“I was nervous about doing a movie about Latinos. I’ve usually stayed away from it,” she told 24 Frames, saying she found most depictions of Latino culture on the big screen to be one-note and marginal. “But after I read the script, I realized this is about a symbol of hope. It was kind of the way we felt about Obama when he was first elected …”
The depiction of Machete as a symbol of hope for a Latino community, at a time when, as the movie noted satirically, immigration fears were running riot, heartened Rodriguez. And to the extent it shows Latinos and whites working together, she says, it felt even more ideological.
“It was like seeing Run DMC and Aerosmith doing that video together,” she said, referring to “Walk This Way.” “It was like, ‘Yeah, man, we can all do this together and laugh about it.’ “
By Joe Bendel. Whether you consider it an unintentional disconnect stemming from China’s rapid industrialization or outright hypocrisy, the chasm between official rhetoric and reality is wide and stark in the Communist People’s Republic of China. It might be go-go times in the big coastal commercial centers, but the rural areas are desperately poor. An estimated 130 million migrant workers leave for those cities, working long hours for exploitative wages. They only make one annual return home for the traditional New Year holiday. Considered the world’s largest migration of people, documentarian Lixin Fan examines the taxing ritual through the eyes of one struggling Chinese family in Last Train Home, which opened Friday in select theaters nationwide.
Zhang Changhua and Chen Suqin are second class citizens, veritable illegal aliens within their own countries. Under the government’s restrictive residency laws, they have few formal rights and no access to social services outside their home district. Yet, they have had little choice but to seek work in China’s teeming urban centers. As a result, they have rarely seen the pre-teen daughter and young son they left to be raised by their grandmother.
Mother-daughter relationships can be difficult even under easier circumstances, but the three years Chen and her daughter Zhang Qin have been separated are taking a toll. Yet Chen cannot entirely blame her for feeling abandoned, even while lamenting that she has not been a good mother. Unfortunately, the resentful daughter spitefully drops out of school, becoming a migrant worker herself. It is a bitter turn of events for her parents, who now must face the possibility that many of their sacrifices will have been for naught. They also know only too well the rough education she is in for, especially when navigating the yearly mass exodus.
Sharing an obvious stylistic affinity with the Digital Generation of independent Chinese filmmakers, Chinese-Canadian director Lixin Fan is not afraid of holding long, quiet shots. However, he captured some uncomfortably intimate family drama, while conscientiously refraining from adding outside commentary. Clearly, the filmmaker built up a large reservoir of trust with his subjects. In return, he lets them speak for themselves in their own words, unfiltered and unhurried.
Train is a very personal film, but it is hard to miss the underlying point that approximately 130 million more migrant Chinese workers currently endure similar conditions. Ironically, China’s peasants used to be the PRC’s politically privileged class, but now the laws are rigged against them.
Should digital auteur Jia Zhangke ever remake John Hughes’ Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, it would probably look a lot like this. An unvarnished exercise in cinema vérité that takes on tragic dimensions, Train is a pointed corrective to the uncritical media coverage the Chinese government carefully cultivates. It is all the more difficult to shake, since it is not at all clear everything will ultimately work out alright for the Zhang family. Indeed, such is the nature of life. Uncompromising but deeply humanistic, Train opened last week in select theaters nationwide.
By Jason Apuzzo. Yesterday, after my post on the new film Tomorrow When the War Began (which appears to be a kind of Australian Red Dawn), a reader named Psudo reminded me that this new film is coming out at roughly the same time as the new videogame Homefront– which is actually written by Red Dawn writer/director John Milius, and is quite obviously inspired by the subject matter of his original film. Check out the two trailers for the game, above and below. My understanding is that Homefront will be coming out in February.
John Milius' forthcoming video game.
Homefront is actually set about 15 years from now. The idea is that North Korea has become a mini-expansionist empire, invigorated by a young new leader, and that this empire grows to consume both South Korea and Japan. Meanwhile, the United States’ economic and military profiles continue to weaken. The North Koreans then launch some kind of advanced electronic pulse weapon that takes out our defense systems. Enter North Korean invaders.
Whether one finds this scenario especially plausible, by the way, isn’t really the issue here. What’s fascinating is how prevalent this type of scenario is becoming in current projects.
We’ve been documenting these invasion scenarios here at Libertas all summer, as regular readers know. These scenarios are truly starting to appear everywhere – most prominently in science fiction films. Suffice to say that Homefront is looking not only a lot like the forthcoming MGM remake of Red Dawn, but also this new Australian film Tomorrow When the War Began, plus the forthcoming web series Red Storm, and about a hundred different sci-fi invasion stories coming down the pike. Plus, this summer we’ve seen the return of films depicting the Cold War Soviet spy threat in Salt and Farewell, and vivid depictions of communist tyranny in indie films like Mao’s Last Dancer, Disco & Atomic War, and The Red Chapel (which deals specifically with North Korea).
How big of a trend is this? It’s a very big one that’s impacting us in many different ways. Two recent films greenlit with $200 million budgets – Universal’s Battleship and the Warner Brothers Battle of Midway – both seem to partake in the trend, for example. [Midway was the World War II battle that permanently scuttled any Japanese hopes of invading America; Battleship is a World War II-style naval battle, set in the future, pitting a combined Earth navy against an invading alien force.]
We’ll keep an eye on all this here at Libertas, to be sure. I personally think these films reflect deep domestic anxieties about the direction the country’s going in … and I don’t think these anxieties are waning. They’re only growing in intensity.
One final word: I spent a pleasant evening several years ago with John Milius; we smoked cigars and talked about the White Rajah of Sarawak … and, ironically, about Mao. I want to wish him the best with this new project.
[Editor’s Note: Recently I came across this striking video above, by New York-based filmmaker Richard Mosse. At first glance, I was shocked by what appeared to be a shahid-style terror video made by a Western filmmaker. Watching the video through, however, it occurred to me that this likely was not an actual terror video, so much as a kind of ‘genre’ piece or riff on terror videos. My thoughts then moved to the question of what an expert in this area might think of it. Fortunately I was able to turn to LFM Contributer ‘Max Garuda,’ who works in the field and has access to Arabic translation.]
“A short terror video made in Gaza. Possibly the only such video ever made by non-Palestinian producers. As a result, the representation breaks with the conventions of the Palestinian suicide video genre. In Arabic, ‘shahid’ means martyr, or witness.” – Filmmaker/photographer Richard Mosse, describing his video Shahid.
By ‘Max Garuda‘. The artist’s commentary above alerts the viewer to the existence of a ‘terrorist video genre,’ and that Mosse’s creation breaks with that category. This assertion raises two questions: what is the ‘terrorist video genre’ and what conventions does Mosse’s video contest? (An argument can be made that any film belongs in any genre if anyone can make a compelling argument for inclusion. Or, said differently, film/video genres are not fixed sets of criteria by which categorizations are easily made. Rather, they are fluid, evolving bodies of work, responding to artistic practice, distribution/marketing strategies and audience expectations.)
That being said, why does Mosse desire to characterize his video within the ‘terrorist video genre’ or by comparison to it – especially when the differences that do exist are so significant enough to make a strong argument that his video doesn’t break from the genre, but rather has nothing to do with the genre. But first, a little background on the ‘terrorist video genre.’
The 'theater of terror.'
As the title might suggest, the most obvious distinguishing characteristic of the genre was originally the provenence of the video followed by content. Generally speaking, only terrorists made ‘terrorist videos,’ which were used to showcase the terrorizing act or transmit a message requiring some expression of authenticity. The terrorist act depends on shock and a visceral reaction by the ‘public’ of the terrorized. A beheading that occurs in the forest is just a beheading; a beheading captured on video and spread globally by broadcast news or the Internet is an act of terror. Videos showing murders, explosions and other deadly acts were created to broaden the impact of the terrorist act. The ‘theater of terror’ is a common framework for understanding terrorism, in which the terrorist’s act must have the paralyzing effect of fear – because the scope of the actual violence is quite limited. Even the 9/11 attacks, with their relatively high death toll, depend on the ‘theater of terror’ effect for their power–changing how Americans (and other countries and their citizens) conduct their daily lives, from intrusive security measures to a simple constant state of fear. Many early terrorist videos operated in this domain.
The other common example of early terrorist videos were simply video-based messages. Whether VHS tapes smuggled out of remote bivouacs to eager news outlets or digital videos posted to websites, the form of the terrorist video was targeted primarily at followers of the movement, to ensure them that the leadership was still alive and in control. Hence, the periodic release of a video of Osama bin Laden exhorting his followers or Ayman al-Zawahiri expounding on a facet of Islamic exegesis that fits his extremist goals. The target of these videos was generally the faithful, and secondly the ‘contested populations’ or those that don’t openly support the extremists but aren’t too convinced of the piety, competence and forthrightness of local government.
Strategic messaging.
More recently, though, we see a fusion of these two goals (theater of terror and strategic messaging) into the genre of the ‘terrorist video’ that Mosse and his collaborators purport to produce. In this newer class of terrorist videos, we usually see direct address of the camera by the producing group, images of their heroes (Bin Laden, Al-Zarqawi, etc.), and sometimes images of their terrorist acts or types of acts the video implies are imminent. Because these newer videos are not as gruesome as the beheading type video, and because they are frequently hagiographic in their treatment of extremist heroes and martyrs, their access to the ‘theater of terror’ is less about instilling fear in a subject population, but rather in making a spectacle of the process of terrorism and thus improve recruitment within the contested population (particularly disaffected youth). Continue reading EXCLUSIVE: Libertas Reviews a ‘Terror Video’
A new Australian film called Tomorrow When the War Began, distributed in Austalia by Paramount (starting September 2nd) and based on an Australian teen novel series of the same title, is getting a lot of buzz right now (see The Hollywood Reporter’s HeatVision blog and Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood today) because the film is currently unspooling for potential distributors at the Toronto Film Festival. The film marks the directorial debut of screenwriter Stuart Beattie, whose credits include Collateral and Pirates of the Caribbean.
Here’s the HeatVision summary of the project:
“Tomorrow” is based on the best-selling Australian novel by John Marsden, which is the first in a series of seven books that have sold over two million copies in Australia and New Zealand. In a “Red Dawn” from Down Under way, it tells the story of a group of high school teenagers who decide to take an end of the year camping trip and return home to find houses deserted and phone lines cut. They soon learn that their country has been invaded, and they’re forced into a battle of life and death against the deadly occupying force.
Check out the trailer above – the parallels to Red Dawn are quite obvious. You can otherwise read some early reviews of the film here and here.
The film, and John Marsden’s original novels, are coy on the matter of who the invading force happens to be – but all indications are that they are most likely the communist Chinese, potentially with the aid of other southeast Asian forces. Tellingly, Marsden apparently dedicated the most recent book in the Tomorrow series to “the people of Tibet, East Timor and West Papua” … all of whom have been invaded either by China, or Indonesia. For an in-depth look at the controversy over this project in Australia, I strongly advise watching the interview below with Marsden – who talks about the novels and the film, and discusses the political implications of both. Expect this exact same controversy to play out once this film is released in the U.S. – assuming that’s allowed to happen.
It’s fascinating to me that films like this are suddenly getting made right now (e.g., Salt) – although certainly a great many more of them are getting made outside Hollywood (and America, generally) than from within. [In American films right now, fears of foreign invasion are currently being sublimated into the science fiction alien invasion genre. See my exchange with the LA Times’ Patrick Goldstein here.]
Most recently, for example, it was an Australian production team that made Mao’s Last Dancer, which is in theaters right now (see the LFM review). Mao’s Last Dancer deals with a ballet dancer’s defection to the United States, in a much-celebrated case that even involved the intervention of (then) Vice President George H.W. Bush, and yet it was apparently impossible for that film to be made here in this country by American filmmakers.
So we now apparently have a case where a kind of ersatz remake of Red Dawn, made by Australians, may actually hit theaters before MGM’s ‘official’ Red Dawn remake (due to MGM’s complex financial situation). Personally, by the way, I’m still waiting for Chris Morris’ incredible new film Four Lions to get its U.S. release (see the LFM review); that release seems very much up in the air, sadly, due to frightened domestic distributors.
So what’s going on here? I think it’s this: that the climate for freedom-oriented filmmaking is actually better these days outside the United States than within. What a shift that represents. And what a tragedy.
Let’s hope Tomorrow When the War Began gets a U.S. release. We’ll be keeping an eye on this story as it develops.
By Jason Apuzzo. Yesterday we reported on how both: 1) Avatar: Special Edition tanked at the domestic box office, debuting behind Piranha 3D; and 2) how James Cameron had bad-mouthed Piranha 3D’s use of the new 3D technology as “exactly an example of what we should not be doing in 3-D.” Furthermore, and perhaps most tellingly, Cameron distanced himself from his own direction of Piranha 2: The Spawning.
Today, Piranha 3D producer Mark Canton (who also produced 300, another technically innovative thriller I liked) bites back!
As reported today at the LA Times’ 24 Frames blog, Canton has apparently fired off an open letter to Cameron on a variety of issues – including not only Cameron’s proprietary attitude toward 3D, but also the narrative problems with Avatar. Good for Canton.
Here are some choice excerpts from Canton’s letter:
“Mr. Cameron, who singles himself out to be a visionary of movie-making, seems to have a small vision regarding any motion pictures that are not his own … Let’s just keep this in mind Jim — you did not invent 3D. You were fortunate that others inspired you to take it further … To be honest, I found the 3D in ‘Avatar’ to be inconsistent and while ground breaking in many respects, sometimes I thought it overwhelmed the storytelling … Technology aside, I wish ‘Avatar’ had been more original in its storytelling.”
As you can imagine, I’m very much in agreement with Canton about this. You know what Avatar is without the cumulative impact of 3D, ILM and Weta Digital? It’s Green Zone. That’s the little secret Cameron wants to hide, and why he’s weirdly distancing himself now from his roots in the world of campy, Roger Corman-inspired cult movies like Piranha 2. Cameron’s above that stuff now, you see – because he’s got 20th Century Fox and a massive production apparatus backing him now. What a phony.
By the way, I’ve actually seen Cameron’s Piranha 2: The Spawning, and the original Joe Dante/Roger Corman Piranha – and, of course, Alex Aja’s new Piranha 3D … and I can tell you that Piranha 3D is easily the best of the three, and Cameron’s film is easily the worst.
Is that part of the subtext here? Could Cameron possibly be that venal – that he doesn’t like being reminded of his all-too humble origins … just as some younger guy borrows ‘his’ technology and makes an obviously better film?
Perhaps the true problem Cameron faces is that – unlike George Lucas, and unlike Peter Jackson – he’s just a litte too easy to copy.
[UPDATE: in the wake of Piranha 3D’s surprising success as a critical and cult phenomenon, we’re apparently now going to be getting Shark Night 3D, according to the Hollywood Reporter’s HeatVision blog today. The film is set in the Louisiana bayou, with the usual sexy teenagers as fish chowder. Also read today how James Cameron – with Guillermo Del Toro’s help – is about to ruin H.P. Lovecraft’s classic sci-fi horror novel, At the Mountains of Madness, with their new 3D film adaptation. A new, highly unflattering script review of that film is out.]
