By Jason Apuzzo. Most of the attention surrounding the re-release of Avatar in ‘special edition’ form has centered around the extended ‘alien sex scene’ – which is sounding pretty tame, frankly. [Having recently seen Piranha, of course, pretty much everything is seeming tame right now.] Buried, however, in an article today from The New York Post, is this tidbit from James Cameron about another scene that’s been put back in the film – a scene Cameron refers to as “the drums of war.”
• A scene Cameron calls “the drums of war,” which he hopes will clarify why the humans choose to wipe out the Na’vi. He compared it to America’s decision to invade Iraq. “We had to provoke Saddam to do something stupid, and it’s like that with the humans invading Pandora,” he said. “I felt when I was writing it that the Na’vi had to counter-react and do something that is called an atrocity that gave [humans] the moral right to go in and destroy and displace them. The additional footage is pretty short, but it fulfills that purpose.”
So let me untangle this for you. Cameron’s ‘thinking’ more or less proceeds as follows:
• America invaded Iraq by ‘provoking’ Saddam into doing “something stupid.” What was that, exactly? Refusing to allow in weapons inspectors? How did we ‘provoke’ him to refuse weapons inspection?
• In Avatar, the Na’vi are thus ‘provoked’ into committing something that is “called an atrocity.” So is it an “atrocity,” Mr. Cameron … or isn’t it? Does an atrocity become less of an atrocity if it’s provoked?
• The atrocity which isn’t actually an atrocity because it was provoked then becomes the pretext for the humans moving in and exploiting the Na’vi’s land. Or something.
Did you get that?
By the way, I’d like all the people out there who still aren’t sure whether Avatar is a political film to please raise your hands – so Mr. Cameron can hand you some free, prune-flavored suckers.
The movie’s strengths are considerable. The first section summons up a tormented period of Chinese history when art was bent to the breaking point in the service of a ruthless state … The film celebrates artistic freedom without preaching a sermon, and often flies when Mr. Chi is on screen. When he is on stage, spinning and leaping to the strains of magnificent music, the film soars.
I’ve put another clip of this extraordinary new film below. Make sure to see it this week. You can read the LFM review of it here.
As regular Libertas readers know, we expressed our enthusiasm for Piranha 3D early on – eagerly devouring each marketing ploy for this exceedingly cheeky and sexy little thriller. It’s for this reason, sensing the possibility that this film might be a cult classic, that we dispatched noted film critic and theoretician Prof. Jacques de Molay to review Piranha 3D for Libertas. He delivered a decidedly impassioned and idiosyncratic review.
I just got off the phone with Jacques, and frankly he’s still raving about the film. I could barely hear him, because he’s currently kayaking down the Amazon river, but some of the phrases I made out were: “Cult masterpiece … easily the best film of the year, possibly of any year … ecstatic pleasure … dream-like … watching hyper-real, 30-foot high females floating underwater in free space in 3D … like something out of a Botticelli painting … or Raquel Welch in Fantastic Voyage … why couldn’t James Cameron think of this?!” At a certain point I had to cut Jacques’ call off, frankly, because he was just going on too much. I suppose I’ll have to see the film now.
• From real-life spies to fictional ones, Angelina Jolie premiered Salt in Berlin this week. This worldwide tour of hers is really colorful, and I enjoy covering it … but I’m wondering if one visit to, say, Greta van Susteren’s show might actually do more good for this film’s box office right now. Has Salt really been promoted as aggressively here in the States as it should be?
• In sci-fi news, an interesting casting notice has leaked for the forthcoming J.J. Abrams’/Steven Spielberg Super 8. I’m very much looking forward to that film – actually much more so than any of the forthcoming sci-fi projects on the books that we’ve been covering here, simply because I have greater confidence in the filmmakers involved. We’re also learning that X-Men: First Class will apparently be taking place in the 1960s. According to Aint It Cool News:
[T]he film takes place in the 1960’s. John F Kennedy is the President of the United States. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X are on TV doing marches. There is a spirit of a hopeful future that was prevalent in that time.
Word on the street is that Indy 5 will be headed to the Bermuda Triangle, potentially with a final stop in Atlantis. Indy 4, along with the suprise-hit Cloverfield, kicked off the most recent wave of alien invasion projects … and I expect Indy 5 to add a new dimension to this whole craze before it’s all over, due to Lucas and Spielberg’s deep immersion in sci-fi lore …
• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … would you buy iPod accessories designed by Brit celebrity Katie Price? [They adorn her headgear to the right.] These things look like they’re designed to receive transmissions from outer space – of which she may already be receiving her fair share. She may be trying to snag a role in Area 51, although Battleship or Piranha would probably be more appropriate given that she already comes equipped with artificial flotation devices.
And that’s what’s happening this weekend in the wonderful world of Hollywood.
By Jason Apuzzo. As many of you are aware, we’ve been highly critical of late of Sylvester Stallone’s new film The Expendables, which features an extremely nasty caricature of a CIA agent, as played by Eric Roberts. [See our thoughts on the film here and here.] Our criticism of the film in fact recently made The LA Times.
All of this is of note because in a recent interview Stallone did on Fox News with Bill O’Reilly on Thursday, August 19th, Stallone responds to unnamed critics who have taken him to task on his depiction of the CIA and of ostensible ‘imperialist’ American overreach overseas.
Since I’m not aware of any other film site that’s taken Stallone to task on these issues as we have, I will proceed under the assumption that he’s responding to Libertas – or has otherwise been made aware of our criticisms.
Watch the segment of the interview between 3:05 – 3:30 for Stallone’s remarks on this subject. His denials of our criticism are, unfortunately, difficult to square with what is actually depicted in his film – in which a druglord/ex-CIA operative collaborates with the brutal regime of a South American country in order to exploit that country’s cheap labor and resources.
One final note here: we like and respect Bill O’Reilly here at LFM. In fact, LFM’s own Govindini Murty has appeared as a guest on Mr. O’Reilly’s show twice. Unfortunately, however, Bill did not bother to actually see The Expendables before conducting this interview – something he admits at the outset. Had he actually seen the film, it’s unlikely he would have agreed with the characterization of the film by Stallone and others as being benignly ‘patriotic.’ It isn’t. The only flag Stallone waves in this film is his own.
[Editor’s Note: LFM Editor Jason Apuzzo has the day off. In his place he’s invited an old friend, Professor Jacques de Molay, to review Piranha 3D. As long-time Libertas readers may recall, Jacques is a Professor of Cinema & Neurosemiotics at the University of Northern California, and is a widely recognized Marxist intellectual.]
By Jacques de Molay.Bon jour, Libertas readers. Due to LFM Editor Jason Apuzzo’s vacation, and the fact that Piranha 3D is directed by the subversive French auteur Alexandre Aja, I have been asked to review this striking new film for the bourgeois film forum Libertas.
It could be said that the subject of Piranha 3D is ‘consumerism,’ albeit consumerism that is contextualised into a dialectic that incorporates within it both “T” and “A.” Except that in the case of Aja’s provocative, neo-deconstructionist exercise, female “T & A” in Piranha 3D is itself the object of consumption – as well as being approximately 10 meters high, unclothed and in three dimensions.
A parable of 'consumer' culture?
Aja understands that in America’s capitalistic society, the chief object of consumer desire and fetishizing is female flesh, itself. By thereby ‘incorporating’ into his film such pre-commodified females as Kelly Brooke (ooh-la-la!), Riley Steele, Ashlynn Brooke, et al as objects of ‘consumer’ desire in his film, Aja boldly poses the question: who are the ‘real’ consumers depicted in Piranha 3D? Are ‘we’ ourselves the piranhas here? And if so, what does this say about the state of deconstructive, post-capitalist feminism (i.e., whose ‘asses’ are being hung out to dry here?)
Piranha 3D takes place in the fictional bourgeois community of ‘Lake Victoria’ (substituting for Lake Havasu), a repressive middle class haven of Bush’s America – note the proliferation of police, armed with tasers (“Don’t taze me, bro!”) – that swells from a population of 5,000 to approximately 50,000 each year for the annual teen rite of ‘Spring Break.’ This annual bacchanal – which both legitimizes sexual profligacy, yet contains it within the strict confines of the corporate calendar – provides the ultimate ‘feeding frenzy’ for the film’s ‘consumer class,’ the piranhas. For the piranhas, the teens of Lake Victoria are truly ‘pieces’ of ass.
Early in the film we are introduced to our ‘hero,’ a classic WASP teen of the American middle classes named ‘Jake,’ played by Steven R. McQueen – who is the grandson of the famous actor Steve McQueen. And thus immediately one is reminded of the elder McQueen and his appearance in 1958’s The Blob, another film which thematized the devouring of teenage flesh by an insatiable ‘consumer’ beast. [Set to the music of Burt Bacharach.]
We are also introduced to another ‘hero,’ Jake’s mother, a female sheriff played with gruff brio by Elisabeth Shue. Shue’s sheriff is a classic figure of Bush’s America, drilling martial ‘responsibility’ into her son and prudishly shielding him from on-line porn. We practically expect ‘Jake’ to enroll in Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University by the time the film concludes.
'Spectacular' bodies: the temptations of American consumerism.
In a scene evocative of 1957’s The Monster That Challenged the World (another film subtly promoting America’s military-police state), an earthquake at Lake Victoria collapses the ocean floor (the Wall Street collapse?) and opens an underwater chasm, unleashing an enormous swarm of ancient piranhas (releasing unholy forces from the capitalist id?). These savage aquatic creatures, possessed of unexpected shrewdness and cheeky charisma, have ostensibly lain dormant as eggs for millions of years – much like the flash-frozen, fried fish meals so popular in Western capitalist economies.
Soon enough, however, the ‘consumed’ will themselves become the consumers.
After the earthquake, these ‘unleashed consumers’ immediately surface … and confront actor Richard Dreyfuss, reprising his role as ‘Matt Hooper’ from Jaws. And thus the first character killed in this fable of Bush’s America is, predictably: the liberal Jewish intellectual.
In short order, however, we learn that the true villain of Piranha 3D is not so much the prehistoric fish … so much as it is a character named Derrick Jones (Jerry O’Connell), based ostensibly on “Girls Gone Wild” mogul Joe Francis. This character – who attempts to lure young Jake into his world of commodified females, alcohol and drug use – takes Jake, his benign romantic interest ‘Kelly’ (Jessica Szohr), and models ‘Danni’ and ‘Crystal’ (the astonishing Kelly Brooke and Riley Steele, respectively) into the isolated, outer reaches of the lake.
It is here – in this bucolic setting – that the signature sequence of Piranha 3D takes place, the sequence which will be talked about for years to come among film critics, academic semioticians, and older men wearing raincoats: a campy, underwater ballet between Ms. Brooke and Ms. Steele, performed to the strains of Léo Delibes’ “Flower Duet,” conducted fully naked and in 3D. Surely this will be remembered as Aja’s ‘Odessa Steps’ sequence in years to come, his defining moment as a visionary. I am not aware of anything resembling this sequence in the history of the cinema, at least in terms of the fetishizing of female flesh within the strictures of normative capitalist discourse – not to mention within the classical music canon.
It is here especially that Mr. Aja’s meaning becomes only too plain: we ourselves are the ‘piranhas,’ ogling after this commodified flesh. Here one begins to appreciate the sophistication of Mr. Aja’s vision, in comparison to the similarly 3D-mad James Cameron. Aja dispenses with Cameron’s tame, prudish alien titillation – and gives us the ‘real’ thing, in vivid three dimensions, as only a French director could.
Eager capitalist, reviewing his 'product.'
Soon enough the piranha ‘consumers’ begin wreaking their havoc. I have been informed by Editor Apuzzo that one of the conventions of bourgeois film criticism is not to ‘give away’ the ending, so we will limit our remarks to revealing that the Derrick Jones/Joe Francis character – clearly Piranha’s scapegoat in terms of channeling the audience’s anxiety over the exploitation of female flesh – comes to a uniquely spectacular end (aided here by 3D technology) … in which his male member is chewed off with gusto by the piranhas … who subsequently spit the member out, apparently as disgusted by Mr. Jones’/Francis’ exploitation of female labor as is the audience. [The piranhas’ refusal to ‘devour’ the male member also confirms suspicions that the fish are, in effect, masculine and heterosexual in sensibility. Are they fanboys, perhaps?]
Mr. Aja’s critique is thereby made plain: after the Wall Street collapse, commerce in today’s capitalist society can only end in bloody apocalypse – a farrago of bikini tops, chewed limbs … and shattered ideals.
On the acting front, special kudos should be given to Ving Rhames – the sturdy character actor who valiantly combats the marauding fish, at one point with an outboard motor – and to Christopher Lloyd of Taxi and Back to the Future fame, playing the stock ‘mad scientist’ character. His presence in American mainstream cinema has been missed.
A vision of the predatory American 'consumer'?
Given the repressive nature of American society in the long aftermath of the Bush years, Piranha 3D should likely have been rated NC-17, if not an outright X. In my less restrictive homeland of France, where we are better prepared to appreciate such material, I assume there will be a ‘French’ cut of the film – perhaps featuring an extended version of the breathtaking ballet sequence … and perhaps replacing the Delibes with Bizet.
[Editor’s Note: here at Libertas we are committed to providing a platform for freedom of speech, and a diversity of ideas – including those of today’s progressive left. We’d like to thank Prof. de Molay for his unique contributions to our understanding of the new film Piranha 3D.]
By Joe Bendel. Forget the Syfy (Sci-Fi) Channel’s Earthsea miniseries. Ursula K. Le Guin, the author of the Earthsea novels and stories, would certainly prefer you did. Her reaction to Gorō Miyazaki’s anime adaptation of her fantasy world has also been decidedly mixed, but arguably not as vehement. In fact, Miyazaki’s film is not without merit, especially for those not intimately grounded in the Earthsea mythology. Three years after its Japanese premiere, Miyazaki’s Tales from Earthsea, finally has its American theatrical release, now screening in select theaters courtesy of Walt Disney.
While the legendary Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki long sought to adapt Le Guin’s Earthsea stories, it was his son Gorō, a relative new comer to animated filmmaking, who was assigned the project by Studio Ghibli, the anime house co-founded by Miyazaki the elder. The result is a visually striking, if thematically familiar, fantasy.
Like the epics of Tolkien and Robert Jordan, Tales follows a young protagonist of destiny, Arren, a confused prince who has apparently just murdered his father, the king. Fleeing in shame, he encounters the wizard Sparrowhawk on the road. Like his late father, Sparrowhawk is concerned about the chaos sweeping over Earthsea. The weather is unseasonable, crops are failing, livestock are dying, and two dragons were recently spotted off the coast fighting to the death – an unprecedented event in the Earthsea fantasy world.
From Miyazaki's "Tales from Earthsea."
Naturally, there is a Sauron-like evil overlord to contend with. In this case, it is the androgynous sorcerer Cob, whose slave-trading minions are out to get Arren. Indeed, Tales follows the standard epic fantasy template, but does so reasonably well. There is also a pseudo-environmental motif of a world out of balance that should have appealed to Le Guin, but it is subtler and more nuanced than most “green” movie messages.
Miyazaki the younger is most successful creating an epic look in the film, employing watercolor backgrounds and hand-drawn animation for dramatic effect. Indeed, his fantasy landscapes and cityscapes have an exotic beauty that elevates Tales well above standard issue anime.
Redubbed for an American audience (not an uncommon practice with anime distribution), the English language cast mostly ranges from adequate to fairly good. Timothy Dalton (the under-appreciated James Bond) is the class of the field, lending his commanding voice to Sparrowhawk. In contrast, Willem Dafoe’s work as Cob often sounds campy, in the wrong way.
The first Disney animated release to carry a PG-13 rating, Tales is similar in intensity (and subject matter) to Ralph Bakshi’s 1978 animated Lord of the Rings. Richly crafted but predictable (as is the case with most contemporary fantasy fiction), Tales is better than genre diehards might have heard at their conventions. It is currently screening in New York at the Angelika Film Center, and in Los Angeles at The Landmark.
By Jason Apuzzo. We want to keep people pumped here at Libertas about seeing Bruce Beresford’s extraordinary and courageous new film, Mao’s Last Dancer. We’ll be showing you a variety of clips from the film, including this excerpt above for today. It features the lovely Joan Chen as dancer Li’s mother. This clip really gives you a sense of what you’re in for with this film, in terms of how bold it is. [Make sure to read Joe Bendel’s LFM Review of Mao’s Last Dancer.]
“As I depart for my annual August vacation, I leave you with a highly recommended magical experience you must not miss. A giant hit at the 2009 Toronto Film Festival, Mao’s Last Dancer, by the great Australian director Bruce Beresford (Driving Miss Daisy), is a feel-good film bursting with courage, energy and overwhelming inspiration … In the cherished tradition of heartbreaking movies about personal triumph against impossible odds, it is a combination of Billy Elliot and Rocky …
“At 19, granted unheard-of permission from Mao’s regime as one of the first exchange students to travel abroad, on a three-month student visa, in 1980, Li [the dancer and protagonist of the film] faces new hurdles. His parents expect him to bring honor to their humble station, his country expects him to represent China like a good, loyal and cynical comrade, drawing attention to Communism while trusting no one. Terrified and confused, he is the first boy from his province to travel to Beijing, much less the world beyond. Landing in the U.S. in a stiff, outdated, Chinese government-issued suit, he is like Dorothy arriving in Oz. Housed and guided by the kind but flamboyant Stevenson (wonderfully acted by the charismatic Bruce Greenwood), he takes little time overcoming culture shock, adjusting to alien Chinese restaurants and realizing that the Communist propaganda drummed into his head about America as a place of deprivation and darkness is a lot of hokum. The more he experiences of Texas cooking, kung fu movies, miraculous kitchen appliances, American hospitality and tennis shoes, the more distanced he grows from the ideals of Communism and the rigid dogma of Chairman Mao. (Against the rules of the Cultural Revolution, he also discovers the thrill of admiring political defectors like Nureyev and Baryshnikov without fear of arrest while watching forbidden tapes.) Capitalism, he confesses, is groovy …
“Distilling so much drama and turmoil into two hours is not easy, but by the time the film completes Li’s long and arduous journey, in 1986, when his parents are finally allowed to fly to the U.S. to see him dance for the first time, you will marvel at how much is accomplished. I predict the highly charged emotional finale will leave you cheering … Mao’s Last Dancer is a masterpiece.”
