom age cult classic that was written, produced, and directed by Robert Clarke – who also stars in the film (you can see him below, more or less, wearing the rubber ‘sun demon’ mask).
In good Roger Corman style, Clarke shot The Hideous Sun Demon for under $50,000 – which included the $500 he spent on the rubberized lizard suit. The movie was shot exclusively on weekends (12 of them, to be exact) so Clarke could get two days’ use of rental equipment for only one day’s fee! If you’ve ever been a low-budget filmmaker, you know exactly what that type of experience is like. [I know because I used the same trick on Kalifornistan.]
The Hideous Sun Demon stalks Nan Peterson.
As an actor Robert Clarke was a staple figure in 1950s science fiction films, and some of his best work includes The Man from Planet X (1951), The Incredible Petrified World (1957) and The Astounding She-Monster (1957). He would later do a lot of TV work, appearing on such big-time shows as: The Lone Ranger, Dragnet, Perry Mason, Sea Hunt, General Hospital, Marcus Welby, M.D., Adam-12, Baa Baa Black Sheep, Hawaii Five-O, Fantasy Island, Dallas, Knight Rider, Murder She Wrote, Falcon Crest and Dynasty. So all in all he had a pretty good career, given that he started it wearing a rubber lizard suit.
*** SPOILERS BELOW***
The premise of The Hideous Sun Demon is cool: research scientist Dr. Gilbert McKenna (Clarke) falls unconscious after accidentally being exposed to radiation during an experiment with a new radioactive isotope. Later, while recuperating in a nearby hospital, ‘Gil’ is taken to a solarium to receive the sun’s healing rays … but while he naps, he metamorphoses into a hideous, lizard-like creature! Fortunately, when out of the sunlight, Gil reverts back to his normal human form.
We eventually learn that Gil has actually experienced an evolutionary ‘regression’ back through the chain of mankind’s ancestors (primitive mammals, reptiles and amphibians) triggered by his exposure to the sun’s radiation. In order to control this regression, Gil has to stay out of the sunlight – and effectively live a completely nocturnal existence.
So what would any swinging 50s bachelor do, under such awkward circumstances? Why, Dr. Gil hits the bar scene – and becomes, in effect, a nocturnal ‘lounge lizard’! Haunting the nighttime bars, Gil drifts away from his repressed, brunette lab assistant, played by Patricia Manning – who loves him from afar, but can’t bring herself to express it – and takes up with a busty, atom age blonde bombshell played by Nan Peterson. The decidedly unrepressed Nan brings out the animal in Dr. Gil, you might say, in a way that the poor drab lab assistant can’t.
The morning after: Nan Peterson after a date gone horribly wrong!
Peterson, for her part, plays a torch-song lounge singer who finds Gil dark and dangerous – of course, she has no idea how dangerous – and eventually she spends a many-splendored night with Gil on the beach … before he has to run off just as the sun comes up (aren’t men always like that?). Gil, you see, doesn’t want her to glimpse his ‘lizard’ side. Whew! The problems couples had back in those days! [And you thought things were complicated on Mad Men!]
Though Gil is able to hide his animalistic side from Nan and the police for a while, his life spins out of control as his ‘lizard’ side eventually takes over – with things leading to an explosive climax after Gil goes on a murderous rampage one day in broad daylight. And we learn, after all the mayhem subsides, that not only is mankind’s tampering with nature a very dangerous thing – but those Marilyn Monroe-style blondes can sometimes bring out the worst in a man …
***END OF SPOILERS***
The Hideous Sun Demon is a lot of fun; it’s campy, sexy, and is probably best enjoyed with a few adult beverages on hand – yet the film has an interesting subtext that makes it almost (if not quite) on a par with similar sci-fi classics from its era, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers or Creature from the Black Lagoon. It’s a pity the movie wasn’t done in 3D, although Ms. Peterson certainly provides her own version of a third dimension. This version of The Hideous Sun Demon on YouTube lacks the Elvira opening, but you can probably imagine what the Mistress of the Dark would say about the film – and in particular what she might say about the plenteous Ms. Peterson …
We hope you enjoy the film in its entirety, and a Happy Halloween to everybody!
By Jason Apuzzo. For the past several months here at Libertas we’ve been covering the massive new wave of politically-charged ‘alien invasion’ projects that are about to be unleashed on moviegoers over the next two years or so. The origins of this intriguing new wave of films probably go back to 2008, when J.J. Abrams and Matt Reeves released Cloverfield, a sci-fi cult hit that played out as a kind of faux-documentary riff on the 9/11 attacks. [Abrams would also incorporate a 9/11-style attack on the planet Vulcan in 2009’s Star Trek.] Also in 2008 came Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg’s affectionate riff on 1950s sci-fi invasion films, in which Dr. Jones confronts not only aliens (of a somewhat benign variety) but the Soviet communist menace, as well. Of course, the ‘alien invasion’ genre then got supercharged in late 2009 by James Cameron’s Avatar, which not only revived 3D but ‘politicized’ sci-fi to a degree unseen since the early 1950s.
One of the things that makes this new wave of films so interesting – and redolent of similar waves from the 1950s – is that it extends from the mega-big budget (e.g., the $200 million Battleship from Universal, starring Liam Neeson) to the low-budget (such as next month’s Skyline, made for under $10 million). And on a thematic level, although not all the plotlines are known for these films, many of them seem to be channeling political anxieties associated with terrorism, foreign threats, nuclear fears, as well as paranoia about the increasingly radical tone of American politics. [See my exchange with the LA Times’ Patrick Goldstein on this subject here.]
By the time this new wave of films peaks – probably about two years from now – Gareth Edwards’ Monsters (opening in select theaters today) is unlikely to be remembered as a high-water point of the genre, even for low-budget fare. Edwards’ film is too languorous, too derivative of other (and better) films to really linger in the memory. What Monsters does accomplish, however, is suggest how easily science fiction can be adapted to comment on contemporary political concerns.
America conducts urban warfare in Mexico in "Monsters."
The set-up for Monsters is relatively straight-forward. In the near future, America has sent space probes out into our solar system searching for microbial evidence of life. These probes have crashed back to Earth in the vicinity of the U.S.-Mexico border, where alien life forms brought back from space have swiftly grown into massive creatures – ‘monsters,’ that more or less look like grilled scampi – that have ravaged the countryside, and even major cities. The U.S. and Mexican militaries have thus conducted a massive (but largely futile) operation to both contain and destroy the creatures, resulting in urban warfare and endless bombing runs that have reduced many urban centers in Mexico to rubble. What’s more, we’re led to believe that the American bombing runs over Mexican cities have been far more devastating and lethal than the creatures themselves. Continue reading The First Wave of ‘Political’ Sci-Fi: LFM Reviews Monsters
By Joe Bendel. Filmmakers working behind the Iron Curtain had a natural affinity for the absurd and the surreal. Given their experiences under Communism, they could easily relate to such Kafkaesque cinemascapes. It also behooved them to keep their social critiques obscured by layers of allegory and symbolism. A passion project only made possible by the fall of the Berlin Wall (or the epochal “Wende”), Ulrich Weiß’s Miraculi represents the culmination of such cinematic strategies. Finally produced in 1991, Miraculi screens next week as part of Wende Flicks: Last Films from East Germany, a retrospective of the East German DEFA studio’s final years (1990-1994), presented at Anthology Film Archives in conjunction with the Goethe-Institut New York.
In the Czech Republic, one of the few annoying holdovers from the Communist era are the plain clothes transit inspectors looking to fine riders who cannot produce their appropriately punched tickets. Evidently East Germany had these transit narcs as well. Through a series of chance circumstances, Sebastian Mueller, a mild mannered juvenile delinquent, joins the ranks of the volunteer transit inspectors. In truth, he is not very good at his duties, but he takes them very seriously, alienating his father, who labels him a traitor to the workers.
Episodic and trippy, Mueller’s story defies pat description. In a strange way, Weiß invests Mueller’s reviled voluntarism with strange and cosmic dimensions. Yet, one can easily glean the power dynamics at work. As one character explains, stiffing the tram is truly the only safe method of rebellion available to her, so who cares if she is caught.
Miraculi’s dense layers of meaning are probably only fully grasped by those who experienced the oppressive drabness of the GDR. That being said, there are plenty of signifiers astute westerners should be able to catch. Indeed, the significance of an abnormal psychology lecture delivered to Mueller and his fellow inspectors is hard to miss, if viewers have any familiarity with the Soviet bloc’s record of institutionalized psychiatric abuse.
Undeniably both subversive and demanding, there is no possible way Miraculi could have been produced under the Soviet-dominated GDR regime. It is a world away from Soviet Realism, even though it scrupulously captures the depressed grunginess of industrialized East Germany. It is a rich, challenging work, recommended to viewers who do not have to “get” everything they see to appreciate a film. It screens this coming Monday (11/1) at Anthology Film Archives as part of the remarkable WendeFlicks series. Truly a cinematic event, many of the Wende selections have never been subtitled or shown outside of Germany, until now. Yet films like Miraculi are both historically important and fascinating in their own right. The Wende Flicks series runs in New York from November 1st through the 3rd.
