Dreamworks’ Halo Movie, Christina Hendricks + Hollywood Round-up, 10/7

From "Halo: Reach."

By Jason Apuzzo. • A lot of news comes to us today from the Sci-Fi/Alien Invasion front. First of all, it appears that Dreamworks is still contemplating bringing the Halo video game to the screen. Much like George Lucas’ current Clone Wars saga, or James Cameron’s Avatar (or Aliens, for that matter), Halo is another space-troopers story that traces its lineage back to Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers of 1959. And even though there have been an endless number of disputes recently between Universal, Fox and others over this property, I think it would be a great saga to bring to the screen – if done properly, of course. Peter Jackson was originally supposed to supervise this project; later it was Neil Blomkamp; now, it appears, the whole thing has landed in Steven Spielberg’s lap, at least in so far as who makes the major decisions – so we’ll see how this whole thing goes. This project would obviously come with a gigantic built-in fan base – and would represent a major, big-budget addition to the burgeoning ‘alien invasion’ genre (with all its rich subtexts) that we’ve been chronicling so assiduously here at Libertas.

• In other news on this same front, the next Transformers movie will apparently be called Transformers 3: The Dark of the Moon; and there’s been an update on Sam Raimi’s Earth Defense Force project – apparently he would only be producing that film, rather than directing it. The reason for that became clear yesterday when Raimi committed to directing Oz: The Great and Powerful (the 3D big-budget ‘sequel’ to the original Wizard of Oz). Also: we got more details yesterday about James Cameron’s new/extended/Director’s cut/special edition/steel-belted/air conditioned/new-and-improved Avatar DVD with its 1000 hours of supplemental materials, 400 deleted scenes, 500 cast interviews, and Cameron’s CGI virtual/fantasy-simulation of the Bush Impeachment Proceedings. Just kidding. The DVD debuts November 16th, and the opening of the film will contain an as-yet-unseen sequence featuring Sam Worthington’s character on a hyper-polluted, dystopian Earth. You can catch a glimpse of that sequence in some new trailers just released. Incidentally, I’m reminded here of an excellent list that a reader named Emma Taylor recently sent me on The 20 Greatest Works of Dystopian Literature. For some odd and unfathomable reason, the Avatar novel adaptation has not yet made that list – I guess because it’s still in galleys? 😉 Thanks to Emma for the list.

Christina Hendricks of "Mad Men."

• Most likely you’ve heard by now that Zack Snyder (300, The Watchmen, Legend of the Guardians, Sucker Punch) has been hired by Christopher Nolan to direct the Superman reboot. We’re also learning that Nolan may want to take the franchise in a somewhat ‘post modern’ direction – with reporter Clark Kent traveling the world like Christiane Amanpour, struggling over whether he wants to even be Superman – and that the main villain in the new film may be General Zod. On what may be a related note, we’re also learning that the project currently has script problems. So what does all this mean? Actually, we don’t know what all this means – but my advice would be to keep an eye on Nolan here, because he’s the one obviously running the show. My sense is that Nolan has hired someone to carry out his vision, not someone else’s – which is likely why Darren Aronofsky was rejected, and why Aronofsky’s publicist is currently running around town convincing everyone that his client is still hireable on superhero projects. In related Nolan news, Batman 3 will apparently start shooting in New Orleans in April; and in other superhero news, Emma Stone will now apparently be playing Gwen Stacy in the Spider-Man 3D reboot.

• Other news and notes: Peter Jackson has finally been confirmed as the director for the two Hobbit films, which will apparently be shot at a cost of around $500 million, and in 3D. I’m still having a hard time believing that budget, but there it is. Also: it appears that Die Hard 5 may be happening (I couldn’t care less, frankly); and a screenwriter has been found for the legendary Steve McQueen-Yucatan project that Robert Downey is reviving. My advice would be to put a digital Steve McQueen (and a digital Ali Macgraw?) in that project, rather than Downey – whom I still don’t like, even if the rest of Planet Earth fawns over him.

• There’s a movement afoot to put Charlton Heston’s likeness on a stamp. Libertas favors this effort, and you can read more about it at The Hollywood Reporter.

• In related news (i.e., people whose likeness appears on stamps), Joel Surnow’s miniseries on the Kennedys is currently shopping for international distributors at the big Cannes TV market.

• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks (see above) is everywhere. She just did a fashion shoot for Harpers Bazaar, and some photos were just released of her on the set of the new indie thriller, Drive. And, in a new interview, she says that she gets teary-eyed when curvy women tell her that she’s made them feel beautiful and sexy. [Did Gloria Steinem ever have that effect on women?] Somebody please cast her in a 3D film  – now! – so the rest of us can also get teary-eyed …

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

Posted on October 7th, 2010 at 8:35am.

Patrick Pleutin’s “Bâmiyân,” Taliban Intolerance & The Nine Nation Animation Series

By Joe Bendel. At its best, animation creates a stylized world to express the truth of the very real world around us. Several of the award-winning animated shorts recently collected by The World According to Shorts do exactly that. Titled Nine Nation Animation, the mostly very strong animated shorts program (see showreel above) now traveling to art house theaters nationwide.

Starting strong, Nine kicks off with Kajsa Naess’s Deconstruction Workers from Norway. Employing actual photos of actors animated against a chaotic construction site, Deconstruction certainly has a distinctive look. Yet had screenwriter Kjartan Helleve’s caustic dialogue about life and relationships been produced in a live action film, it would still be quite funny – which is, indeed, the ultimate test of an animated film.  It is followed by Burkay Dorgan’s Average 40 Matchsticks, representing Turkey. Its stop motion animation would be impressive in a show-reel, but it is rather a trifle within the overall program.

Easily the richest, most substantial work in Nine is French animator Patrick Pleutin’s Bâmiyân (available below, in French only). Told through multiple narrators, Bâmiyân first follows a Chinese monk on his 632 AD pilgrimage to view the great Buddha statues of Bamyan. Eventually, the first child storyteller is interrupted by a second who glorifies the statues’ destruction centuries later at the hands of the Taliban. It is a chilling illustration of Islamist intolerance learned at an early age. Bâmiyân’s visual style is also quite dramatic, evoking not just traditional Tibetan, Chinese, and Indian art forms, but even hinting at the ancient cave paintings of Lascaux. Indeed, Nine is worth seeing for Bâmiyân alone, but it is followed by two more quite rewarding films.

From Patrick Pleutin’s "Bâmiyân."

If Philip K. Dick had rewritten Adam Sandler’s Click with the Hello Kitty characters and set it in the world of Tron, it might resemble David O’Reilly’s Berlinale Golden Bear winning Please Say Something. Obviously, that is worth seeing.  It is a bit of a surprise Belgian Jonas Geirnaert’s Flatlife won the Cannes Jury Prize, because this cross-section view of life in four contiguous apartments is very funny, but not the least bit political. Though easily the most sentimental, Robert Bradbrook’s Home Road Movies might be the most innovative, manipulating images of British actor Bill Paterson (recognizable from Comfort and Joy, Smiley’s People, and a host of other credits), appearing as the filmmaker’s late father, to create a tangible sense of pathos.

There are the occasional misfires. Veljko Popoviç’s She Who Measures is an ugly-looking, predictable, didactic screed against commercialism. The South African Blackheart Group’s dodo bird fable The Tale of How is impressively baroque, but the operatic narration makes it nearly impossible to follow. A collection in itself, the concluding Never Like the First Time dramatizes three Swedes relating their first sexual experience. Though uneven, it has its moments, including the harrowing middle story of a young woman that serves as a cautionary tale and something of a corrective to the Maxim-esque episode that preceded it.

Happily, this is not an assemblage of Benetton’s commercials or UNICEF infomercials. Nine simply collects some of the best animated shorts around the world as determined by World According to Shorts’ rather eccentric aesthetic judgment. Indeed, their overall record here is quite good, picking one film of true distinction, three high passes, and two mixed bags that are still rather good on balance. That is a far better batting average than you get with most festival short programming blocks. Well worth seeing, Nine just ended its week long run in New York at the IFC Center and now travels to art house theaters across the country.

Posted on October 6th, 2010 at 9:08am.

LFM Review: Waiting for Superman

By Patricia Ducey. Waiting for Superman is an emotionally gripping and ultimately devastating critique of the American public school system, in the same vein as The Lottery or The Cartel and a host of previous education movies. Superman focuses on a half dozen children and their families – and their desperate quest to gain admittance to their city’s charter school. There are only a few spots in each school and many applicants; the filmmakers draw us in and–let’s be honest–manipulate us with the suspense leading up to what is characterized as a make-it-or-break-it day when the charter school chooses its next class by lottery. Will these children escape their neighborhood “dropout factory” and secure their futures?

Co-written with Billy Kimball, directed by Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth) and produced by Jeff Skoll’s Participant Productions, this documentary possesses an authentic progressive pedigree. Skoll views films as vehicles for social change, a kind of “loss leader” that delivers butts in the seat to the alliances and activists he has already mobilized to capitalize on them (see here) and he hopes to do the same with Superman. Skoll greenlights pictures that conform to his own world view, as he is of course entitled to, and sometimes departs from expected liberal orthodoxy – as when he reportedly turned down Michael Moore for Sicko funding. The Canadian Skoll knows from personal experience the failures of nationalized health care. Superman takes aim at a few surprising targets, as well – like teachers’ unions and government bureaucracies.

The film opens with Guggenheim driving by three public schools in his neighborhood on his way to drop off his own kids—at a private school—and recalling his first education documentary of 1999,  The First Year. Nothing has changed since then, he muses with regret, and thus was born the idea of Superman.

Most of the children are poor in the film, and all of them are trapped in schools determined by where each family lives. One of the subjects of the present film, a fifth-grader named Anthony, is being raised in Washington, D.C. by his grandmother. His father is dead from a drug overdose; he never knew his mother. He wants to get a better education yet he doesn’t want to leave all his friends. He answers “bittersweet” when asked how he would feel if he really did win the lottery to get into SEED, a DC boarding school for inner city kids. This is what’s left for him, a child already burdened by loss, in DC, the film says, yet not one word about the voucher program in DC or President Obama’s phasing out of that city’s successful program.

But Superman does take on Democrat and Republic legislators alike and their alliance with what it considers the real enemy, the bulging PAC funds of the teachers’ unions. And the film praises bipartisan cooperation, too – specifically, that between the late Ted Kennedy and then President G. W. Bush that produced No Child Left Behind. Many people, though (including me) questioned that “unity” because it represented more government control – not less – of a problem that government itself caused.

This is where Superman goes irretrievably wrong. We endure the painful story of these beautiful children and their dedicated parents only to be urged on to … what? Send a text to Skoll’s website for mobile updates? Write an astroturfed letter to our governors, urging them to adopt a new blizzard of education standards? These have been formulated by Skoll’s assemblage of experts and appear to be a workaround for NCLB. I question how and why these experts arrived at their conclusions. The fact that they are unelected does not bode well, either, for future responsiveness to parents.

Superman has all the smart facts. Reading and math scores have not improved in 30 years; a number approaching 50% of our children do not graduate from high school at all. I would ask, then, why are solutions like distributing vouchers or dismantling the Department of Education (founded roughly 30 years ago) and returning schools to local and parental control considered too radical? Let it be said that I know many wonderful teachers and public employees, as well. I want to emphasize that the problem is mandatory union membership and union alliances with politicians and non-education groups. In Superman, we see placards at “teacher” protests against Chancellor Michelle Rhee from the ubiquitous ANSWER, for instance, indicating that something other than local education issues are at stake.

From "Waiting for Superman."

Slick websites and tweets and texts do not constitute a real answer to the problems presented by this otherwise moving film. Adding to the sticky quagmire of federal, state, and local rules and regulations for education, rightfully lamented by the film, will not cure the problem or force accountability. Freedom to choose just might. Why not reduce top-down solutions like national standards and national experts, and empower individual parents and local communities? Superman rightfully rues the lottery system, necessitated by the scarcity of truly effective charter schools now in operation. But how do we empower individuals? The voucher system, to me, represents a much quicker, more elegant solution.

Guggenheim is free to choose what he thinks best for his children because he has the money to pay for tuition. He feels terrible about it. But the Superman parents have money, too, available to them. It’s just that the government and their handmaidens – the education unions – mediate the transaction between family and school.

The only true accountability for schools will be realized when parents can vote with their kids’ feet, and take their voucher and their child to another school. The answer to bureaucratic failure is never more bureaucracy. The answer is freedom – because the answer is always freedom. I hope that the families who send their children to school every day know, like Guggenheim, that it’s ultimately their own free choice where they send them.

Posted on October 5th, 2010 at 10:36am.

The Social Network: How Hollywood Doesn’t Understand Innovation + The New Thing & Hollywood Round-up, 10/4

From "The Thing" (2011).

By Jason Apuzzo. The Social Network took top honors at the box office over the weekend. I saw the film on Friday, and although I found it interesting the film was also curiously unmoving and somewhat clinical. Essentially it felt like a gossipy Vanity Fair article rather than a movie. Silicon Valley is apparently reacting to the film badly, believing that Hollywood doesn’t really understand them at all. They’re right. Basically, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and director David Fincher don’t really know what to do with Mark Zuckerberg in this film other than to slap the usual geeky-Jewish-nerd template over him, and assume that his prime motivations for creating Facebook were: girls and money.

A motivation they seem completely incapable of understanding is: innovation.

And this, ultimately, is why the movie fails as a depiction of Silicon Valley culture. In an industry based on sequels, remakes and franchise properties, I’m sure it must be difficult for Hollywood people to grasp what makes the Silicon Valley guys and girls tick: a desire to innovate, to create technologies no one has ever dreamed-of before, to push the boundaries of science and industry. This is not what Hollywood has any interest in any more, to say the least. But a spirit of innovation is what makes people like Steve Jobs tick. Or filmmakers like George Lucas, or the Pixar guys, or Francis Coppola – all of whom decamped for the Bay Area decades ago, for reasons few people in Hollywood (whether liberal or conservative) seem capable of understanding.

January Jones plays Emma Frost in "X-Men: First Class."

Oh and incidentally, as of this month Steve Jobs’ Apple may currently be replacing Exxon as the most valuable company in the world, in terms of market capitalization. That’s another development the Hollywood guys probably don’t understand at all.

A fun little footnote here. Some years back when I was a graduate student at Stanford (I was studying lit), I had a buddy in the computer science department there. We would occasionally hang out at the computer lab late at night and shoot the breeze. Often there would also be these two other guys there, huddled off in a corner working on something. They always seemed busy, and intense – my buddy and I always wondered what they were working on.

I never gave those guys much thought until years later when I saw their pictures, and realized that those two dudes in the lab were … Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

And what warm, wonderful guys they were! 😉

• First it was MGM bankruptcy, then losing Guillermo del Toro, then labor troubles, and now a fire has burned down a crucial workshop in New Zealand that was to be used for production on Peter Jackson’s already-troubled Hobbit adaptation. Plus: word is now leaking that the 2 Hobbit films may be shot in 3D, at a cost potentially as high as $500 million. Is there really that much juice in this series? I sure hope so, for Jackson’s sake (and MGM’s).

• I was very sorry to read that one of my favorite directors, John McTiernan (Predator, Die Hard, The Hunt for Red October, Die Hard: With a Vengeance), just got sentenced to one year in prison for his role in the Anthony Pellicano wiretapping scandal. It could’ve been worse, though: he could’ve been forced to direct a Green Hornet sequel.

Tanit Phoenix.

• Hugh Hefner’s life may be getting a BBC miniseries treatment, and Brett Ratner may be reviving the Beverly Hills Cop franchise, sans Eddie Murphy. Why do those two stories seem related? It must have something to do with bringing things back from near-death.

• Mary Jane is apparently going to be played by Emma Stone in the Spider-Man reboot. No surprises there. And you’ve probably already heard by now that Wonder Woman will be coming back to television, in a new series to be written and produced by David E. Kelley. Few details are available about what’s planned for this reboot, so we’ll be keeping an eye out …

• On the Sci-Fi/Alien Invasion front, Olivia Wilde of Tron and Cowboys and Aliens (and ACLU ads) has now been cast in (the project formerly known as)I.m. mortal. Plus, check out this interesting set visit to the forthcoming The Thing prequel/remake/reboot (see the picture above); Matt Reeves talks about Super 8 and also the potential of a Cloverfield 2; and Mad Men’s January Jones may be doing a lingerie scene for X-Men: First Class, so that’s a plus.

• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … did you know that somebody did a prequel to Death Race, called Death Race 2: The Beginning … with Danny Trejo and Sean Bean? Neither did I, but apparently it’s going straight to DVD – and it also stars South African model Tanit Phoenix, who as a brunette might be a great candidate to play the new Wonder Woman on TV. Judge for yourself …

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

Posted on October 4th, 2010 at 1:08pm.