LFM: Libertas Film Magazine – Page 420 – LFM: The Voice of Freedom in Movies & Pop Culture

The New ‘Edgy’ Snow White, The New Ten Commandments, More Alien News & Hollywood Round-up, 10/14

Tronbig — Daft Punk does the music for "Tron: Legacy."

By Jason Apuzzo. • All of the big news today is on the Sci-Fi/Alien Invasion Front. Apparently the screenwriter on Ridley Scott’s Alien prequel turned in his script to Fox, and the Suits were pleased; and, what’s more, the Suits supposedly want Natalie Portman to play the lead role, a character described as “a female Colonial Marine general.” Uugh. Portman’s shrill, abrasive performance in the Star Wars prequels was easily their biggest problem – not Jar Jar Binks. Mercifully, we also learn today that someone else – Noomi Rapace, star of the Swedish version of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo – is similarly in the running for the lead. My prediction is that Scott would go with Rapace, as she seems edgier – and would probably be less expensive than Portman for this 3D-native film that Fox apparently wants to keep in the $150-$160 million range. Also: supposedly the script reads more PG-13 than R-rated, which also made the Suits happy – albeit perhaps not Scott. We’ll see. This whole thing could still blow up and go nowhere.

• Are you aware that there are three competing Snow White projects in Hollywood right now? The latest apparently involves director Tarsem Singh (of Jennifer Lopez’ dreadful The Cell), who’s just been offered what is described as “an ‘edgy’ and comedic look at the original Brothers Grimm story.” This would be the one to put Natalie Portman in; I suggest having her whine about having to clean up after the Seven Dwarves.

• In other Alien Invasion news, Luc Besson is apparently returning to the sci-fi genre, with a large-scale project that “he’s planning on shooting in 2012 and 2013 for a release in 2013 or 2014.” Supposedly he’s already at work designing creatures for this project, and he’s also saying that James Cameron’s recent innovations (one assumes 3D here) were a large part of his motivation to return to sci-fi. Very interesting. Also: actor Morgan Freeman is saying that he and David Fincher still very much want to adapt Arthur C. Clarke’s sci-fi ‘alien encounter’ masterpiece Rendezvous with Rama – and that they want to do it in 3D. I think that’s a marvelous idea – and long overdue, frankly. It would be an absolutely perfect project for 3D. Also: there’s a new featurette out on I Am Number 4 (a forthcoming teen alien invasion flick) that pretty much gives away the whole movie, which I’d actually already lost interest in due to the trailer. And finally: there’s a very interesting, semi-spoilerific interview out with the Strause brothers of Skyline, in which they detail how they’ve managed to create a large-scale alien invasion movie on an ultra-low indie budget – and how the freedom associated with indie filmmaking has made them even less eager to work though the studio system. They’re also already planning a sequel! Good for them. This is really amazing stuff – and gives you a little glimpse at filmmaking’s future, I suspect. There are also some interesting new pics out from the film, and I’ve put one below. Remember that this film was made for under $10 million; Peter Jackson, take note.

• In related Sci-Fi news, the Tron marketing bonanza has begun. Disney already has a theme park attraction in the works, the new Daft Punk Tron album is coming, and a teaser for the new Pirates of the Caribbean film (which will similarly unspool in 3D and in IMAX) will apparently be attached to the Tron prints when the film debuts in December. I certainly hope the film is good, with all this happening … and in other sci-fi news: Steven Spielberg’s huge Terra Nova TV series is apparently running into major cost overruns; NBC’s Obamaphillic The Event is slipping in the ratings (while Hawaii Five-O soars); and Aint It Cool News is running a glowing review of J.W. Rinzler’s new book, The Making of The Empire Strikes Back. I’m very eager to read that book.

heston4 — Charlton Heston in "The Ten Commandments."

• In Classic Movie News, Paramount is about to debut a new, digitally restored ‘roadshow’ version of Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 masterpiece, The Ten Commandments – a longer version that apparently hasn’t been seen since the film’s debut! This is fantastic news, although the LA Times article on the subject is frustratingly short on details. What are the new/extended scenes?! I hope this reaches DVD/Blu-ray soon. We showed what was then the best existing print of The Ten Commandments at the 2005 Liberty Film Festival. [I still remember that print sitting in my living room – I think I hugged it.] Cast member Lisa Mitchell introduced the film that night, and what a thrill that was. I can’t wait to see this ‘new’ version of a great classic. In other classic movie news: there’s a new book out that delves into the romance on- and off-screen between Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland, probably the best romantic pair the movies have ever produced.

• On the Political Front, Aaron Sorkin recently addressed concerns over The Social Network’s misogynistic depiction of women. His excuse basically boils down to: they’re geeks, so what do you expect? The explanation doesn’t fly. Sorkin’s film doesn’t critique misogyny so much as revel in it. Tacking on a female lawyer with a brain at the end of the film hardly makes up for that. Elsewhere, Obama recently met with the kids from Waiting for Superman, and also with Clooney (re: Darfur). He should’ve met with both of them at the same time – I think Clooney dropped out of Northern Kentucky. Elsewhere: Clint Eastwood says that Joaquin Phoenix will not be appearing in his J. Edgar Hoover biopic (although DiCaprio will be); Paul Giamatti will be playing Ben Bernanke, Billy Crudup will be playing Timothy Geithner and Ed Asner will be playing Warren Buffett (?!) in Libertas reader Curtis Hanson’s Too Big to Fail for HBO; and, finally, Clint Howard – brother of Ron, and star of some of my favorite Roger Corman flicks – advises young Hollywood conservatives to exercise caution when speaking their minds. I respect Clint’s opinion on this, but it’s for exactly this reason that so many of us choose to avoid the Hollywood system altogether and work independently – so that we can exercise our free speech rights. No Hollywood career is worth sacrificing those for.

• In franchise news, George Miller says that heavy seasonal rains in the Australian Outback were actually the cause of the Mad Max: Fury Road delays. Elsewhere, the projected $500 million budget for the two Hobbit films will apparently be the largest movie budgets ever (in unadjusted dollars), assuming those films are greenlit. Is this really a good idea for MGM, which is presumably trying to exit from bankruptcy? Anybody remember how Peter Jackson’s King Kong turned out? Hint: it underperformed. Elsewhere, the more recent Harry Potter films will apparently be getting the 3D treatment after all, once those films hit Blu-ray; and Inception’s Tom Hardy will apparently be joining the cast of Christopher Nolan’s new Batman film.

• The Playboy Mansion recently hosted a charity event to benefit our wounded warriors. The event featured motorcycles and Playmates, as well as a live auction of limited edition Playboy centerfolds and a prop gun once used by John Wayne. Honestly, I can’t think of a more patriotic way to spend one’s weekend outside of hunting Taliban.

• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … in a sign of how bad Obama’s economy is, Kim Kardashian recently posed nude for W Magazine covered only in silver. In a better economy she clearly would have been covered in gold …

And that’s what’s happening today in the wonderful world of Hollywood.

Posted on October 13th, 2010 at 6:52pm.

Fresh Video: North Korea’s Largest Military Parade Ever + Kim Jong Il’s Heir Apparent

By Jason Apuzzo. Images often capture events more descriptively than words. The UK Guardian’s Dan Chung has done some great video reporting from Asia in recent years, and we wanted to show you some fresh video footage from him of a massive North Korean military parade – supposedly the nation’s largest ever – that was recently held in order to ‘introduce’ Kim Jong-il’s heir apparent , Kim Jong-un. This was Kim Jong-un’s most public appearance since being named as North Korea’s next leader.

Among the proclamations made at this parade was the following:

Ri Yong Ho, chief of the general staff of the North Korean army, said at the event: “If the US imperialists and their followers infringe on our sovereignty and dignity even slightly, we will blow up the stronghold of their aggression with a merciless and righteous retaliatory strike by mobilising all physical means, including self-defensive nuclear deterrent force, and achieve the historic task of unification.”

Take a look at the video above. Two words come to mind: farcical … and chilling.

Posted on October 13th,2010 at 11:38am.

A Reasonable Nobel Season

By David Ross. Mario Vargas Llosa has won the Nobel Prize in literature — a laudable, long overdue selection — and Chinese democratic activist Liu Xiaobo has won the Peace Prize. This was an unusually reasonable and gratifying Nobel season. The Nobel establishment was evidently trying to perform emergency reconstructive surgery on its own reputation after giving President Obama the Peace Prize.

I read Vargas Llosa’s The War of the End of the World (1981) twenty-five years ago. I was a fifteen-year-old intern in the Washington office of Congressman Bill Gradison (R-Ohio). One of my fellow interns lent the book to me. I was enraptured. The plot long ago evaporated from memory, but I still have certain tableaux fixed in my mind; I still recall a certain mood of welling apocalyptic energy. I haven’t read Vargas Llosa in the intervening decades, but I have long meant to give his work a further try. I now have my impetus.

Vargas Llosa is a rare conservative among winners of the literature prize. The Nobel committee has notoriously blackballed conservatives and non-progressives since the 1960s. Pound, Borges, Nabokov, and Updike had undeniable claims on the prize but were all criminally denied. Solzhenitsyn and Saul Bellow were the exceptions to the rule. Note however that the committee’s official commendation of Vargas Llosa exudes academic left-wingery (“for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat”) as if to make clear that the committee observed the usual bien pensant considerations. “Cartography of structures of power” may be the clumsiest phrase ever employed by the Nobel committee, and that’s saying a good deal: some of its commendations read like thesis statements plucked from overly earnest high school term papers.

There were, admittedly, reasons to snub Pound, but the snubbing of Borges and Nabokov was an outrage against intellectual honesty. Updike had two strikes against him: he was an non-self-loathing American and he was a quiet conservative (see his brilliant essay “On Not Being a Dove” here). He was the only haute-novelist who did not vocally oppose the Vietnam War, and he consistently defended the religious sensibility against the galloping secularism of the age. When the Twin Towers were struck he did not, like Susan Sontag, rail against American imperialism, but wrote in a mood of deep and genuine heartbreak (here). Other Americans whom the Nobel committee has ignored, in order of victimization:

Wallace Stevens
Thomas Pynchon
Marianne Moore
William Carlos Williams
Tennessee Williams
Philip Roth
Richard Wilbur
Norman Mailer
Edmund Wilson
Cynthia Ozick
John Barth

Had she lived into middle age and realized her great genius, Flannery O’Connor would have been another conservative whom the Nobel committee could have boasted of snubbing.

The Wall Street Journal comments on Vargas Llosa’s ascension (here) and interviews the Nobel hero (here). Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker sends fluttering our way the usual clever nothings (here).

[UPDATE: Read here how Swedish leftists are apparently outraged that Llosa won the award, because he isn’t “one of us.” Thanks to LFM’s Patricia Ducey for the heads-up.]

Posted on October 13th, 2010 at 9:06am.

Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold at The Met and in Movie Theaters

By Patricia Ducey. If you were thrilled at Lt. Colonel Kilgore’s mad helicopter ride in Apocalypse Now or swept away by the portentous opening of Terrence Malick’s The New World, you may already be an opera lover. Moviemakers have always borrowed from the rich store of classical music – and very liberally from Richard Wagner – to heighten the emotion and theatricality of their productions, and now the Metropolitan Opera is offering HD productions of the source operas themselves.

We are all now able to share these performances live across the world. At 1 p.m. the curtain rises in New York; at 10 a.m. in California we sip our coffees and wait for the theater to darken; in Switzerland they dress in formals and make an evening of it. Now in its fifth season, “The Met: Live” is the perfect marriage of myth, movie artistry and music – and it’s also affordable at roughly $22 per ticket. Last season’s Tosca and Turandot, thoroughly grounded in the familiar narrative territory of romantic literature and soaring arias, won me over – and so I ventured out recently to what I hoped would not be a morning misspent with Herr Wagner …

Wagner_s_Die_Walk_re_ — Deborah Voigt as Brunnhilde.

To be honest, in 21st century America our sensibilities have been trained to respond to the conventions of moviemaking – i.e., camera angles, close-ups, etc. – so as a neophyte opera fan, I find these ‘movie’ productions almost better than some of the live productions I’ve seen. “Not if you had good seats!” my opera loving friend counters, but how many of us can afford that $200-plus ‘good’ ticket? In the Met: Live productions, the production team expertly uses the camera to enhance the storytelling so that we’re not, for instance, continuously scanning a huge faraway stage for the action. So for anyone who did not grow up with this art form as part of their national culture, the familiar conventions of filmmaking prove an invaluable aid here. In addition, the Live broadcasts open with a backstage tour, led (on this occasion) by Deborah Voigt, and include interviews with the cast (with shoutouts to their countrymen) and wardrobe/production staff, along with a “making of the Ring” mini-doc – all of which makes the opera very accessible.

The Met: Live opened October 9 th with Das Rheingold (“The Rhine Gold”), the 2.5-hour prelude to Richard Wagner’s massive-in-scope “Ring-cycle.” The entire cycle runs approximately 15 hours and is meant to be seen in four sittings. In this epic undertaking, Wagner creates an entire mythical world, borrowed from Norse and medieval German sagas, with gods and creatures engulfed in struggles for power and greed and love, all culminating in the four-hour Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods).

The opera opens with three entrancing Rhine maidens who guard the store of magical gold under the Rhine – and the evil Alberich, the dwarf who unsuccessfully woos the beauties. Angered by their rejection, he renounces love and steals their gold and forges it into a ring that the mermaid-like creatures have promised will allow any who possess it to rule the earth. We then meet the gods Wotan, his wife Fricka, and their progeny. Wotan would like to rule the earth as well, and outsmarts Alberich to steal the ring. Plot complications ensue, and the ring eventually ends up in other hands – Wotan trades away the ring for a safe home for his fellow gods. At the conclusion of Das Rheingold, his reunited family ascends into beautiful Valhalla, safe at last. Yet, as we hear the strains of familiar chords, we know that the peace of Valhalla is but a chimera; something is coming – something larger than life, something wonderful.

Terrence Malick, incidentally, who is a student of German philosophy, used the image of the water nymphs in the opening scenes of New World – mirroring the opening of Das Rheingold. I can only wonder if this was intentional. Another mythmaker, J. R.R. Tolkein, long-ago acknowledged his borrowing of the all-powerful gold ring for his own ‘Rings-cycle’ – as well as his indebtedness to Wagner’s vision.

Given the sterility and vapidity of our modern day myths (currently, Avatar), exploring opera, theater, short films or foreign films as we do at LFM can only enrich our understanding of filmmaking culture, infusing it with the chords and themes that have resonated in humanity through the ages; indeed, this may be the only way that new film practices will emerge, once the tiresome contemporary genres of the anti-hero, of puerile sexuality, or of nihilism have run their course.

While we await this salutary development, check out this schedule and make a date for The Met: Live. [There is an encore performance of Das Rheingold on October 27th.] I am not quite a Ringhead yet, but I will definitely make time for the others and certainly for The Valkyrie. These operas have it all: fierce heroes and heroines, magical golden rings, illicit love – and, most of all, majestically beautiful music.

Posted on October 12th, 2010 at 12:57pm.

New Medal of Honor Takes the Battle to Afghanistan

By Jason Apuzzo. Did you folks see the debut of the new Medal of Honor trailer last night during Monday Night Football? I’ve embedded it above. This new game from EA takes place in Afghanistan, following Special Ops forces. The trailer is quite cinematic in flavor, and almost appears to be a re-telling of recent offensives in Afghanistan. You can read more about the game at the Wall Street Journal’s Speakeasy blog today. The game was designed in collaboration with some of our special ops guys.

One extremely unfortunate note, though: there’s apparently an option in this game to ‘play’ on the Taliban side, as it were – which is really tasteless.

Posted on October 12, 2010 at 10:59am.

Could The New Halo Movie be the anti-Avatar? + French Women & Hollywood Round-up, 10/12

By Jason Apuzzo. • I’m still tantalized by the notion that Dreamworks’ proposed Halo project could be a kind of anti-Avatar – i.e., an epic sci-fi film that makes genocidal theocratic aliens into the enemies, rather than into victims of Earth-based imperialist aggression/corporate exploitation, etc. I’ve embedded a trailer above that should give you some sense of what such a film might feel like, particularly in terms of its epic scale.

My sense is that this would be a difficult project for Dreamworks to botch, provided their desire to retain some basic fidelity to the storyline and not turn off – I almost wrote ‘alienate’ – the game’s legion of fans. We’ll see.

• The Social Network won the weekend at the box office. No surprises there, but it was disappointing that Disney’s Secretariat placed third behind the vulgar-looking Katherine Heigl comedy. And now, apparently, Disney’s new marketing chief is quasi-falling on her sword over the film’s mediocre opening. My sense is that people should be patient here; I expect Secretariat to have a long shelf life, and good word-of-mouth. It’s interesting that the Hollywood Reporter article about Disney’s marketing chief notes that Secretariat did much better business in the Heartland than on the coasts. That’s completely unsurprising to me, because the vibe of the film is so retro-old school … it’s almost like a classic women’s melodrama from the 1940s. My advice to the Disney people would be start marketing the film hard to women, and not just to people they’ve tagged as middle-American conservatives/Fox News viewers/Christians, etc.

• French actress Lea Seydoux has been cast as the villainess of Mission: Impossible 4. This reminds me, happily, that French Vogue is celebrating its 90th anniversary this month. I’d been wanting to show everyone the superb cover of the anniversary issue (see right). It certainly captures French women at their finest, non? Vivre la differance, I always say. Over at fashion blogger Garance Doré’s site (see here and here) you can read about the 90th anniversary Masquerade Ball held at Karl Lagerfeld’s Paris apartment, in celebration of this momentous anniversary. We love Garance’s site here at Libertas, by the way. In somewhat related news, while the French are celebrating their beautiful women, a German group has just devised some new ‘body morphing’ software that can re-sculpt the bodies of actors and actresses. The Germans used to have such faith in their gene pool; apparently times have changed.

• On the Dwarves/Fairies/Gnomes Front, you can see below the new trailer for Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader if you’re still following that series. Also: Peter Jackson is out reminding people today that due to the complex MGM situation, his Hobbit films have still not technically been greenlit. No kidding – we may not see those films for another 40 years, the way things are going. And finally, Warner Brothers is canceling the planned release of the next ‘Harry Potter’ movie in 3D, as there simply isn’t enough time for them to do a high-quality 3D conversion. No doubt this is embarrassing for them – but it’s much less embarrassing than having a bad conversion panned. For the umpteenth time here at Libertas, I remind people that it’s always better to shoot natively in 3D when possible – rather than endure the vagaries, inadequacies and expense of the conversion process.

• On the Political Front, Shia LaBeouf apparently wants to play the young Karl Rove in College Republicans, which is described by the LA Times as “a comedy-drama about a young Karl Rove vying for the position of chief campus conservative under the guidance of one Lee Atwater.” I suppose that might be entertaining; Rove could certainly do worse – in terms of looks, though, it would probably be more accurate to cast Jonah Hill. In related news, people are still irritated that Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (starring Shia LaBeouf) wasn’t left-wing enough. This must really be a weird month for Stone, in so far as he just released a pro-Hugo Chavez doc. In other news: a new kids TV show is debuting featuring “Sharia-compliant Muslim superheroes.” Has Marvel optioned that yet? Incidentally, I want to remind everyone that Four Lions is being released here in the States on November 5th – although that film’s about sharia non-compliant Muslim terrorists.

• Some new production stills are out from the Angelina Jolie/Johnny Depp/Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck thriller The Tourist. You can check out one of them below.

• There’s an ocean of news on the Sci-Fi/Alien Invasion Front. First of all, actress Noomi Rapace is apparently the hot candidate to be the female lead – i.e., the primary lead – in Ridley Scott’s very expensive (and probably 3D) Alien prequel. [Minor note: James Cameron’s Aliens, still easily my favorite film of his, is coming to Blu-ray with a refurbished print that looks phenomenal.] In other news, a teaser trailer for The Thing shown at the New York Comic-Con has leaked out, although the image is of a poor quality; you can also read some new, spoilerific details just released today about the movie . Of note is that they’re re-shifting the story around the female lead, a lá Ripley in Aliens. And since this new version of The Thing is apparently intended to dovetail (like a prequel) with John Carpenter’s The Thing from 1982, it’s also worth mentioning today that a remake may be in the works of Carpenter’s other alien invasion movie from the 1980s, They Live. And finally on the alien invasion front: you can catch some great, behind-the-scenes footage of the new J.J. Abrams/Steven Spielberg Super 8 here and here. Watch as the U.S. military (circa 1979) fights off something very big attacking America’s heartland …

• In other Sci-Fi news, 20 minutes worth of Tron: Legacy footage will be shown on 3D IMAX screens October 28th. Also: there’s more news out today about the Daft Punk album for Tron (they’re doing the original score). The album will be released December 7th. One major bummer from today: shooting on the 3D Mad Max sequel Fury Road with Charlize Theron has been postponed for a year, for what appear to be financial reasons. That’s a pity, because they’d supposedly already done a lot of work on that.

• And in Retro Sci-Fi news, George Lucas’ THX-1138 is finally coming to Blu-ray; you can read the LA Times’ recent review of Roger Corman’s Star Crash with Caroline Munro, which just came to DVD and is one of my absolute favorite cult films of all time; the LA Times also reviews the new coffee-table book out on the old Star Trek TV series, called Star Trek 365; and finally, don’t forget to catch this hilarious, recently unearthed interview from 1977 with Harrison Ford about Star Wars. It’s really a hoot, with Ford in full-tilt smart-ass mode.

• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … Minka Kelly of the Friday Night Lights TV series has been dubbed ‘Esquire’s Sexiest Woman Alive for 2010.’ While I think it’s great that Ms. Kelly is still playing a cheerleader at age 30, I nonetheless find this a puzzling, inadequate choice for ‘Sexiest Woman Alive.’ In fact, Ms. Kelly is probably not even the sexiest actress in a magazine spread this month, a title which may go to Diora Baird (of the forthcoming vampire flick 30 Days of Night: Dark Days) who appears in the new issue of FHM. Judge for yourself. Incidentally, Ms. Baird played a green Orion girl in the recent Star Trek – but her scene with Chris Pine (Captain Kirk) got cut. You can watch the clip here – it’s pretty funny.

And that’s what’s happening today in the wonderful world of Hollywood.

Posted on October 11th, 2010 at 5:44pm.