Jason Apuzzo2013-05-22T22:59:56-04:00Jason Apuzzohttp://www.news.moviefone.com/author/index.php?author=jason-apuzzoCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Jason ApuzzoGood old fashioned elbow grease.Voices Raised in Resistance: Powerful Defiant Requiem Premieres on PBS Sunday, April 7tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.30294882013-04-06T15:11:49-04:002013-04-06T18:49:21-04:00Jason Apuzzohttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jason-apuzzo/Requiem by Jewish prisoners at the Nazi concentration camp Terezín. The story of Terezín and of the Requiem is told eloquently in director Doug Shultz's powerful new documentary Defiant Requiem, which premieres this Sunday, April 7, on PBS at 10 p.m. ET/PT (check listings for additional screenings on local PBS stations).
It was at Terezín in 1944 that imprisoned Czech conductor Rafael Schächter led a chorus of his fellow Jewish prisoners -- most of them doomed to the gas chambers at Auschwitz -- in brazenly performing Verdi's Requiem before the very Nazis who had condemned them to death. One of the most complex and demanding of chorale works, Verdi's 1874 Requiem was originally intended as a musical rendition of the Catholic funeral mass. Rafael Schächter took Verdi's music and transformed it into a universal statement, one proclaiming the prisoners' unbroken spirit and warning of God's coming wrath against their Nazi captors.
Defiant Requiem tells two parallel stories: the first takes place during World War II, when Jews throughout Europe were rounded up by the Nazis and sent to Terezín as part of an elaborate deception to convince the world that Germany treated its prisoners humanely. Among those arrested and dragged to Terezín in 1941 was the young Rafael Schächter, a courageous and steadfast Czech opera-choral conductor.
Distinguished American conductor Murry Sidlin, who discovered the history of Schächter and the Terezín performers in the '90s, and who went on to found and conduct the Defiant Requiem concerts, notes in the film that "Schächter would have emerged as a great conductor" had his life not been cut short by the Nazis.
Within the confines of Terezín, Schächter lifted the spirits of his fellow inmates by creating a musical program for them to perform -- a program that inspired an astonishing outburst of cultural activity, which would eventually include almost a thousand different performances of chamber music and operas, oratorios and jazz music, theatrical plays, and some 2,300 different lectures and literary readings. Included in this were 16 performances of Verdi's emotional and musically challenging Requiem. As Terezín survivor Zdenka Fantlova explains in the film: "Doing a performance was not entertainment. It was a fight for life." She later adds, "If people are robbed of freedom, they want to be creative."
This flurry of activity within the walls of the prison camp -- achieved under the most trying possible circumstances of starvation, disease, and abject cruelty -- would culminate in a performance on June 23, 1944, of the Requiem in front of the camp's Nazi brass, visiting high-ranking SS officers from Berlin, and gullible Red Cross inspectors brought in to verify that the prisoners were being well treated.
It was at this point that Verdi's Requiem, with its dark, apocalyptic Dies Irae ("Day of Wrath") choral passage -- evoking the Last Judgement -- and equally harrowing Libera me ("Deliver me") passage took on connotations that Verdi could hardly have imagined. Serving as both a spiritual catharsis for the prisoners, and as a prophecy of the Nazis' ultimate fate, the Requiem was immediately transformed by Schächter and his fellow prisoners into an anthem of divine supplication and retribution. Indeed, shortly after this final performance, both Schächter (see photo below) and most of his choir would be sent to Auschwitz.
Defiant Requiem's second, parallel story takes place in 2006, as Murry Sidlin brings a full orchestra and the Catholic University of America's chorale ensemble -- along with surviving members of Schächter's chorus -- back to Terezin to perform the Requiem once more, this time in tribute. (Sidlin continues to conduct such tribute performances of the Requiem, with concerts scheduled for The Lincoln Center on April 29 and Prague's St. Vitus Cathedral on June 6.)
The journey to Terezín is clearly a spiritual quest for Sidlin (who has since founded The Defiant Requiem Foundation), who views the modern performance of the Requiem at Terezín as the completion of something begun seventy years before. As Sidlin says at one point in the film: "I brought the Verdi here because I want to assure these people [Schächter and the deceased prisoners] that we've heard them." Sidlin's staging of the Requiem in the now unassuming confines of Terezín is powerful and gripping -- and serves, one senses, as the perfect tribute to Schächter and his fellow performers.
Highlighting the role that individuals can play in keeping important cultural history alive, it was Sidlin's discovery of the book Music at Terezín in the late '90s, and his subsequent championing of the concert series, that has brought the otherwise forgotten history of Rafael Schächter and the Terezín Requiem performances back to life. It is a culmination both of Sidlin's passion for music and of his own personal history; Sidlin's grandmother and many of her closest relatives were murdered outside Riga, Latvia by Nazi SS assassination squads during World War II.
This June, Sidlin (see photo below) will be awarded the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Medal of Valor for his efforts to commemorate Rafael Schächter and the Terezín prisoners.
When we spoke with Sidlin recently, he recounted to us the special nature of Rafael Schächter's connection to Verdi's music. Sidlin noted that the young conductor had taken the score of the Requiem with him as one of his few prized possession to Terezín.
"I'm convinced that if he could have cut himself open and taped that score to his heart, and then bound himself up, he would have done so. It was that important to him," Sidlin explains. "It [the Requiem] is the kind of work that you read late at night and it gives you assurance -- of strength, of courage, of hope and dignity and renewal and memories."
As survivors recount, the performance of Verdi's music fed the souls of the Terezín prisoners, giving them something to look forward to in the midst of 12-hour days of slave labor, disease, cold, starvation, and executions that would eventually kill 33,400 of them -- along with deportations to Auschwitz that would kill another 88,000 prisoners from the camp.
Survivor Edgar Krasa says of the Requiem, "It was a prayer that overcame hunger ... you were there [singing] in that cellar and you were a different person." Another survivor who sang in the chorus, Marianka May, agrees: "My stomach stopped growling when I was singing. I think when you are more a soul than a person, I don't think the soul has to be nourished by anything but heavenly music."
Art was not a theoretical matter to them, nor was it mere entertainment. As Sidlin notes, "Vera Schiff -- who is in the film -- said to me once: 'The Nazis knew that if you kill the soul, the body will follow.'" Sidlin exhorts, "So keep that soul ignited."
Sidlin further explains that after years of not being allowed to perform, teach, or study the arts in Nazi-occupied Europe, for the Jewish prisoners of Terezín,
"Doing the Verdi Requiem -- this was a pinnacle for them ... Schächter chose this work not only because it was a crowning achievement artistically, but also because it was raising the fist, it was defiance and resistance, it was saying all those things to the Nazis about the Day of Wrath [that they couldn't say otherwise]."
Participating in the 2006 Requiem concert at Terezín was an emotional experience for the contemporary performers. Actor/singer/dancer Lisa Ferris was an undergraduate in music at the Catholic University of America when she participated in the first Defiant Requiem concert at Terezín (two more concerts have been performed there subsequently). As Ferris recalls, "It very quickly became about something more than just getting all the notes right. It was about creating a memorial to this group of people."
Ferris befriended Terezín survivor Edgar Krasa (featured in the documentary), Rafael Schächter's roommate and assistant on the original Requiem performances. Krasa's sons, Rafael (named after Schächter) and Daniel would sing in the Defiant Requiem chorus with Ferris. (See photo below of Lisa Ferris with Edgar Krasa and Rafael Krasa at Terezín, courtesy of Ferris.) Ferris says of Edgar Krasa:
"He is so full of life in a way I'd never seen before - his wife [Hana Krasa, also a Terezín survivor], as well. He has such joy. He is a human manifestation of how you can't destroy the human spirit. And the musical performance was a microcosm of that."
When asked about the emotional impact of performing at Terezín, Ferris admitted, "It wasn't easy. Those kinds of experiences are haunting." Ferris grew emotional as she described the moment when Sidlin took the performers down to the cellar where the original Terezín chorus had rehearsed:
"We were down there for ten or fifteen minutes, and the air down there was suffocating. It was dark and moldy and hard to breathe. To hear how this group of people, with one score and a broken piano, rehearsed in this place where you couldn't even breathe - and [yet] they created this epic piece of music."
Sidlin confirms this experience:
"I think we were doing OK until we went down into the cellar, and that was a transformative moment. We realized that after twelve hour days, they [Schächter's chorus] had to drag themselves, walking over dead bodies, by choice coming down here, where it was freezing - no light, no air - standing next to people who are sick, and standing next to everyone who is hungry, and to do this night after night."
Schächter's original Terezín chorus had to learn the entire Requiem score by heart, due to only having one score to share among the 150 of them. And as Sidlin explains, Schächter was demanding.
"Edgar Krasa says he was merciless, and it wasn't because he was a tough conductor. It was because he would not let their minds wander. He would not let their minds go inside themselves and think about the things he wanted them to overcome, which included things like: Where are my children? Where is my wife? Where is my husband? These are incredibly difficult things to imagine."
Lisa Ferris concludes of the experience: "If you are a performer, you are lucky enough to have a handful of experiences that change you, that you carry with you for years to come. ... Every person with a heart feels connected to this group of people in 1944."
Defiant Requiem also presents recreations of cultural life at the Terezín camp - along with animations adapted from surviving Terezín drawings - and features poignant reminiscences from the camp's survivors. The survivors themselves are uniformly remarkable for their eloquence and equanimity.
As a horrifying counterpoint to the Terezín survivors' memories, and reinforcing the depth of the Nazis' sadism, Defiant Requiem also presents surviving Nazi propaganda footage of Terezín as it was perversely stage-managed during a Red Cross inspection visit to appear like an attractive Jewish commune, a Potemkin village of Third Reich magnanimity. Children play in the grass and eat butter off slabs of black bread, adults compete vigorously in soccer, a pleasant outdoor café bustles with life and activity. As Defiant Requiem's narrator Bebe Neuwirth informs us, many of the people shown in the footage would within weeks be shipped to Auschwitz in cattle cars for extermination -- including some 15,000 children, some as young as three years old.
In telling the largely forgotten story of the Terezín camp (see photo above), Defiant Requiem adds meaningfully to the body of knowledge about the Holocaust -- but it also adds a new twist to debates over the political and rhetorical uses to which music is put. Given the Nazis' adoption of Richard Wagner's operas as a soundtrack for their program of national mythic renewal (with which Schächter as an opera conductor would have been familiar), it may be said that Schächter's adoption of Verdi's Requiem hoisted the Germans on their musical petards. Schächter would later be joined in this endeavor by such artistic luminaries as Thomas Mann, whose famous 1947 novel Doctor Faustus associated music of the German Romantic tradition with the diabolism of the Nazi era.
When we asked Sidlin what Verdi's Requiem means to him as a work of music, Sidlin responded:
"It used to mean singing in tune, playing precisely. It used to mean following Verdi's dynamics and his metronome markings, all those things that don't matter ... Now it means this: an opportunity to give Rafael Schächter something of the career he never had - as a real hero, as an artistic hero. That's number one."
"And number two is that Verdi's Requiem is way beyond beautiful, powerful, dramatic music. The internal meaning of the Verdi is now: 'What is our spiritual obligation as humans?' It reminds us of people in a concentration camp with no food, no medical attention, freezing, sick, terrified, who stepped forward and taught us what the Verdi Requiem means."
When asked how this experience has changed him, Sidlin told us:
"It's not only changed me personally, it's changed my whole focus. My whole professional life now is dedicated and devoted to illuminating the legacy of Terezín and what a major role the arts and humanities play in that mission. It's an exercise in seeking a connection with history - and therefore being able to well serve the future."
For the viewer, what ultimately remains after watching Defiant Requiem is the intense reality of what singing Verdi's music meant to the prisoners of Terezín who had been condemned to death. As Terezín survivor and original chorus member Marianka May explains it: "Verdi's Requiem put all of us into another world. This was not a world with the Nazis. This was our world. [...] We just tried to reach something that's bigger than we are ... and let's hope that we are singing to God, and God can't help but hear us."
Highly recommended, especially for those interested in the cultural history of the Holocaust or in classical music, Defiant Requiem premieres this Sunday, April 7th on PBS at 10:00 p.m. ET/PT (see local listings).]]>Courage & Individual Conscience: The Top 10 Pro-Freedom Films of 2012tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.23868342012-12-31T07:51:40-05:002013-03-02T05:12:02-05:00Jason Apuzzohttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jason-apuzzo/Zero Dark Thirty, Lincoln, Les Misérables, or Skyfall -- should explore the centrality of freedom to our civilization. As we celebrate 2012 in film, it's fitting that we honor movies that affirm the very liberty that makes our art, our traditions of free speech, and our democratic form of government possible.
Whether depicting historical figures like Abraham Lincoln, or pop-culture icons like James Bond and Katniss Everdeen, or contemporary dissidents like China's Ai Weiwei and Russia's Masha Drokova, the movies below illustrate how freedom only survives when brave individuals are willing to risk their lives fighting for it. These films also depict the virtues that accompany such bravery: a strong individual conscience and empathetic feelings of responsibility toward one's fellow human beings.
Many of this year's best pro-freedom films also portray the bravery of women. In a refreshing development, movies like Zero Dark Thirty, Barbara, The Hunger Games, and Putin's Kiss all feature complex, independent women as their leads -- while Skyfall, in the character of "M" (Judi Dench), features a strong woman in a pivotal leadership role. This is another way in which these movies powerfully affirm the democratic spirit.
Here then are our ten best pro-freedom films of 2012:
1) Zero Dark Thirty
A taut and intense account of the almost ten year hunt for Osama bin Laden, director Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty captures the emotional and ethical complexity of the War on Terror -- while unfolding a vast, investigative mystery that takes audiences from secret CIA bases in Afghanistan, to the corridors of power in Washington D.C., to the urban mazes of Pakistan. Leading this historic manhunt is an indomitable young CIA analyst named Maya, played with steely resolve by Jessica Chastain, who for nearly a decade tracks down bin Laden's courier on the way to locating the terrorist mastermind. Scrupulously non-partisan, Zero Dark Thirty gives primary credit for bin Laden's demise not to any politician -- but to sober career intelligence professionals as well as military personnel, a tragic number of whom gave their lives in pursuit of Al Qaeda's leader. Telling their story with a refreshingly understated realism, Zero Dark Thirty honors these largely anonymous men and women who protect our freedom in an increasingly dangerous and chaotic world.
2) Barbara
Germany's official Oscar entry and winner of the Silver Bear for Best Director (Christian Petzold) at the 2012 Berlin Film Festival, Barbara is the most compelling depiction since The Lives of Others of day-to-day life in a modern surveillance state -- in this case the communist East Germany of the early 1980s. Nina Hoss gives a complex, Oscar-worthy performance as a pediatric surgeon whose desire to leave East Germany puts her under the watchful eye of the Stasi (the secret police), and of a conflicted, would-be lover played by Ronald Zehrfeld. Austere and suspenseful, Barbara is one Germany's best dramas since the 1970s, and an indictment of any society in which allegiance to a political system overwhelms common humanity.
3) Lincoln
Director Steven Spielberg's Lincoln brings the story of The Great Emancipator to life in a way that is both respectful of our 16th President's achievements and alive to his humanity. In perhaps the richest depiction of Abraham Lincoln since Henry Fonda's in John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), Daniel Day-Lewis brings warmth, interiority and conviction to a man charged with the weightiest responsibilities in American history -- as both slavery and the fate of the Union hang in the balance. Lincoln also highlights the value of eloquence in free societies; in recounting the sometimes baroque political backstory behind passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, Spielberg suggests that it was Lincoln's poetic oratory as much as any other factor that ended slavery in America for good.
4) The Other Dream Team
One of the best sports documentaries in recent years, and a highlight of the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, director Marius A. Markevičius' The Other Dream Team tells the emotional story of the 1992 Lithuanian Olympic basketball team -- a symbol of freedom and Lithuanian national pride after decades of Soviet rule. The film tells the improbable tale of how Lithuanian basketball talents like future NBA stars Arvydas Sabonis and Šarūnas Marčiulionis came to dominate Soviet basketball in the 1980s (even defeating Team USA in the 1988 Olympics) -- only to face off against Russia in the '92 Barcelona Games, wearing tie dyed uniforms provided by The Grateful Dead (!), after Lithuania had just won its hard-fought independence. A moving and uplifting piece of Cold War history, The Other Dream Team is as much a tribute to the courage of the Lithuanian people in the face of communist tyranny as it is to the inspirational power of sports.
5) Skyfall
One of the best James Bond thrillers since the 1970s, director Sam Mendes' Skyfall reinvents 007 as a hero for the War on Terror era -- and thoughtfully affirms the value of our intelligence agencies in the post-9/11 world. In Skyfall, information pertaining to NATO penetration of worldwide Islamic terror cells has been stolen in Istanbul, and Bond must retrieve the data before Western agents are exposed and killed -- the opening act of an elaborate revenge plot orchestrated by the sociopathic Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem). In a film rife with references to Winston Churchill and his legacy, Bond and his colleagues are depicted as reflexively selfless in the cause of freedom -- and Dame Judi Dench's quotation of Tennyson's poem "Ulysses," as both she and Britain come under attack, packs an unusually stirring punch for a Bond film.
6) Caesar Must Die
Italy's official Oscar entry and winner of the Golden Bear for Best Film at the 2012 Berlin Film Festival, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's documentary-drama depicts a group of prison inmates -- including several with life sentences -- rehearsing and performing Shakespeare's Julius Caesar within their high-security Roman prison. Shot largely in black-and-white, the film features vivid performances from its non-professional cast, who bring a raw passion and fury to Shakespeare's timeless parable of tyranny and betrayal; plus, uncanny parallels between the prisoners' lives and Shakespeare's characters add a poignant, humanistic quality to the drama. Like a pieta-in-motion, Caesar Must Die gives testimony to how art can awaken an inner freedom of the spirit, even in lives broken and brutalized by crime -- and it's a heartfelt evocation of basic human dignity.
7) Les Misérables
The beloved musical by Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg (and by extension, the original novel by Victor Hugo) finally gets the epic treatment it deserves in director Tom Hooper's heart-on-the-sleeve, verité-style interpretation. The emotional, tortuous journey of escaped convict Jean Valjean toward freedom, respectability, and redemption plays out against the huge canvas of Paris' June Rebellion of 1832 -- an uprising in which a rag-tag band of student freedom-fighters strike a blow on behalf of the poor. Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway utterly inhabit their respective roles as the soulful Jean Valjean and the tragic Fantine, and Russell Crowe makes for a formidable Inspector Javert -- tormentor of Jean Valjean and pitiless embodiment of the law, devoid of human compassion. Les Misérables plays out like a sentimental, populist ode to liberty -- albeit a liberty grounded in social justice and Christian forgiveness -- as Jean Valjean earns the freedom he illegitimately gained by sacrificing himself on behalf of others.
8) Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry
Currently on the Oscar short-list for Best Documentary and the recipient of a special jury prize at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, director Alison Klayman's Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry depicts the pro-democracy activism of the witty, pugnacious Ai Weiwei, China's most famous contemporary artist. Outraged by the political repression he sees around him, Never Sorry shows the earthy, voluble artist risking his flourishing career (as one of the designers of 'The Birds Nest,' Beijing's Olympic stadium) to speak out on behalf of democratic reform in China -- a risky endeavor that likely has its origins in the persecution of Ai Weiwei's father during the Cultural Revolution. Using social media tools -- mainly Twitter, blogs, and digital cameras -- Ai Weiwei becomes a one-man army of free speech and transparency, particularly when exposing the Chinese government's shoddy "tofu construction" that led to the unnecessary deaths of thousands of school children during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. For this and other human rights efforts, Ai Weiwei is brutally beaten by the police (suffering a cerebral hemorrhage), imprisoned on trumped up charges, and forbidden from speaking to the media. Unfolding a story that is still in progress, Klayman's film becomes an indispensable account of how one defiant, creative individual can challenge an authoritarian system and become a symbol of hope around the world.
9) The Hunger Games
The spectacular box office success of The Hunger Games affirms that science-fiction remains a vital genre for communicating the value of freedom, in this case to the young women so often marginalized in our popular culture. Directed by Gary Ross, The Hunger Games tells the story of teen heroine Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), who fights for her freedom by way of brutal gladiatorial combat in the future dystopian state of Panem. Drawing on the Greek myth of Theseus, modern reality TV, and imagery of the Vietnam and Iraq wars, Ross and Hunger Games creator Suzanne Collins craft an electrifying depiction of an individual's fight to free herself from authoritarian state control and media-induced mass conformity. Katniss asserts her integrity and sense of personal responsibility -- crucial prerequisites to democratic freedom -- by volunteering to take the place of her under-aged sister in Panem's barbaric 'Hunger Games.' Katniss overcomes lethal competitors and manipulation of the Games to become a symbol of hope to an otherwise despairing public, who see in her example that they too can fight for liberty and prevail.
10) Putin's Kiss
Putin's Kiss documents the real-life heroism of Masha Drokova, a charismatic leader in the Russian nationalist youth group Nashi who makes the courageous decision to leave the group after she witnesses anti-democratic tactics directed against journalists and human rights activists. As depicted in the film, Masha owes everything to her involvement in Nashi: a coveted job on TV, a nice apartment, a university education, and a medal given to her by Vladimir Putin himself. Yet Masha gives all of this up in protest over the brutal beating of an opposition journalist and friend, Oleg Kashin. At a time when political dissidents face official harassment and jail terms (or worse) for challenging Russia's leaders, Masha makes waves in activist circles -- and puts her future at risk -- by standing up for her own personal integrity against pressures emanating from Russia's authoritarian political class. Directed by Lise Birk Pedersen and winner of the World Cinema Cinematography Award in Documentary at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, Putin's Kiss is a timely account of how even those trapped within a corrupt political system can stand up for individual conscience and freedom.
Honorable Mentions:High Tech, Low Life, Stephen Maing's superb documentary about Chinese dissident bloggers; The Ambassador, Mads Brügger's darkly comic exposé of corruption in The Central African Republic; Words of Witness, Mai Iskander's insightful documentary about Egyptian journalist Heba Afify; and The Sheik and I, filmmaker-provocateur Caveh Zahedi's outrageously subversive mockumentary.
Special Note: we honored Jafar Panahi's This Is Not a Film and Luc Besson's The Lady in our list of "The Top Ten Pro-Freedom Films of 2011," since those films had their initial screenings in 2011 and then went on to wider release in 2012. These fine films are certainly also worthy of your support this year.
We would also like to thank our colleague Joe Bendel for the many excellent reviews he has done of pro-freedom films for Libertas Film Magazine.]]>The New Star Wars, Disney & Why Sci-Fi Was So Great in the 1970stag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.22981042012-12-14T12:06:48-05:002013-02-13T05:12:01-05:00Jason Apuzzohttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jason-apuzzo/Star Wars trilogy, beginning with Episode VII, supervised by George Lucas and produced by Disney.
As Darth Vader might say, there's "a tremor in the Force." The question is: what will this new Star Wars look like, now that we don't have Emperor Palpatine to kick around any more?
There's certainly been nothing like this news in Hollywood in years, with rumors swirling around about the new Star Wars films almost on a daily basis. What will the new storyline be? Who will direct the films? Will Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher or Harrison Ford make a cameo? Did Boba Fett survive the Sarlacc Pit?
And will SPECTRE or the Miami Heat be the new villains?
It seems incredible that overnight Star Wars has managed to reinvent itself - again - and become the biggest, most talked-about sci-fi franchise around. (Imagine what James Cameron must be thinking right now.) The question on everyone's mind, though, is what exactly a new Star Wars trilogy will look like with limited involvement from George Lucas, the original cast having hit retirement age, many crucial characters gone, and having to pick up where 1983's Return of the Jedi left off - i.e., with Ewoks playing victorious drum solos on Stormtrooper helmets.
In other words, what is the 'essence' of a Star Wars film now that the series can't lean on standbys like Yoda or Obi-Wan Kenobi or exploding Death Stars anymore?
For clues to this mystery, it's best to go back to the 1970s, the fabulous era - at least, for science fiction fans - when Star Wars was born.
Although the 1950s are justifiably regarded as science fiction's Golden Age, the era of the 1970s easily rates a close second. It was the period when science fiction finally replaced the Western as the great American movie genre.
To be fair, what we're calling 'the '70s' here probably began around 1968 with the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Planet of the Apes, and didn't end till around 1984, with the release of The Terminator. So maybe we should call this sci-fi's 'modern' era - or simply 'the Star Wars era.' Science fiction had a distinctive flavor during this period - it was darker, more realistic, and also more emotional - and Star Wars set the tone for the time.
It was also during this era that science fiction became more popular than ever - more popular even than comic book movies are today - dominating both the box office and prime time television.
Of the top 15 highest grossing movies of all time adjusted for inflation, four are sci-fi films from this period: the original Star Wars trilogy, plus Steven Spielberg's E.T. A host of other films from this time - Alien, Blade Runner, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, just to name a few - are similarly regarded as classics. Plus, television series like The Six Million Dollar Man (and its spin-off, The Bionic Woman), Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century were huge hits - with the Galactica franchise still around with us today.
So how did they do it back then? What made sci-fi of this period so wildly popular?
The key thing to understand about '70s or Star Wars-era sci-fi was how it revised and updated a genre that had gotten old and slightly creaky (think Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea). It did so in three major ways:
1) Science fiction became more realistic.
The big leap forward in sci-fi 'realism' came in 1968 with Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, which Kubrick made after consulting with scientists and engineers at NASA and MIT, and after devising new visual effects techniques like front projection. After 2001, which played out like a Cinerama documentary shot in space, sci-fi films couldn't afford to look anymore like they were shot in your parents' garage (even if they were).
George Lucas and his geniuses at Industrial Light & Magic raised the bar on sci-fi realism even higher with Star Wars in 1977 - while adding a new twist: a 'used universe' design style that gave everything a gritty, dented, lived-in feel. It was this gnarly, textured aesthetic that later influenced Alien, Blade Runner, Outland and a lot of other great sci-fi of the era - and became the key factor in making people believe that the sci-fi they were seeing was 'real.'
Before the original Star Wars, watching sci-fi films sometimes felt like visiting Neiman Marcus - all shiny surfaces, supermodels and expensive clothing. That's basically what you got in fun but conventional sci-fi fare like Rollerball (1975) or Logan's Run (1976).
Star Wars changed all this, as Lucas dropped his characters into garbage compactors and grimy cantinas, or had them hauled around in Jawa junk caravans and broken-down cargo freighters - like the wonderfully clunky Millennium Falcon. It all brought sci-fi down to Earth, grounded it in a more believable reality, and made the genre more accessible to average audiences.
So after the clean, polished, Art Deco look of the prequel trilogy, Star Wars should go back to looking like it did in 1977: a used car lot in outer space. Robots and ships should go back to looking bulky, stiff and dysfunctional - like something out of your local repair shop, not an Apple Genius Bar. It would immediately throw everyone back into the world we last saw in 1983.
As part of this, whoever directs the new film should avoid having every setting be digital. Spend some money and build real sets! Don't worry, Disney can afford it.
2) Science fiction became more dystopian.
This is an important point: the original Star Wars has often been attacked for introducing a cheery, uncritical optimism to the otherwise 'edgier' Hollywood cinema of the 1970s.
Except that it didn't quite go down that way.
Like so much sci-fi of the 1970s, the original Star Wars was basically dystopian - depicting a galaxy ruled by an inhumane Empire, a military dictatorship presided over by a genocidal cyborg (Darth Vader). Over the course of the film, a planet gets destroyed (Alderaan), the hero's family and kindly mentor (Ben Kenobi) are killed off, a princess is subjected to an invasive mind probe (by her own father, as it later turns out), and the heroes are rewarded in a ceremony that looks suspiciously like something out of Triumph of the Will.
I guess back in the '70s that seemed cheerful.
The truth is, Star Wars-era science fiction was full of tyrants, nasty aliens and menacing cyborgs; think of Khan from Star Trek II, or the creature from Alien, or the 'replicant' Roy Batty from Blade Runner, or the HAL 9000 from 2001. These figures captured the anxiety of the times - as America's economy went in the tank, international tensions dragged on, and technology made unwelcome encroachments on people's lives.
By the way, is any of this sounding familiar?
Now would be a good time for Star Wars to go back to its roots as a parable of the struggle for freedom in a depressed world. People are low right now - much like they were in the '70s - and a good new Star Wars trilogy might pick everybody up. Part of why Star Wars felt so uplifting back in the '70s was that the film acknowledged we were living in tough times - but also that we could pull out of them with a little heroism and good humor.
One other point: some people worry that Disney would never let Star Wars go back to being a 'darker' franchise (a la The Empire Strikes Back). Actually, Disney produced two gems of dystopian sci-fi back in the Star Wars era: The Black Hole (1979) and Tron (1982). Plus, many of the great Disney classics - one thinks of Snow White, Fantasia, or 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea - are essentially dark fairy tales, very much in keeping with the original Star Wars vision. Certainly the recent Tron: Legacy (2010) showed that Disney still has the taste for this kind of sci-fi material.
So assuming Bob Iger doesn't want to jam Hannah Montana into a Star Wars film, the marriage between Disney and the Star Wars franchise should be a good one - and may be what the series needed.
3) Science fiction became more emotional.
Ask anyone who was around back in 1977 and they'll tell you: watching Star Wars in a packed theater was an emotional experience, a major event. You waited in line for hours just to get in, watched the opening scroll and the huge Imperial Star Destroyer roar over your head in Dolby stereo, and by the time Han Solo flipped the Millennium Falcon into hyperdrive people just went wild.
And when Luke finally blew up the Death Star? The house came down.
Watching Star Wars in a theater was simply the pop-culture experience of the 1970s. Whatever the Beatles were to the Boomer generation, Star Wars was to Generation X. People came out of theaters feeling that their lives had changed.
But the funny thing was, a lot of sci-fi during this period was emotional. Grown men cried watching Spock sacrifice himself in Star Trek II; and everybody cried during E.T. And to this day, the most frightening film I've ever seen in a theater was still the original Alien; the emotion that film provoked in me was sheer terror.
Sci-fi somehow struck emotional chords back in the Star Wars era that it's simply not hitting today. (Although I admit to having a soft spot for Bumblebee in the Transformers movies; maybe that's because he reminds me of R2-D2). My hope is that the new Star Wars films are crafted with human emotions in mind, rather than just sci-fi spectacle.
We have enough visual pyrotechnics today, don't we? What we don't have are characters anybody cares about.
Personally, I'd love to see Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford make cameos in the new film - even if just for a minute. It would be a gas, the ultimate reunion, like Led Zeppelin getting back together. And it would be emotional. I imagine Han Solo holding down a corner with Chewie in the Mos Eisley cantina, throwing back a few drinks, telling stories about how Leia finally dumped him - then maybe blasting a bounty hunter or two.
Only this time, Han shoots first.
So in the grand scheme of things, what does it mean that Disney now owns Star Wars? Disney's certainly been a good fit for Pixar and Marvel, so Lucasfilm has likely found the right home. (Actually, could Disney buy the Oakland Raiders while they're at it?)
What it means is that we're not only going to get a new trilogy, but probably a live action Star Wars TV series for ABC, and also spin-off movies for certain characters - just like with Marvel. Boba Fett may finally get his own films (he should), or even Expanded Universe figures like Prince Xizor or Darth Bane - which would be fun.
Who knows? Your children may someday end up watching a Salacious Crumb series, or a brand new show on the Real Housewives of Tatooine.
By then I'll probably have checked out of Star Wars, thinking that I've had my fill. Of course, that's what I thought back in 1983 ...
[Special note: fans of '70s-era science fiction should check out Christopher Mills' excellent Space: 1970 website.]]]>What a Surveillance State Looks Like: Barbara Revisits Cold War East Germanytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.21389902012-11-19T13:53:18-05:002013-01-19T05:12:01-05:00Jason Apuzzohttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jason-apuzzo/
Or imagine being subjected to random body searches, conducted by capricious security officials with too much time on their hands. (OK, admittedly we already have that -- even if only at our nation's airports.)
For the most part, however, Americans only have a dim sense of what it's like to live in a truly repressive society -- such as East Germany was behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. And this, ultimately, is the true value of director Christian Petzold's gripping new film Barbara, which starts its U.S. theatrical run in December and recently screened at the AFI Festival in Hollywood. Germany's official submission for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, Barbara is the most compelling depiction since The Lives of Others of day-to-day life in a modern surveillance state, in this case the communist East Germany of the early 1980s.
Already the winner of the Silver Bear for Best Director (Christian Petzold) at the Berlin Film Festival, Barbara stars Nina Hoss in the title role as a pediatric surgeon whose promising career at the prestigious Charité hospital in East Berlin is cut short when she files for an Ausreiseantrag, officially expressing her desire to leave East Germany. A terse and enigmatic blonde, Dr. Barbara Wolff also happens to be in the midst of a torrid, secret affair with a West German businessman -- who's quietly arranging for her escape to the West, as he makes officially sanctioned business trips into East Germany.
As punishment for her desire to leave East Germany, Barbara is sent to a rural hospital near the Baltic Sea, where she works under the watchful eye of Dr. André Reiser (actor Ronald Zehrfeld), who heads a modest pediatric unit. André tries to get chummy with Barbara, which she resists -- suspecting him of being an informant for the Stasi (the East German secret police), who periodically arrive at her front door to strip search her or otherwise harass her.
Just another day in East Germany's worker-paradise, you might say.
As the story unfolds, however, Barbara slowly warms up to André, as she gradually comprehends his quiet, understated resistance to the inhumanity around them. She also grows absorbed in her clinical work with children -- especially Stella, a pregnant escapee from a socialist labor camp, whose only wish is to raise her child in the freedom of the West. Barbara's feelings of professional and personal responsibility for Stella complicate her own plans to defect, leading to the film's suspenseful finale.
'Understated' really is the word for Barbara. Don't expect lengthy speeches about tyranny, or furniture-smashing sex scenes in this film. More like an austere German drama from the 1970s (Volker Schlöndorff's The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum comes to mind), Barbara gets most of its mileage out of quiet moments of drama between people who by force of circumstance are incapable of trusting each other.
As such, the film becomes a profound indictment against the type of society in which allegiance to a political system overwhelms common humanity.
Having myself visited East Germany and the Soviet Union prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, and having known Soviet dissidents (including one who worked in the Kremlin), my sense is that Barbara gets the details right in terms of depicting the inauthentic, paranoid lives people led behind the Iron Curtain -- particularly those with secrets to keep. The film also captures the creepy voyeurism that fuels the modern surveillance state -- where the bogus imperatives of political fanatics justify shocking levels of access into people's private lives.
Nina Hoss is already getting Oscar buzz for her performance as Barbara, and with good reason: She brings a distinctly European mixture of intelligence, world-weariness and discreet sexiness to her role. (It's easy to imagine Deborah Kerr or Eleanor Parker playing her role in another era.) The rest of the cast fares similarly well -- particularly Rainer Bock as the chief Stasi officer. By contrast, Ronald Zehrfeld sometimes seems too soft and cuddly as André, a man ostensibly doing double-duty as head of a clinic and state's informer -- but in the film's sweeter, more intimate moments he shines.
The main takeaway of Barbara is that we don't want our own society ever looking like East Germany does in this film - dreary, lifeless and deeply fearful. It's a punitive, masochistic world lacking any defining features beyond those associated with mindless (and heartless) political conformity.
Of course, the totalitarian society shown in Barbara is also one that was doomed to collapse, in no small measure due to the type of quiet heroism and compassion depicted in the film. That's Barbara's other big takeaway -- the importance of individual heroism, and fidelity to one's conscience -- and it's a message that's as important today as it was when the Wall came down.]]>Skyfall & How James Bond Stays Current at 50tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.21024362012-11-09T16:02:08-05:002013-01-09T05:12:01-05:00Jason Apuzzohttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jason-apuzzo/
With Skyfall, the latest 007 thriller opening this weekend, it's now been five decades since the Bond character debuted on screen in 1962's Dr. No. Since that memorable first film, in which Sean Connery saved the world from a megalomaniac with metal hands -- while rescuing Ursula Andress from the confines of a white bikini -- James Bond has saved the world from nuclear bombs and space lasers, cheated death using jet packs and exploding cigarettes -- and even found time to romance women with names like 'Plenty O'Toole' and 'Xenia Onatopp.'
It's been a busy, full life for the world's most famous secret agent -- which begs the question of why, as currently embodied by Daniel Craig in the latest film, the character suddenly seems so fresh and relevant to the world of today.
The question arises because the James Bond of Skyfall no longer seems like an exhausted relic from another era, as he often did during the '90s and early 2000s. Instead, he now feels like a character who has been fully and (for the most part) successfully reinvented as a merciless, sardonic and lethal warrior for our age of terror.
And although Skyfall isn't quite the classic some critics are making it out to be, it's easily one of the best Bond films since the 1970s.
On this point, I must confess to having given up on Bond long ago. Until recently 007 was looking like a tired hero -- a guy in a middle-age crisis, a character to put in the next Expendables. M needed to send Bond into retirement -- maybe ship him off with a fifth of vodka and a Russian mistress (I recommend Anya Amasova, aka Agent XXX from The Spy Who Loved Me) to James Bond Island off the coast of Thailand. Even SPECTRE would probably leave him alone.
After all, with the Cold War long over (despite Vladimir Putin's best efforts), Great Britain no longer the force it once was, and with women less eager to play characters named 'Kissy Suzuki' or 'Dr. Molly Warmflash,' you'd think 007 would be quietly boxed away in the attic by now along with vinyl records and your parents' fondue pot.
Casino Royale in 2006 seemed to change all that, but director Sam Mendes' Skyfall really confirms it; Bond now absolutely works as a hero for the 21st century. The question is: why?
There are three reasons, in my opinion:
1) Bond has been fully reinvented for the War on Terror era.
This process began in Casino Royale, but Skyfall digs much deeper into the purpose and mentality of our intelligence agencies in the post-9/11 world -- and strongly reaffirms their value. Without giving away too much of Skyfall's plot, suffice it to say that the entire purpose of the film is to re-invent the James Bond mythology to fit the current war, which as Judi Dench's M memorably states is fought primarily "in the shadows" -- with our enemies less likely to be nation states with massed armies than shadowy, sociopathic operators working within hidden networks.
And it's precisely in this environment that Bond thrives.
As Skyfall opens, information pertaining to NATO penetration of worldwide Islamic terror cells has been stolen in Istanbul, and Bond has to get the data back before Western agents are exposed and killed. As the story unfolds, Bond's value as an experienced field agent -- able to make human judgments in murky situations and act, where technology alone is inadequate -- is constantly reinforced, even when his physical and emotional resources are depleted.
Bond and his colleagues are also depicted as patriotic and reflexively selfless, to the point of being subtly associated with Winston Churchill and his legacy. (Look for references to Churchill's wartime bunker along with visual cues of a vintage British bulldog.) In the midst of this, the tone of the film is more sober -- and befitting of wartime -- than what we've seen from the Bond series in a long time.
2) Bond movies have finally figured out modern women. More or less.
Let's face it: no Bond film is going to resemble Steel Magnolias, yet one senses that the Bond series has finally turned the corner in terms of a more modern depiction of women.
Skyfall does this primarily by way of variety. If you're looking for the classic Bond femme fatale, Skyfall's got that in the alluring Bérénice Marlohe -- who looks and acts like she walked right out of Ian Fleming central casting. (Actually, there's far too little of her in the film.) Or if you're looking for a modern career girl, able to trade pithy wisecracks with 007, there's the perky Naomie Harris -- who's obviously primed for a return in the series.
And if you're looking for gravitas, of course, there's Judi Dench as M. Skyfall sometimes even feels like it's her film more than Craig's. After all, it's M's legacy that's on the line in Skyfall, as dicey decisions made in her past (and present) come back to both haunt and redeem her. And as usual, Dame Judi elevates the proceedings with her intelligence and wit, and her quotation of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poem "Ulysses" at a crucial moment in the film -- as both she and Britain come under attack -- packs an emotional wallop.
3) Bond is still masculine, a man among Hollywood boys.
As for Daniel Craig, one thing is for certain: he's a hard-ass, easily the first Bond since Connery whom you don't want to meet in a dark alley. He's flinty, brutish, more than a little cynical -- and withdrawn in the old-fashioned way. He doesn't do therapy or analysis, and you probably won't find him on Facebook. He's refreshingly understated -- an adult man with secrets, secrets he isn't interested in sharing with you.
He also looks good in Tom Ford suits, which helps.
You can't imagine, for example, Craig playing a superhero in tights -- the costume de rigueur for today's male action stars. That would be too garish, too histrionic for him -- because Craig's Bond doesn't really view himself as a 'hero,' even if others do. He's simply there to do a job, perform his duty, then walk away. This is an old-fashioned way of looking at the role, more in line with how Bond behaved in the 1950s Fleming novels.
Moving forward, I think it would help Craig if he showed a lighter, more droll side. He needn't go the full Roger Moore -- great as that would be -- but maybe just unwind and have a little more fun with the part.
And along these lines, not everything in Skyfall works. Javier Bardem's role as the villain seems underwritten; Bardem himself is a fine actor, but his villainy here seems to consist mostly in leering at Bond -- and having a bad hair dye job. Also: casting Ben Whishaw's hair as Q doesn't really work. Maybe there was more of Whishaw in the film -- I just didn't notice.
Plus, I miss Ken Adam's extravagant sets. Couldn't Bardem live in a hollowed-out volcano? Or maybe in a levitating palace, surrounded by genetically designed Thai supermodels? That's still the kind of Bond villain I prefer, because Sam Mendes' sober, less-is-more approach could make the Bond series very dull, very quickly.
I'll admit that I wonder what the drily amusing Michael Fassbender might do with Bond (for a taste of that, see him in X-Men: First Class), or a top-flight action director like Michael Bay. I imagine Bay sending Fassbender on a secret mission to Cozumel to investigate fraud in the international lingerie market - only to uncover a massive conspiracy involving talking Aston Martins, or thermonuclear-powered breast implants.
Just throwing around ideas here.
But in the meantime, Bond is definitely back as an action hero for our time - and not a moment too soon.]]>A Conversation With Fashion Icon Ozwald Boateng on Style, Africa, and His New Film A Man's Storytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.20686772012-11-03T08:49:35-04:002013-01-03T05:12:02-05:00Jason Apuzzohttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jason-apuzzo/A Man's Story, opening this weekend in New York and Los Angeles, makes certain that the British fashion designer and style icon no longer remains a secret.
In a career already spanning two decades, the 45 year-old Boateng has outfitted celebrities from Will Smith to Russell Crowe, from Jamie Foxx to Mick Jagger. At age 28, he became the youngest tailor - and the first of African descent - to open a store on London's legendary Savile Row. Boateng's also designed menswear for Givenchy and bespoke costumes for films like The Matrix and Ocean's Thirteen, and he's even been the subject of his own Sundance Channel TV series, House of Boateng. He's also the recipient of an OBE (Order of the British Empire) for his contributions to the clothing industry.
Throughout all this, however, Boateng's private side - such as his quiet struggles in the rarified world of British fashion, or his efforts to foster entrepreneurial investment in Africa - have taken a back seat in public to his style innovations.
Director Varon Bonicos' new documentary, A Man's Story - for which Bonicos filmed Boateng from 1998 through 2010 - reveals much about Boateng's personal life: from the challenges of growing up as a young man of African descent in London of the '70s and '80s, to the abiding influence of his father on his life and career. The result is a warm and often poignant film that humanizes Boateng, while doing full justice to the glamorous place he occupies in the world of men's fashion.
We spoke with Ozwald Boateng and Varon Bonicos in Los Angeles, where they are promoting A Man's Story. The interview has been edited for length.
GM: What is your passion for film - and in particular, how are you inspired by the intersection of film and fashion?
OB: Film has always been a really good tool for me to communicate emotion about why I create a collection. I'm probably one of the first designers to make short films. The first time I did it was back in 1994. The invite for my first fashion show was a VHS cassette. And it kind of became part of the language of my designing collections - I was always putting together short films.
Apart from that, I think fashion designers are directors anyway. We spend a year designing a collection for a fashion show that lasts maybe fifteen minutes. We have to design the look of the catwalk, cast the model for each look, work up the sound, the lighting - it's a lot of work that goes into that fifteen minutes.
JA: Film has been so important in terms of influencing men's style, men's self-perceptions. I was curious whether there were film icons, movie stars who have influenced your sense of style?
OB: Sean Connery, of course, since I was a kid - you know, James Bond. Or The Thomas Crown Affair - you can't beat those three piece suits. The Italian Job with Michael Caine - again the suits. If you're a designer, there's got to be some films that you've seen that have inspired you creatively. There's no escaping that. Film is such a very good tool for communicating emotions, and all designers and creative people look to inspire an emotional response.
JA: You mention Connery and Bond, and he was so crucial in selling the Savile Row style here in the States.
OB: Absolutely.
JA: You yourself have become an icon on behalf of that style. Was that something you planned from the outset as a designer - to be so out front selling the look yourself?
OB: No, actually, I tried to stay out of it. In the early years, it was because I was a very young guy working in a very old discipline - so really, that's tough to begin with. And then I was trying to do it in a very modern way - so again, that's tough. Add me, visually, into the mix of all that, and that just complicates things. So for the first few years, I didn't let anyone take any pictures of me. Basically, a lot of people had no idea what I looked like. And because my name did not necessarily sound African, a lot of people ... just thought I was some kind of middle aged white guy [laughs]. So no-one actually knew what I looked like, and that was the best thing - because it allowed everyone to focus on the work.
JA: You were hidden, basically.
OB: Yeah, but it was all very deliberate. Because I'm good at what I do, and I just wanted to focus on the work. Let people talk about my cut, the influence of the cut, the detail, and that's all it was about - for years.
And then there was this famous magazine in London called The Face - this was in the late '80s, early '90s - and that's the first time I kind of revealed myself. And the reason was that the journalist was so adamant that she take a picture, and I was fighting it and fighting it, and anyway, I did it. And then the moment I had the picture taken, the dynamics completely changed. I got a lot more interest, but the interest always came back to that they wanted to take a picture of me - and that's when I got into Italian Vogue, and all those magazines at that time.
GM: One of the most powerful parts of your story is that you are of Ghanaian descent, you were born in London - and you broke into a place as tradition-bound as Savile Row. How was your background as an African an asset to you - in your fashion, in your creative work - and at the same time, what challenges did it pose that you had to overcome?
OB: As I say very early on in the film, at the time I was growing up, it was tricky. You had two options: allow it to become a headache, or just get on with your life [laughs]. So I chose to just get on with my life and not let it bother me. So even when I was experiencing real issues, I just didn't see it. So, I think that when someone's got an issue about where you're from, and they're going at you - and you ignore it ... it makes them powerless.
So that's been my way of dealing. When I went to school, there were two black kids in the whole school. I think the first time I saw only black people was when I went to Ghana - I must have been 21, or 22, at that time. To have that visual experience - I remember going, "oh, wow - I've not seen that before."
GM: You're very proud of your culture and of the artistry that comes with it. And you have collections inspired by African style, but also by Japanese samurai style, Native American culture, Russian style. You show all this interest in different cultures - and I think in part that's because you yourself come from a culture different from that of the UK.
OB: Exactly. And that's why Savile Row was so relevant, because Savile Row is an important street in British history. So my opening a shop there had much greater meaning than just opening a store. And I think, subconsciously, I was aware of that. Because I'm always about change for a greater meaning. But the way to do it is without putting any badges on it. Because the more you put a badge on something, the more it becomes something else.
GM: I'd like to ask you about your commitment to helping Africa through development. You've said in your interviews that you believe private investment and entrepreneurship are more effective in helping Africa than government aid.
OB: Yes, absolutely.
GM: I'd love to hear more about your philosophy and how you think you can accomplish your goals through your Made in Africa Foundation and also through this film.
OB: Designers are creating for the future ... [we're] basically visionaries ... so when you visualize something, you don't visualize it to be worse than it is, you visualize it to be better [laughs]. That's how designers think. So when I go to Africa, I don't visualize it being worse, I visualize that if we did everything right, what would that look like, and suddenly it's an amazing vision.
Africa controls 50% of the world's natural resources, in some cases 70% - so the concept of poverty [in Africa] makes no sense. And in the world, resources are key. So when you understand those points, the only thing left is: 'why?' And the 'why' is the infrastructure. So infrastructure development is the key. And you balance that out with how much aid has been invested, which is billions, and of the aid money that's been put in, if 20% actually hit the ground and got deployed, I'd be shocked. So that's why I set up the foundation.
In terms of what we're dealing with: we've written a paper for the British government on policy for Africa, we've campaigned the World Bank, the African Development Bank - and the African Development Bank is doing a $22 billion dollar infrastructure bond. So now there's more interest in investment in Africa than there's ever been since I can remember. The main thing we've done in Africa is to change views, which is the key.
JA: For both of you, what is the big takeaway that you want people to have on this film? And Varon, you put twelve years into this - all that footage going back to the late '90s. We see documentaries all the time, and no-one is rolling cameras over that length of time.
VB: The film is 96 minutes out of five hundred and something hours. It was really hard to craft. It's like little tiny dots of newsprint - and then you pull out, and you get the picture. The editor Tom Hemmings had to sit in a darkened room for two months just watching footage. But you know, I met Ozwald and I'd never met anyone like him before. I was only supposed to film for a few weeks ... [but it wound up being twelve years]. The central message of the film really is about belief, the core structure of belief. It's got a man's story - and fashion, it's a great backdrop. The film also highlights one of the most important relations in life, which is a relationship between a parent and a child. But the central message is about belief. I'm proud of the film. It's great to be sitting here with you to be able to talk about it.
OB: I think each person's going to take a very personalized viewpoint about what the film's doing for them. I make bespoke suits that are made to fit men as individuals - and that's somehow worked through the film, [with] the film fitting the individual. That seems to be the poetry of life.
JA: In the final shot of the film, you're walking off stage with your father. That was very touching. He inspired you - and look what it created. I just thought that was wonderful.
OB: That's interesting. Many people see the film, but no-one's mentioned that. So let me tell you about that. I decided I was going to do this fashion show based around this movie, and I called it, "A Man's Story." I wanted to figure out: at what point do you become a man? Is it 18, is it 21, is it when you get married, when you have kids? So I'm sitting at dinner with five mates of mine, and the guys say, "actually, you only become a man when you lose your father. It's when you have a problem, and you can't call him - because he's not there." And I said, "wow." So at that point I realized I'd done all this stuff, and I'd never celebrated my dad. So my whole focus moved from what I was doing to making it all about him. Which is why, at the end of the show, I'm applauding him. [...] So that's really what A Man's Story is about. It's really about your moments, and remembering them. And also, enjoying them as they happen.
VB: I agree. Enjoy every moment as it happens.
A Man's Storyopens in New York and Los Angeles on November 2nd, and is also available in Apple's iTunes store.]]>Basketball Diplomacy: An American Point Guard Becomes a Symbol of Freedom in The Iran Jobtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.16771372012-07-17T15:39:52-04:002012-09-16T05:12:12-04:00Jason Apuzzohttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jason-apuzzo/
The reasons for this go beyond sports, however, because over the course of one gripping and emotional season -- a season documented by director Till Schauder and producer Sara Nodjoumi in their extraordinary new documentary, The Iran Job -- Sheppard becomes one of Iran's most popular athletes, and brings a ray of hope into an increasingly repressive and isolated society.
The Iran Job screened last week in Washington, D.C., and had its world premiere recently at the Los Angeles Film Festival, where we had the chance to talk to the film's creators.
As depicted in the film, Kevin Sheppard's Iranian odyssey begins in the fall of 2008, when he's offered a spot on A.S. Shiraz's roster. Having already played professional basketball in South America, Europe, China and Israel, the voluble Sheppard is unfazed by the prospect of playing overseas -- but is understandably nervous as an American traveling to Iran. Coming in the midst of a 2008 election in which Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain all had sharp words for Iran and its nuclear program, Sheppard nonetheless decides to take the plunge out of a spirit of professionalism.
It was a decision that would change his life, as well as the lives of everyday Iranians -- and in particular, those of three young Iranian women.
One of the most compelling aspects of The Iran Job is the way it captures the casual details of life in today's Iran -- a closed society that clearly harbors some unusual stereotypes about the outside world. So for example, the moment Sheppard arrives in Iran and meets up with his Serbian roommate (the team's 7-foot center, and the only other non-Iranian allowed on the squad), Sheppard learns that his cable TV has been custom-provided with hundreds of pornographic channels -- the assumption being that because he is an American, he must be sex-obsessed. The irony that such programming is even available in a "strict" Islamic society, of course, is not lost on Sheppard -- who can't help but laugh at Iranian officialdom's awkward notions of diplomatic courtesy.
Such ticklish moments aside, however, Sheppard immediately begins bonding with average Iranians. A natural show-off with a wicked sense of humor, Sheppard dazzles everyone around him -- even when they barely speak English, and are only able to respond to his warm smile and playfulness. The camera follows him early on as he goes out to grab dinner, and we see regular Iranians high-fiving him and snapping pictures with him before he's even picked up a basketball. His enthusiasm and dynamic personality ignite smiles everywhere.
We asked Sheppard about the rock-star treatment he received from average Iranians:
"The funny thing about it is, once I got over there -- people really love America. The government would say, 'Down with America.' They have all kinds of signs -- 'America is the Devil,' 'Down with the U.S.A.' -- but once you get to the people, they love American culture, they know everything about America, they love all the American sports. So it was a little bit ironic and crazy for me at first. I was like, how can you have all these signs around? But yet, when you speak to the people it's totally different. So I know it [hostility toward America] was not coming from the mass of the people in general. This was all pushed upon them by the government."
As The Iran Job proceeds, however, Sheppard's innate enthusiasm is challenged by his lackluster basketball team, A.S. Shiraz a new and untested squad in Iran's Super League, and a team sorely lacking in the kind of talent or winning attitude to which Sheppard is accustomed. Viewers basically get the sense that Sheppard has just joined The Bad News Bears of Iranian basketball, and his first task will be to shake up the underwhelming squad.
It's worth noting here that The Iran Job follows the usual parameters of sports documentaries in depicting how one inspirational player can turn the fortunes of a franchise around by getting his teammates to believe they can win. That's precisely what Sheppard does, due in part to his on-court heroics (we watch him win several games with buzzer-beating shots), but mostly due to his cocky swagger and high standards. The intense, demanding point guard simply hates to lose -- and refuses to let his teammates ever be comfortable accepting defeat.
More important things are happening off the court, however. As Kevin plays his first few games -- lighting up the scoreboard and exciting fans with his brash, aggressive style (he plays like a toned-down version of the Clippers' Chris Paul) -- we watch as three young Iranian women named Elaheh, Laleh and Hilda become his biggest fans. All of the women are educated professionals and avid basketball enthusiasts, and they become a kind of chaste, chatty cadre of groupies -- spending their evenings hanging out unsupervised (and therefore at no small risk from Iran's morality police) at Kevin's apartment, mostly discussing politics and their professional aspirations. The three friends clearly feel comfortable around Kevin, and pour out to him their frustrations with Iranian society -- especially in terms of its restrictions against women.
This is where The Iran Job becomes considerably more than a sports documentary, giving viewers a sense of the agonizing difficulties currently facing women under strict Islamic rule. Elaheh, Laleh and Hilda show remarkable candor and courage speaking in front of the camera about their grievances with Iran's regime, and viewers can't help but wonder why women of such warmth, intelligence and accomplishment (Elaheh is a savvy event planner, Laleh is getting her master's degree, and Hilda is a physiotherapist) should have any limitations put on their aspirations at all.
The stylish Elaheh, incidentally, is quite the looker -- she bears a striking resemblance to Kim Kardashian -- and develops a full-on crush for Sheppard. Adding poignancy to the situation is that Sheppard already has a girlfriend back home in the Virgin Islands, and that Elaheh's own parents are eager to marry her off to an Iranian of their choosing -- a fate she resists. With so many complications, Elaheh contents herself with inviting Sheppard to her family's home for dinner, and otherwise with taking him for impromptu tours of her city. Her emotional need for him, however, is written all over her face, and probably the most touching aspect of The Iran Job is Elaheh's unrequited passion -- a passion that every aspect of Iranian society seems to frustrate. Indeed, we learn that women in Iran can't even sit near men at basketball games, and at one point during the film women are even banned from attending games, altogether.
[SPOILER ALERT: Two of the three women -- Elaheh and Laleh -- eventually make major decisions affecting their fates, with Elaheh rejecting her arranged marriage and moving out of her family home, and Laleh becoming actively involved in the Iranian revolution, leading to her being arrested several times; and one has the sense that these decisions were motivated at least in part by their friendship with Sheppard.]
We asked Sheppard about his unusual relationship with Elaheh, Laleh and Hilda, his biggest fans in Iran:
"The young ladies -- I stay in touch with them a lot, because they were making the biggest push in the revolution. Women, in general, have it so hard in Iran. And ironically, they are probably the smartest people over there. They were so educated. I mean, I had 15 guys on my team, and only two guys spoke English. Yet all the women I talked to knew English, French and Farsi. [...] They were really highly educated. But because of their [Iran's] system and the government, they were really restrained in terms of reaching their full potential. So that was really heartbreaking for me."
The Iran Job builds to its suspenseful climax as two things happen simultaneously: Sheppard unexpectedly leads his team into the Super League playoffs and a showdown with the heavily-favored team from Tehran, and Iran itself moves toward the fateful 2009 election and the attempted Green Revolution. While trying to lead his overmatched team through the playoffs, Sheppard winds up literally having a front-row seat for the mass protests accompanying the election (Sheppard's Tehran hotel room gave him a dramatic view of the protests, with the front lines between the protesters and the regime's armed militias literally at his front door) -- and it's at this point that his balancing act as an unofficial American sports ambassador becomes most complicated. The bonds that Sheppard has formed by this point with his teammates and with average Iranians make it impossible for him to view the revolution dispassionately; at the same time, his official job in Iran is simply to play basketball.
And so as Sheppard's popularity grows -- creating awkwardness for the Iranian regime -- he becomes something of a silent icon for Iranians, a quiet witness to the possibility of freedom.
As Sheppard explained to us, the experience was life-changing:
"I could not help but get emotionally involved with the people, seeing what they're going through ... they just draw me in, and it made me a much more rounded and humble person, once I got there and saw what was really happening. Because the people over there really want change. The government has their view, but the people have their view, also."
"A couple of the guys [on his team] came to me and said, 'you don't just make us play, you kind of give us hope.' So you really get emotional."
As a film, The Iran Job has two major assets going for it: a fantastic musical score made up of contemporary Iranian hip-hop music, and the charismatic personality of Kevin Sheppard himself. Sheppard exhibits major star power, investing vitality, insight and humor into otherwise tense situations. Director Till Schauder and editor David Teague wisely keep Sheppard at the center of events, rarely straying away from him to make general political points about the situation in Iran -- and the film is more effective for doing so. Although nominally a sports documentary, The Iran Job is really a penetrating look at how life is currently lived by average Iranians torn between their aspirations for freedom and a repressive, moralistic regime.
The film's German director, Till Schauder, who was blacklisted from entering Iran after making the film, is hopeful that Iranian society is on the cusp of change:
It reminds me a little bit of Germany, just before The Wall came down. The measures [associated with holding power] became more and more absurd, so I think it's a matter of time. My biggest hope, as much as it's possible in a country like Iran, is that there's a peaceful transition. [...] It's inevitable at some point that there will be change. Hopefully they will figure this out in a halfway civilized and non-violent way."
A film not to be missed by either sports fans or those interested in the current situation in Iran, The Iran Job screens at The Noor Iranian Film Festival in Beverly Hills on August 5, and is eyeing a late September/early October release.
As for Kevin Sheppard, he recently retired from professional basketball after finishing his third season in Iran's Super League. He now runs a not-for-profit youth league, Choices Basketball Associations, which provides a positive environment for kids of the U.S. Virgin Islands through after-school programs and basketball.
Sheppard is reflective about his experience in Iran as a sports ambassador: "Sports transcends politics. That's why I think sports have a very powerful role in bringing people together."]]>Battleship, Memorial Day and the Top 10 Naval Warfare Movies of All-Timetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.15341002012-05-22T19:26:21-04:002012-07-22T05:12:24-04:00Jason Apuzzohttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jason-apuzzo/
And although Universal's new film Battleship just capsized at the box office, unable to compete with the entertaining spectacle of The Avengers or Facebook's Hindenburg-style IPO, it's still a perfect excuse to take a look at the top 10 naval warfare movies of all-time.
Movies about America's naval heroes -- and there have been some great ones -- teach us about courage under fire, about the importance of strategy, and recall a more romantic era when tactical masterminds made split-second decisions that changed the course of world history.
Granted, America's enemies these days don't seem to like the water very much. Long gone are the days of legendary naval adversaries like Japan's Isoroku Yamamoto (the Harvard-trained mastermind behind the Pearl Harbor attack), Germany's Alfred von Tirpitz (whose submarines raised havoc during World War I), or even Britain's Lord Sandwich -- who somehow took time out from battling America's Continental Navy to invent the sandwich.
Even the Russians don't seem eager to confront the U.S. out in the open ocean, anymore -- possibly due to the traditional Russian difficulty of keeping nuclear-powered ships afloat.
All of this is why Hasbro and director Peter Berg resurrected the cinema's most reliable enemy, space aliens, to serve as the foe in Battleship.
And even though Battleship doesn't make the Top 10 list below, as Memorial Day approaches the film may nonetheless put you in the mood to watch one of these classics of the World War II-era and beyond, from the days when America proved her might -- and sailors proved their mettle -- by battling for supremacy on the high seas:
1. The Enemy Below (1957)
The Enemy Below pits laconic World War II destroyer captain Robert Mitchum against a craggy, war-weary German U-boat skipper played by Curt Jürgens. Mitchum and Jürgens play cat-and-mouse with each other across the south Atlantic, putting their tactical skill and nerves to the maximum test. And as their duel grows more intense, so too does their respect for one another. With a great musical score by Leigh Harline and directed by actor Dick Powell, The Enemy Below set the standard for realism in its day -- although it's Mitchum's rivalry with Jürgens that puts the film over the top.
Best line: "I don't want to know the man I'm trying to destroy."
2. Destination Tokyo (1944)
Destination Tokyo stars Cary Grant as a conscientious sub captain who leads his crew on a daring mission from the Aleutian Islands to Tokyo Bay. Co-starring John Garfield as a skirt-chasing sailor named 'Wolf', and featuring colorful performances from Alan Hale and Dane Clark, Destination Tokyo brings the action like few other war films of its day. Grant's sub torpedoes destroyers and aircraft carriers, and conducts bold night missions along the Japanese coast -- all while dodging minefields, depth charges, bombs, even an appendicitis attack among its crew. Destination Tokyo was so good, it inspired a young Tony Curtis to join the Navy -- years before he would appear on-screen with Grant in Operation Petticoat.
Best line: "Congratulations, Wolf... It's been an hour since anything reminded you of a dame."
3. Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970)
A mega-production that tells the story of the Pearl Harbor attack from both the American and Japanese perspectives, Tora! Tora! Tora! was so big that it needed three directors to make -- one of whom initially was Akira Kurosawa. Tora! Tora! Tora! takes its history seriously, exploring the political and military context behind the infamous December 7, 1941 raid. An epic film in every sense, including in its methodical pacing, Tora! Tora! Tora! shows what a complex, risky gamble the attack was for the Imperial Japanese -- along with the many tactical failures on the American side that made it possible. In the pre-digital era, few war pictures seem bigger than Tora! Tora! Tora!, and the final attack sequence still looks incredible today because so many of the pyrotechnics are real.
Best line: "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve."
4. The Hunt for Red October (1990)
A signature film of the Cold War-era and based on the famous Tom Clancy novel, The Hunt for Red October stars Sean Connery as Soviet sub captain Marko Ramius, who decides to defect to the U.S. and hand over his undetectable sub, the Red October, before the Russians can use it to launch World War III. Connery is perfect as the wily Ramius, and a young Alec Baldwin does a nice turn playing Jack Ryan before Harrison Ford took over the role in later films. A great musical score by Basil Poledouris -- along with sharp performances by James Earl Jones, Sam Neill, Fred Thompson and Scott Glenn -- rounds out this must-see classic.
Best line: "We will pass through the American patrols, past their sonar nets, and lay off their largest city, and listen to their rock-and-roll... while we conduct missile drills."
5. Sink the Bismarck! (1960)
This neglected classic recounts the harrowing story of how Germany's massive Bismarck battleship, the naval Death Star of its day, threatened to obliterate Britain's Royal Navy -- and actually did obliterate the HMS Hood, Britain's most powerful battle cruiser. Sink the Bismarck! also dramatizes how blind luck often factors in to history's most decisive battles. Strong performances by Kenneth More and Dana Wynter, as well as a colorful turn by Karel Štěpánek as Germany's Admiral Lütjens, make Sink the Bismarck! key viewing for naval warfare buffs.
Best line: "We are unsinkable... and we are German!"
6. They Were Expendable (1945)
Director John Ford's They Were Expendable brings an element of poetry and heightened realism to the genre in telling the story of how America's PT boats fought the war against the Imperial Japanese in the Philippines. They Were Expendable stars John Wayne and Robert Montgomery -- who actually commanded a PT boat during the war, and who took over directing the film when Ford (who shot footage of the Battle of Midway and also of D-Day for the Navy Department) fell ill. A sobering, moody look at the sacrifices made during wartime, and also at military innovation in the face of numerically superior forces, They Were Expendable was Ford's last wartime film -- and a memorable one.
Best line: "I used to skipper a cake of soap in the bathtub, too."
7. Midway (1976)
With a boffo cast featuring Charlton Heston, Henry Fonda, Robert Mitchum, Glenn Ford and Toshiro Mifune, and with music by John Williams, Midway recounts the decisive Battle of Midway on an epic scale. Although the film sometimes feels cobbled together with too much stock footage, Midway takes combat strategy more seriously than most war films -- painstakingly setting up the options facing both the American and Imperial Japanese fleets in this crucial naval conflict that turned the tide in the Pacific. And even with Mifune playing Admiral Yamamoto, and Fonda as Admiral Nimitz, it's Heston who steals the show as hard-ass Navy captain Matt Garth.
Best line: "'Wait and see.' We waited. December 7, we saw. The 'Wait and see'-ers will bust your ass every time."
8. The Caine Mutiny (1954)
This exceptional adaptation of Herman Wouk's novel is probably the finest film ever on the psychological strain of command. Humphrey Bogart (himself a former Navy man) was nominated for Best Actor for his iconic performance as Captain Queeg, who loses his composure - and possibly his sanity - during a dangerous typhoon, prompting his minesweeper crew to relieve him of duty. Scintillating performances by Fred MacMurray and José Ferrer, and vivid Technicolor cinematography by Franz Planer, round out this dramatic and provocative look at stress under fire. Plus, you'll never look at a bowl of strawberries the same way.
Best line: "The first thing you've got to learn about this ship is that she was designed by geniuses to be run by idiots."
9. Pearl Harbor (2001)
Michael Bay's epic telling of the Pearl Harbor attack brought a new level of realism and detail to the depiction of combat -- with ILM's visual effects team re-creating not only the Japanese attack, but also the Doolittle raid and the Battle of Britain. Although the film's romantic subplot never totally clicks, Pearl Harbor still packs an emotional punch once the Japanese raid kicks in -- and the film's old-fashioned, patriotic sensibility fits the subject matter perfectly. Bay's team actually re-created a large-scale section of the doomed battleship USS Oklahoma and capsized it for the film. Don't try that at home.
Best line: "I've got some genuine French champagne. From France."
10. Action in the North Atlantic (1943)
Another classic from Humphrey Bogart, this wartime Warner Brothers gem was Bogie's first film after Casablanca made him a superstar. Action dramatizes the vital role of the Merchant Marine in transporting armaments during World War II, as Bogie and Raymond Massey guide a Liberty ship on a harrowing mission to Murmansk - battling U-boats and the Luftwaffe along the way. Action is well-named, with more combat scenes than any World War II film outside of Destination Tokyo. And although the film was shot exclusively on the back lot, Bogie and Massey still made real-life dives off one of the film's burning ships... after a few drinks.
Best line: "The trouble with you, Pulaski, is you think America is just a place to eat and sleep. You don't know what side your future's buttered on."
Honorable Mentions: Crash Dive (1943), Operation Pacific (1951), In Harm's Way (1965).]]>"Step Up to the Loudmouth!" Morton Downey, Jr. and the 10 Ways to Improve Today's Political Talk Showstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.15075542012-05-11T16:43:38-04:002012-07-11T05:12:13-04:00Jason Apuzzohttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jason-apuzzo/Tribeca Film Festival, I indulged in a guilty pleasure.
Wearing dark shades, and clutching my plastic media badge and a $7 bag of greasy popcorn, I stealthily ducked into a Chelsea multiplex to watch some of my youth flicker by across the big screen.
When I say 'my' youth, I'm also talking about the youth of millions of other guys who were teenagers during the late 1980s and tuned into politics. If you were around at that time, there's probably one name you've never forgotten -- no matter how hard you've tried: Morton Downey, Jr.
The movie I was watching was the probing and hilarious new documentary, Évocateur: The Morton Downey Jr. Movie. If you never had the chance to experience Downey in his prime, you really missed something. Downey was easily the most popular and controversial TV talk show host of his day -- although that's sort of like saying Genghis Khan was the most popular and controversial equestrian of his day. It doesn't really capture the scale or the savagery of the phenomenon.
Downey was the id of the 1980s -- a real-life Howard Beale, if you remember Paddy Chayefsky's Network. Like some wild, genetic fusion of Howard Stern, Michael Savage and Howard Cosell, Downey invented the modern political talk show almost overnight during his colorful, meteoric career in the late 1980s -- while becoming a tongue-in-cheek folk hero for political junkies like myself, especially (but not exclusively) for those of the teenage male persuasion.
Part rock star (he was a former singer, like his famous father), part populist firebrand, part stand-up comedian, Downey transformed political debate on TV from the staid, genteel disquisitions of David Brinkley's This Week program into something closer to a Vegas floor show -- or a night with the Rat Pack. Dangling his trademark cigarette, and wielding a cutting wit, Downey turned the political talk show into the kind of uninhibited, boozy, late-night pleasure it had never been before -- and has never really been since.
Watching Downey do his routine all over again in Évocateur (more on the film below), several ideas came to mind about how to liven-up today's creaky political talk shows:
1) Encourage In-Studio Fistfights.
Let's face it: most guests on today's talk shows look like they're just going through the motions -- like they're only concerned with their hair and with being invited back. When was the last time someone upended a table, or stormed off a cable news show? It never happens anymore. Before Downey's show, no one had ever seen political activists throw chairs at each other on national television, or watched ACLU lawyers battle screaming teenagers with mohawks, or watched Hollywood directors get dragged off stage -- their legs flailing helplessly, as Downey's working-class crowd hooted with joy. Downey's guests were passionate, and always willing to put their bodies on the line when it counted (watch the legendary Al Sharpton-Roy Innis throwdown). There should be more fistfights, and table- and chair-throwing on political talk shows today -- then maybe we'll believe more of the nonsense these shows are spouting.
2) Bring Back Live Studio Audiences!
Why are today's political talk show hosts so afraid of live studio audiences? Downey began his shows by high-fiving his crowd, even kissing the women in his studio audience. Downey's hyped-up, seemingly inebriated audience (they often dressed in Halloween costumes) was encouraged to talk back to the show's guests from a lectern known as 'The Loudmouth.' It was at 'The Loudmouth' that the audience lived out the primal fantasy of speaking truth to power -- as teenagers, truck drivers, dental assistants and other regular folk got their chance to berate corrupt officials, phony celebrities, radical professors or gasbag political activists. It was this cathartic opportunity to abuse and humiliate the powerful that gave Downey's show its special electricity. ("Step up to the Loudmouth" even became a catchphrase of the day.)
3) Invite Actual Human Beings on as Guests.
This is an important point: consultants, political strategists and journalists should be replaced by actual human beings on political talk shows. Although media figures of today like Al Sharpton, Gloria Allred and Alan Dershowitz got their first big breaks on Downey's show (alongside even wilder guests like Joey Ramone of The Ramones, or Ace Frehley of Kiss), Downey rarely played it easy by inviting on the usual pundits -- or even people conversant in the English language -- to talk about issues. He instead found people who were colorful, off-beat, or in some way good foils for him and his hyper-charged studio audience. As a result, a lot of all-too-real people made their way onto his show: street hustlers, pro wrestlers, strippers, UFO conspiracy theorists, communists, small-time evangelists. Not even Fox News covers as much ground in this respect as Downey once did.
4) Boot Bad Guests Off the Show -- Frequently.
This is the flipside of #3. Downey took great relish in booting dull or belligerent guests off his show -- and this is really something today's political shows should consider doing. Although Downey invited the most radical, combative and often freakish public figures of his day onto his show, sometimes their schtick didn't work and the guest had to be cut loose -- quickly. As an example from today, Fox News keeps bringing on some guy who's listed as a 'conservative comedian' -- but the guy's never made me laugh once. He should be barked-at and ridiculed by Bill O'Reilly, then hauled off by security guards while a live studio audience throws wads of Kleenex at him. Then he might be fun to have around.
5) Get Up Off Your Behind!
Downey was rarely seated on his show; he prowled around the set for the full hour, gesticulating with a cigarette, pointing at the camera, hovering over his guests and bantering with the studio audience. It brought pizzazz and theatricality to the show. Plus, Downey understood that he was the real star of his show, which he why his guests as a rule stayed firmly planted in their seats -- under threat of getting booted. Today's hosts should get off their asses, get out from behind their desks and start moving around more.
6) Drop the Dress Code.
Part of why people are so inhibited on today's shows is that everybody dresses like they're at a GE stock holders meeting. It's boring. Downey frequently came onto his show in jeans, sans coat or tie. He also dressed up as Dracula once, and even wore war paint and army fatigues. Plus, his audience members sometimes dressed as gorillas, carnival clowns, or Cuban revolutionaries. It set the tone, and people loosened up.
7) Learn to Ignore the News Cycle.
This is a big one with me. The term 'news cycle' is really just another way to say: 'whatever somebody else is talking about.' It's tedious to turn on the big cable news networks and see them covering identical subjects, day in and day out. Branch out! Be creative, the way Downey was (he once did a show on "Strippers for God"). Find news stories nobody else is covering, like: "Oil Drillers Who Dig with Their Teeth," or "Green Technology You Can't Afford." It would liven things up.
8) When You Say Something Stupid, Apologize.
It's inevitable that a host will say something stupid or otherwise regrettable over the course of doing a daily political TV show. Downey certainly did, and apologized when necessary. What's annoying is when today's hosts, in an effort to save their careers, double-down on stupid comments later -- pretending that their inane remark ("Senator Smith's wife has skin like a Maine lobster") was actually a carefully considered policy statement ("Actually, my critics aren't aware that before I was a TV talk show host, I worked at The American Crustacean Society. So I know what I'm talking about!"). It's embarrassing. When you say something inappropriate, fess up, apologize and move on -- in other words, be a human being.
9) Feature Live Music.
A former singer himself, Downey occasionally brought live bands -- mostly hard rock acts -- onto his show to great effect. It gave the show a late-night, uninhibited vibe that today's political shows desperately need. (Side note: in the absence of music, such primitive group behavior as chanting or catcalls should be encouraged from the studio audience.) Downey understood that the enemy of political talk shows is stuffiness -- and nobody ever called his show stuffy.
10) Bring Cigarettes and Liquor Back to Late Night.
OK, admittedly this one is never going to happen -- but it should.
Évocateur: The Morton Downey Jr. Movie
The suggestions above are just a few examples of what Morton Downey, Jr. would likely do to liven up political talk shows, were he around today. And who knows? Maybe somebody will actually take some of this advice and turn today's dull, grimly earnest shows into the glorious, Rabelaisian carnivals of human excess that they could be.
In the meantime, thanks to Évocateur: The Morton Downey Jr. Movie, we can look back at how cathartic and liberating it once was to "step up to the Loudmouth."
In Évocateur, filmmakers Seth Kramer, Daniel A. Miller, and Jeremy Newberger dig into Downey's personal story, beginning with his privileged youth as the son of popular singer Morton Downey and actress Barbara Bennett (the sister of actresses Constance and Joan Bennett). We learn, in an incredible irony, that Downey was actually raised next door to the Kennedy compound at Hyannis Port -- and was a lifelong friend of Ted Kennedy, with whom he clearly shared the same salty sense of humor.
Downey rambled through a series of careers as a singer and radio announcer until he finally hit his stride as a New Jersey TV host in the late '80s, channeling mostly working class resentments against liberal cultural elites. (Sound familiar?) The moment his opera buffa-style talk show went national in 1988 it became an overnight hit -- although it would last less than two years. After jumping the shark a few too many times -- at one point even allegedly staging an assault on himself by neo-Nazis in an airport bathroom stall -- his show petered out, his audience moving on to more sedate fare.
Évocateur does a fabulous job of bringing Downey's cracked brilliance back to life with a slew of archival clips from his show, and interviews with former guests and co-workers. It's clear that even liberals loved the guy -- Gloria Allred and Alan Dershowitz have especially warm words for him, in particular.
After the Tribeca screening I asked Jeremy Newberger, one of the film's directors, what made Downey different from today's talk show hosts of either the conservative or liberal variety. "The [hosts] today... there's more machinery in place to protect them," Newberger said. "They have more infrastructure... a lot of these guys are in a vacuum, where no one gets to come across and have a different opinion without being edited out."
"This guy [Downey] was tough, he was willing to speak his mind, and he had an interactive show -- and he was pretty brave to do what he did."
Newberger is right -- Downey was brave. His show was a far cry from the stale, corporate programs of today that seem intent on insulating their high-priced hosts from criticism, awkward questions or interaction with regular citizens. Downey didn't avoid such public exposure -- he thrived on it.
Downey's raucous show may not have been particularly noble or elevating -- no doubt he turned political debate into something more vulgar and carnivalesque than it had ever been. But he also made political TV more earthy, entertaining and human -- and nobody's equaled him in that way since.]]>Hail Caesar! What's Good & Bad About the New Sword & Sandal Moviestag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.14017212012-04-04T10:02:33-04:002012-06-04T05:12:02-04:00Jason Apuzzohttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jason-apuzzo/
But with Wrath of the Titans and the Sword & Sandal/sci-fi mash-up John Carter not exactly setting the world on fire -- along with recent disappointments like Immortals and Conan -- it's getting more difficult by the day to believe that the Sword & Sandal movie can survive the recent fumbling of this otherwise great genre.
And that's a shame, because the Sword & Sandal movie -- known for its gladiatorial games, pagan orgies, depraved emperors, and the occasional snarling cyclops -- may represent the most colorful and enduring movie genre of all time.
Like its cousin the Biblical epic, a Sword & Sandal movie -- or 'peplum,' named after a type of ancient Greek garment -- is typically set in the ancient Mediterranean world, and dramatizes the fight for freedom. Think of Kirk Douglas fighting to free slaves in Spartacus.
The hero of a Sword & Sandal movie (see Sam Worthington above, in Wrath of the Titans) is usually muscle-bound (think Steve Reeves) and able to deliver passionate speeches about freedom (think Charlton Heston). The villain is normally a wicked tyrant, preferably played by a silky British actor (think Christopher Plummer) -- and the hero typically has a few slave girls, wicked queens or curvy sorceresses thrown his way before he settles down with his true love, often played by an Italian brunette (think Sophia Loren).
From as far back as 1914's Italian epic Cabiria -- the first movie ever screened at the White House -- Sword & Sandal movies have been delivering huge entertainment value with their muscle men, exploding volcanoes, sacrifices to Moloch and marching Roman armies.
Cecil B. DeMille and D.W. Griffith took the genre to its early heights from the 1910s-1930s, with spectacular films like Intolerance (1916) and Cleopatra (1934). In the years before the Production Code, these films often pushed the boundaries of sex and carnivalesque violence. In DeMille's infamous The Sign of the Cross (1932), for example, Claudette Colbert takes a sexy milk bath (see below), and the film wraps with a lurid finale featuring Amazon women fighting pygmies, and nubile Christian martyrs (including one played by burlesque queen Sally Rand) served up to gorillas and crocodiles.
Hail Caesar!
The genre's heyday, however, was in the 1950s and early '60s -- the era of 'Hollywood on the Tiber,' when the studios decamped to Rome to recreate the ancient world. This period was dominated by American-made Biblical epics and Italian-made serials about Hercules or other burly, mythical heroes like Maciste. Lavish spectacles like Ben-Hur, The Robe and Quo Vadis saved Hollywood from the economic encroachments of television, and minted a new generation of masculine stars like Charlton Heston, Kirk Douglas and Richard Burton. And the movies themselves got bigger, with new formats like CinemaScope and VistaVision filling movie houses with sumptuous panoramas of ancient lands.
Capping off the era was Elizabeth Taylor's magnificently grandiose Cleopatra (1963), a movie so big that today it would've cost over $330 million to produce -- possibly because the film's dubious Italian accountants claimed Liz Taylor ate twelve chickens and forty pounds of bacon each day for breakfast.
Nothing about peplum movies -- not even their catering -- is small.
After a long drought, broken by only a handful of films like Ray Harryhausen's magical Clash of the Titans (1981) -- and Conan the Barbarian (1982), featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger as the bone-crushing Cimmerian warlord -- the Sword & Sandal genre was revived splendidly in 2000 by Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe in Gladiator (see above). Gladiator took advantage of new digital technology to convincingly recreate the ancient world in telling a blood-soaked tale of Rome's slide into imperial tyranny. Frank Miller's 300 then 'modernized' the genre in 2006 -- recreating the Battle of Thermopylae with video game-style action, post-9/11-style speeches about the value of freedom, and Gerard Butler providing the most impressive display of abs since Franco Columbu was Mr. Olympia.
Fortunately, although recent projects like Wrath of the Titans and John Carter are doing little to build off the momentum of those films, Hollywood still seems to have confidence in peplum movies. Brett Ratner and The Rock are plunging ahead with their adaptation of Hercules: The Thracian Wars, and Russell Crowe recently signed to star in Darren Aronofsky's Sword & Sandal-esque movie about Noah. The 300 prequel Battle of Artemisia still moves forward, and Wrath of the Titans director Jonathan Liebesman wants to direct movies about Julius Caesar and Odysseus. Plus Mel Gibson's Maccabee movie is still in development (a bit awkward, that one), Ridley Scott and Paul W.S. Anderson are both doing Pompeii projects, Angelina Jolie is still circling around an expensive Cleopatra film -- and Steven Spielberg is even considering directing Gods and Kings, an epic telling of the life of Moses.
While it's heartening that these projects are still going forward, no one wants them to suffer the same fate as John Carter or other recent, lackluster efforts. Audiences probably deserve better than what they've been getting, so with that in mind it's time to take an unflinching look at what's working -- and not working -- about this latest crop of Sword & Sandal movies.
WHAT'S WORKING ABOUT THE NEW SWORD & SANDAL MOVIES:
1) Boffo Digital Creatures
Movie creatures haven't been quite the same since Ray Harryhausen retired, but his legacy is still alive and kicking (and growling) into the digital age. Recent creatures like Wrath of the Titans' Kronos (see above) or the club-wielding cyclops, or the White Apes in John Carter, are awesome beasts to behold -- especially in IMAX 3D and 7.1 channel sound. And whereas back in the 1950s and '60s only Harryhausen's movies had credible creatures (even the wonderful Italian peplum movies so often got dragged down by paper mache dragons and rubber lizards), nowadays most Sword & Sandal flicks can be expected to feature a decent mythical beast or two.
2) Great Use of Weaponry
Today's Sword & Sandal stars like Conan's/Game of Thrones' Jason Momoa or Immortals' Henry Cavill (who's also the next Superman) really look like they can fight, or at least like they're trained and know their way around weaponry. And while that isn't a prerequisite for peplum heroics -- Tony Curtis never needed it -- the ability to use a sword, spear or hammer axe convincingly is one of the key selling points of any Sword & Sandal hero.
3) Bold Costumes & Production Design
Tarsem's Immortals featured some wildly imaginative costume and production design (see above), blending North African, Indian, Persian and Greek influences that enlivened the look of Sword & Sandal cinema for the first time in years. Plus, Disney's John Carter managed some fabulous retro/19th century sci-fi designs, for the few people in the audience still awake after the first hour.
4) British Accents
Let's face it: the Brits, along with the Aussies and the Irish, just sound better doing this stuff right now than their American counterparts, and are saving a lot of otherwise sub-par films. In Wrath of the Titans, for example, stodgy dialogue is routinely rescued by the redoubtable Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes -- both of whom could probably make an ad for shaving cream seem portentous.
5) 3D & IMAX
When it comes to Sword & Sandal movies, size really does matter. And while today's 3D/IMAX-sized movies can't compare in scale to films like Howard Hawks' 1955 CinemaScope epic Land of the Pharaohs (one scene in that film featured over 9,000 extras), new films like the IMAX 3D version of John Carter still offer a reasonable facsimile of what those widescreen spectacles of old were like.
WHAT'S NOT WORKING ABOUT THE NEW SWORD & SANDAL MOVIES:
1) Where did all the Love Goddesses go?
Easily the biggest problem with today's Sword & Sandals movies -- although this is less of a problem on cable TV shows like Spartacus or Game of Thrones -- is the lack of good female characters. The wicked queens, love goddesses and slave girls that once made peplum movies so famous (and scandalous) are almost completely gone -- leaving little for the men in these films to do other than chop each other to pieces. No more dancing girls, pagan orgies, or virgin sacrifices -- what fun is that? In the '50s and '60s, tantalizing (and usually Italian) women like Sophia Loren (above), Rossana Podesta, Gina Lollobrigida and Sylva Koscina appeared routinely in Sword & Sandal epics and made life exciting for the gods and mortal men who coveted them -- or feared them. They should be welcomed back.
2) Spoiled Heroes with Super-powers and Abs
The big new trend nowadays -- from peplum films to comic book movies -- is to have annoying, demigod heroes with abs who fret over their supernatural powers. Petulant guys like John Carter or Perseus in Wrath or Theseus in Immortals who can't decide whether the world is cool enough for them to save. It's tiresome. Kirk Douglas didn't fret over his 'powers' or his abs in Spartacus, Ulysses or The Vikings, probably because he didn't have any -- he just had courage (also the cinema's best chin). Today's peplum heroes should have fewer powers and flabbier abs (like Victor Mature), and more backbone. They should be more stoic, and stand for something beyond their own narcissism -- like freedom.
3) Fake Digital Armies
You know the kind I'm talking about, because they're in every new Sword & Sandal film: the fake digital armies (see above, from Immortals), with endless rows of digital soldiers wearing digital armor -- marching and grunting into battle as one. They always appear in a scene that's supposed to be 'awe-inspiring,' but that instead comes across as software-driven and phony. Memo to Hollywood: spend the money and hire some real extras.
4) Characters Who've Never Taken a Bath
In an effort to create 'edgier,' more 'realistic' Sword & Sandal movies, some filmmakers have come up with the idea of populating the ancient world with guys who've never bathed, shaved, or washed their clothes. Wrath has one such guy, an unshaven dude with matted hair named Agenor, who looks like he spent the last six months occupying Zuccotti Park. He actually gets more on-screen time than actress Rosamund Pike (seemingly the only female cast member), who plays the film's pretty blonde heroine. A related idea in today's peplum cinema is to have everything -- buildings, armor, vegetable stands -- sprayed with mud and dirt for that 'authentic,' antediluvian feel. It may come as a shock to some filmmakers to learn that people in the ancient world actually had access to water, and were able to wash themselves.
5) Movies That Skimp on the Big Themes: Freedom, Romance, Religious Faith
Here's the key to a good Sword & Sandal movie: it wears its heart on its sleeve. Classics like Robert Wise's Helen of Troy, Kirk Douglas' Ulysses or Anthony Mann's The Fall of the Roman Empire not only had more intelligent, literate scripts; not only were they better researched, and more faithful to the spirit of their original stories. There was also an element of sincerity and passion to them in how they depicted the big Sword & Sandal themes of freedom, romance and religious faith. In more recent years, for example, a film like 300 took the theme of freedom seriously, and cleaned-up at the box office. By contrast, I read recently that in Disney's early meetings on John Carter, the first things executives discussed about the film were ... the merchandizing and the sequels. It showed.
THE BOTTOM LINE:
While today's 3D/IMAX-sized Sword and Sandal movies have modern technology and other advances going for them, they don't always understand the human element that made classics like Ben-Hur (see above) or Spartacus work. Of course, assuming Hollywood doesn't want more $200 million write-downs on its books, perhaps that will start to change.
The good news is that when Sword & Sandal movies are done right, people still love them. Movies about the ancient world stir our imaginations, and give us a sense of continuity with the past. They also speak to our most cherished values of liberty and faith -- often while providing scandalous fun. Hollywood is right to believe in these projects -- Cecil B. DeMille did, and made a career out of them for 40 years -- so let's hope filmmakers can up their game over the next few years, and make the ancient world as exciting as it used to be.]]>Review: HBO's Game Change is like Days of our Lives for Republicanstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.13203272012-03-05T08:39:10-05:002012-05-05T05:12:01-04:00Jason Apuzzohttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jason-apuzzo/
On the odd chance that you can't get enough of this year's colorful Republican primaries -- if lurid accusations of Newt Gingrich's 'open marriage' or saucy rumors of Herman Cain's romantic conquests haven't been enough for you -- or if you think all the pizazz went out of the campaign once Michele Bachmann left the race (can anyone else say "Obama is a socialist" with such a winning smile?), then HBO's frothy Game Change, which debuts this Saturday March 10th, may be the remedy for you.
Game Change is pure political soap opera, and in fleeting moments it even makes for compelling drama - though to be fair, Game Change is probably not an accurate view into the behind-the-scenes dynamics of the 2008 McCain campaign, or into the personality of its megawatt star, Sarah Palin.
What the movie is, however, is a gossipy and occasionally colorful look at how much changed -- at least in the world of Republican politics -- when John McCain made the decision to select Sarah Palin as his running mate for the 2008 election.
And as the roiling 2012 campaign continues to make clear: a lot changed from that point forward.
There was an era, seemingly a lifetime ago, when the Republican Party appeared to be the quieter, more straight-laced of the two parties. Most people over 30 remember what that was like, back before Republican officeholders were expected to be celebrities.
Traditional Republican candidates were war veterans and businessmen, successful lawyers, sober Congressmen with dark suits and smiling families, genial chairmen of the local chamber of commerce. Think Mitch Daniels crossed with Phil Mickelson.
They were the type of person you'd want to buy real estate or aftershave from, or to lead your nephew into combat -- but not necessarily build a Broadway show or rock opera around.
That, of course, was before the Palins came to town.
Game Change is HBO's adaptation of the book of the same name about the 2008 Presidential election, penned by journalists John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. Crucially, that book depicted both sides of the 2008 campaign -- dwelling mostly on the epic Democratic Party primary battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, something left out completely from HBO's movie.
That the film's producers -- who include Tom Hanks -- dropped the Clinton-vs.-Obama side of the book altogether has opened Game Change up to legitimate charges of partisanship, as has the film's depiction of Palin as mercurial and unbalanced.
And make no mistake: Game Change depicts Sarah Palin as flighty and temperamental, as a Hollywood-style diva who fires staffers on a whim, and as ignorant of the most basic facts about American history and governance.
Whether this depiction is believable, of course, is another question entirely.
Indeed, viewers will be free to question whether Palin really required briefings on the basic differences between the Afghanistan and Iraq wars (which seems unlikely, given that her son Track was deployed to Iraq), or on the elemental facts of World War II, or that she didn't know what the Federal Reserve does.
Though even Palin's most ardent supporters would hesitate to compare her to William F. Buckley in her eloquence or erudition, Game Change stretches the Palin-as-ignoramus cliché past the point of credibility.
Yet it's important to point out that Game Change also depicts Palin as a caring mother, as passionate and sincere in her faith, and as the kind of charismatic, Capra-esque political star unseen in Republican circles since Ronald Reagan. It also depicts her as innocent of the most ridiculous charges made against her during the 2008 campaign: such as that she was a free-spending clothes horse, or that her baby Trig wasn't even hers.
Game Change also shows how Palin's energetic performances in high-pressure situations rescued the McCain campaign.
Game Change's story is simple. It's August 2008 and the McCain campaign is in trouble. A smooth-talking young Senator named Barack Obama has not only improbably blown past Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party nomination, but is suddenly turning the Presidential race into a lopsided rout.
Top McCain advisor Steve Schmidt, played with warmth and intelligence by Woody Harrelson, decides that the campaign needs to roll the dice and select a 'game changer' as the vice presidential nominee. With the stakes getting higher and the clock ticking, McCain and his inner circle decide that the biggest game-changing move -- outside of selecting Democrat Joe Lieberman as the VP -- would be to select a woman for the ticket.
So with only five days left to vet the potential nominee, McCain's team takes a chance and picks the exciting but little-known Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin. And thus begins a high-stakes, behind-the-scenes battle waged between Palin and Schmidt as McCain's circle begins to realize exactly how unconventional the feisty governor from Wasilla really is.
Game Change takes viewers through the big moments from Palin's eight weeks as a VP candidate -- from her knockout convention speech (delivered partly after the teleprompter failed), to the muffed interviews with Katie Couric and Charlie Gibson, to her effective debate performance against Joe Biden. We also see Palin dealing with the unimaginable overnight pressures of rescuing the McCain campaign -- all while mothering a son with Down syndrome, a newly pregnant teenage daughter, and a son sent to Iraq.
All this while trying to look fabulous, prevent her emails from getting hacked, and nail the pronunciation of 'Saakashvili.'
As Palin, Julianne Moore attempts the impossible: depicting someone who is already one of the most vivid, well-known personalities on the political scene. Unfortunately, in Game Change Moore's Palin comes across as somehow smaller than Palin seems in real life - not nearly as self-assured or sassy. Moore seems too trapped recreating Palin's accent and mannerisms to give the kind of full-bodied, Betty Davis-style performance the movie probably deserved. Moore plays Palin like an earnest librarian, rather than as a gun-toting Mama grizzly - and it doesn't quite work.
Veteran actor Ed Harris fares better playing John McCain. Harris, as solid a performer as Hollywood has, captures McCain's earthiness and personal integrity - although he misses McCain's delightfully salty humor. In Game Change, McCain comes across as a crusty, honorable veteran trying to keep pace with bewildering changes in our political culture. He's eager to win and to compete according to the new rules of American politics - but not at the cost his own honor or maverick style.
Game Change is actually something of a love-letter to old-school Republican centrists of the McCain variety (the kind currently driving the Romney campaign). How sincere the film is in this regard is open to question; a truly impartial film would've also included the original book's depiction of the Democrat race, and risked airing dirty laundry on the other party's side.
Game Change's biggest problem, however, is its incredibly clunky script - written with all the grace and subtlety of a Super PAC ad. With sparkling lines like "[t]hank you for cutting your mullet, Levi, it looks much better now," or "they're going to think it's a Machiavellian/Jedi power play," Game Change's dialogue sometimes sounds like a bad riff on Raising Arizona. Juvenile quips like "how does Dick Cheney sleep at night with his Darth Vader helmet on?" hardly help matters, either.
Mostly, though, Game Change is a gossipy, sporadically entertaining insider-tell-all look at a political campaign that continues to resonate four years later.
Game Change will likely do what most political movies made by Hollywood's elite power brokers do these days: enrage conservatives, fill liberals with a fleeting sense of superiority, and drive HBO's ratings down while the rest of us watch SportsCenter or Shahs of Sunset.
It's too bad, too. It would've been interesting to watch a frothy version of this film featuring Hillary and Bill, Barack and Michelle. What, there's no drama there?]]>The Oscars, The Battle of Los Angeles & The Top 10 Movies in Which Aliens Attack L.A.tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.12992932012-02-24T16:40:49-05:002012-04-25T05:12:01-04:00Jason Apuzzohttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jason-apuzzo/
They'll smile and snarl our traffic. They'll toss their hair and forget to thank their husbands. They'll praise each other for their bravery, while collecting $75,000 gift bags.
L.A. is accustomed to such strange invasions, of course. If you're a movie fan, you already know that L.A. has been invaded over the years by everything from giant atomic ants (Them), to buff cyborgs (The Terminator), to rampaging 3D zombies (Resident Evil: Afterlife). So Angelenos take invasions from movie stars in stride.
But this weekend marks an anniversary of an invasion you might not know about: L.A.'s first alien invasion.
This February 24th-25th is the 70th anniversary of The Battle of Los Angeles, also known as The Great Los Angeles Air Raid, one of the most mysterious incidents of World War II -- and also one of the key, oddball events in U.F.O. lore that's still inspiring movies and TV shows to this day.
Between the late evening of February 24th, 1942 and the early morning hours of February 25th, the City of Angels flew into a panic as what were initially believed to be Japanese enemy aircraft were spotted over the city. This suspected Japanese raid -- coming soon after the Pearl Harbor bombing, and just one day after a confirmed Japanese submarine attack off the Santa Barbara coast -- touched off a massive barrage of anti-aircraft fire, with some 1400 shells shot into the skies over Los Angeles during the frantic evening.
Oddly, however, the anti-aircraft shells hit nothing. Despite the intense barrage, no aircraft wreckage was ever recovered.
Indeed, once the smoke had cleared and Angelenos calmed down (the public hysteria over the raid was mercilessly satirized by Steven Spielberg in 1941), no one really knew what had been seen in the sky or on radar. Were they weather balloons? German Zeppelins? Trick kites designed by Orson Welles?
Many people believed the aircraft they'd seen were extraterrestrial - one eyewitness even described an object he'd seen as looking like an enormous flying 'lozenge' - and some accused the government of a cover-up. Conflicting accounts of the incident from the Navy and War Departments didn't help clarify matters.
As if to confirm public fears of extraterrestrial attack, one famous photograph emerged (see above) from the incident showing an ominous, saucer-like object hovering over the city. This much-debated photograph, which even appeared in some trailers for Battle: Los Angeles last year, inspired America's first major U.F.O. controversy -- a full five years before Roswell.
To this day, no one knows for sure what flew over Los Angeles that night and evaded the city's air defenses. (The raid itself is recreated each year at Fort MacArthur in San Pedro.) But since it's more fun to assume that it was aliens than weather balloons, we've decided to honor The Battle of Los Angeles by ranking the Top 10 movies in which aliens attack L.A. (See below.)
To make this list, a film must feature aliens on the warpath -- no cuddly E.T.'s here -- and their attacks must take place in L.A. proper, rather than out in the suburbs or desert (eliminating films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers).
As the list demonstrates, no city -- other than perhaps Tokyo -- has suffered more on-screen calamity at the hands of extraterrestrials than Los Angeles. At the same time, there's no apparently no other city that's easier for aliens to hide in.
1) The War of the Worlds (1953)
Producer George Pal's adaptation of the H.G. Wells' novel is the granddaddy of 'em all, and still the best L.A.-based film about alien attack. Gene Barry plays Dr. Clayton Forrester, a natty scientist at 'Pacific Tech,' who along with his girlfriend Sylvia van Buren (a perky USC coed, played by Ann Robinson) struggles to prevent Martian invaders from destroying human civilization. Highlights of the film include a boffo attack on downtown L.A. (which Pal initially wanted to film in 3D) by the graceful, swan-like Martian ships, and an Air Force flying wing dropping a nuclear bomb on the Martians. Filmed in vivid Technicolor, The War of the Worlds was a huge hit, broke new ground in visual effects technology, and helped kick off the 1950s sci-fi craze.
Best exchange of the film: "What do we say to them [the aliens]?" "Welcome to California."
2) Independence Day (1996)
Director Roland Emmerich's funny, exhilarating and patriotic summer hit from 1996 borrows key elements from The War of the Worlds, but adds a few of its own: 15-mile-wide flying saucers, a president who flies fighter jets ... and Will Smith. In the role that made him a megastar, Smith plays a trash-talking Marine fighter pilot paired with an MIT-trained computer wiz (played by Jeff Goldblum, channeling Gene Barry) who fights an alien saucer armada out to demolish humanity. ID4 is easily the best of Emmerich's apocalyptic films, largely due to its tongue-in-cheek humor. Watch as ditzy Angelenos atop the Library Tower cheerfully greet an alien saucer, only to be zapped into oblivion a moment later. Only in L.A.
Best line of the film: "Welcome to Earth."
3) Transformers (2007)
There's mayhem, and then there's Bayhem. Michael Bay's Transformers redefined sci-fi action cinema in 2007, featuring a spectacular climax in downtown Los Angeles -- a riot of colossal urban warfare and aerial strikes as the U.S. military and Autobot robots unite to fight Decepticon robots out to enslave Earth. A key sequence showcased Autobots and Decepticons 'transforming' at 80 mph on a busy L.A. freeway, swatting aside cars and buses while fighting each other -- living out the fantasy of every aggressive L.A. driver. Unlike the stately saucers of ID4, or the graceful war machines of War of the Worlds, Bay's Decepticon robots are fast-moving, anthropomorphic and nasty. Like certain Hollywood celebrities, they trash talk, strut and propagandize as they smash through buildings and otherwise inflict as much collateral damage as possible. The film that made stars out of Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox, Transformers delivers heaping doses of humor, curvy women and robot carnage; it's Bayhem at its best.
Best line: "You didn't think that the United States military might need to know that you're keeping a hostile alien robot frozen in the basement?!"
4) V (1983)
These alien 'Visitors' look just like us, and they come in peace ... except that underneath their false skins they're actually lizards and want to eat us. That's the premise of Kenneth Johnson's apocalyptic NBC miniseries from 1983, a show that leans heavily on references to Nazism, communism and other pernicious forms of group-behavior. V is also the show that first gave us gigantic motherships hovering over major cities, years before ID4. The best part of V, however, is the scene-chewing performance by Jane Badler as the alien leader Diana; somebody should put that woman in charge of GM. Otherwise, in V the human resistance movement against the aliens centers around Los Angeles -- possibly because it's hard to cop a tan while saucers are blocking the sun.
Best line [about the alien leader Diana]: "That damn dragon lady can bend people's minds around. What the hell does she need a blowtorch for?!"
5) Battle: Los Angeles (2011)
The title of the film is a sly reference to The Battle of Los Angeles, a photograph of which appeared in one of the movie's trailers. A stirring, patriotic ode to America's fighting men and women, Battle: Los Angeles depicts a team of Marines - led by Aaron Eckhart as a rugged Marine staff sergeant -- tasked with defending Angelenos from a massive alien assault. Against a backdrop of intense urban warfare, often resembling street fighting in Iraq, Battle captures the steadiness and quiet resolve of America's soldiers as they defend civilians in an apocalyptic battle for human survival. Like an old-school World War II film, Battle revels in the honor of military service, the basic code of fidelity to the mission and one's fellow soldier -- especially in the face of overwhelming odds. Ironically, it was too expensive to film Battle in L.A., so it was instead shot in the other LA -- Louisiana. (For the full Libertas Film Magazine review of Battle: Los Angeles, see here.)
Best line: "I'd rather be in Afghanistan."
6) Kronos (1957)
This underrated classic from director Kurt Neumann features actor Jeff Morrow as a dapper scientist who, with the help of his shapely blonde research assistant (played by Barbara Lawrence), must devise a way to stop a monstrous, energy-absorbing alien robot from destroying Los Angeles. Suspenseful and inventive, Kronos squeezes a lot out of its modest budget -- from moody photography and stylish production design, to the film's creepy, vaguely humanoid robot. The best part of the film, though, may be its cheeky good humor. Scientist Morrow is so obsessed with stopping the robot as it rampages across the countryside from Mexico that he's completely oblivious to how his assistant is coming on to him.
Best line: "Do you think you'll be able to respect a husband that probably pulled the scientific boner of all time?"
7) Predator 2 (1990)
Can an aliens-invade-L.A. flick with Danny Glover, Gary Busey and María Conchita Alonso possibly go wrong? No, it can't. Though not on the level of its classic predecessor, Predator 2 delivers the goods in a big, 1980s/Joel Silver-style way with action, humor, and some of the wickedest urban combat ever. Drawn to the heat of battle between rival Columbian and Jamaican drug gangs and the L.A. police, the alien 'Predator' arrives in town with a few days to kill -- until a police lieutenant (Glover) decides to hunt the creature down personally. Predator 2 depicts Los Angeles as the ultimate urban jungle -- a lurid swamp of violent drug kingpins, inept bureaucrats, and an out-of-control news media (look for an appearance by Morton Downey, Jr. as a sleazy journalist). Obviously they had L.A. confused here with New York.
Best line: "He's on safari: lions, tigers, the bears ... oh, my."
8) They Live (1988)
Although initially ignored, John Carpenter's thriller-satire about aliens in L.A. -- whose true appearance and subliminal propaganda are visible only through special glasses -- has since become recognized as a cult classic. Intended as a critique of consumerism, They Live also works as an effective satire on L.A.-style narcissism and the nihilism that sometimes lurks underneath it. Featuring wrestler 'Rowdy' Roddy Piper in the lead, and with a stand-out performance by Keith David, They Live takes a decidedly low-tech, retro approach to alien invasion -- and also tackles big issues of social conformity and media manipulation in a goofy, appealing way. It's the perfect antidote to Oscar weekend.
Best line: "I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass ... and I'm all out of bubblegum."
9) Not of This Earth (1988)
Producer Roger Corman remakes his own 1957 classic, this time featuring cult siren Traci Lords as the plucky nurse out to save humanity from an intergalactic vampire eager to replenish his dying planet's reserves of blood. Campy in the extreme, Not of This Earth is the kind of good-natured romp that Corman has specialized in for decades -- a film that lives off the over-the-top personalities of its characters, rather than advanced (or even credible) visual effects. Though sci-fi purists may prefer Corman's more straight-laced original, the '88 version (directed by Jim Wynorsky) brings out the innate silliness of the situation, and benefits from Lords' sassy, sexy turn as the L.A.-based nurse. Best enjoyed with an adult beverage, Not of This Earth is good, trashy fun.
Best exchange: "So what do you do, hon'?" "I'm the house blood-pumper."
10) Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959)
No list of aliens-invade-L.A. movies should neglect this signature effort from director Ed Wood, a film that almost defies description. Considered by some the worst film of all time, by others a postmodern masterpiece, the nano-budget Plan 9 is by universal acclaim one of the defining cult films of all time -- perhaps the defining cult film. A bizarre confection of alien invasion and zombie picture, and featuring overripe narration from '50s psychic The Amazing Criswell (and a truncated performance from Bela Lugosi, who died during production), Plan 9 is a barely comprehensible mish-mash depicting an alien plot to raise an army of the dead. Best enjoyed in its newly colorized form (the Blu-ray will be released March 6th), Plan 9 presents the alien invasion that Los Angeles perhaps most deserves: an invasion of shambling, re-animated B-movie actors.
Best line: "Visits? That would indicate visitors."
Enjoy these films this weekend, especially if you live in L.A. And keep watching the skies ...]]>The Most Provocative Filmmaker in the World: A Conversation With Mads Brügger on The Ambassadortag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.12673922012-02-10T09:33:34-05:002012-04-11T05:12:01-04:00Jason Apuzzohttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jason-apuzzo/The Ambassador, the Central African Republic and the corrupt diplomatic culture that supports it.
He's one of Europe's funniest and most controversial filmmakers, although most Americans haven't heard of him -- yet.
The name of this lanky, cerebral enfant terrible is Mads Brügger.
In Brügger's previous film The Red Chapel (read the Libertas Film Magazine review of the film here), winner of Sundance's 2010 World Cinema jury prize for documentaries, the filmmaker pulled off one of the most dangerous and politically provocative stunts in cinema history by infiltrating North Korea as part of a fake socialist comedy group. Operating under the watchful (and vaguely confused) gaze of the North Korean government, Brügger's cameras proceeded to document the bizarre, Orwellian nether-world of today's Pyongyang and its frightening cult of the 'Dear Leader.'
In his new film The Ambassador (read the Libertas Film Magazine review of the film here), which recently screened at Sundance, Brügger now attempts an even more complex and daring stunt by purchasing a Liberian diplomatic title and infiltrating one of the most dangerous places on Earth -- the Central African Republic (CAR) -- as an ersatz Ambassador. His purpose? To expose the illegal blood diamond trade -- and the corrupt world of CAR officials, bogus businessmen and shady European and Asian diplomats that it benefits.
Like a tragicomic version of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, The Ambassador takes viewers into a rarely-seen world of European influence-peddlers who exploit the African continent -- and the amoral retinue of African officials, petty businessmen and hangers-on who are complicit in the exploitation.
Along the way Brügger and his hidden cameras have close encounters with everything from an obese ex-French Legionnaire heading the CAR's state security (who is assassinated shortly after talking to Brügger), to armed militias in the middle of Africa's 'Triangle of Death,' to a diamond smuggler with a secret child bride and potential terrorist ties, to a tribe of inebriated pygmies organized by Brügger to staff a match factory.
It all makes for a potent, carnivalesque and politically incorrect experience -- and one that exposes the mutual racism (of Europeans toward Africans, and Africans toward Europeans) that makes central Africa such a hotbed of corruption and violence.
In the midst of all this is Brügger himself -- a tall, soft-spoken Danish journalist (and son of two Danish newspaper editors) with an ironic sense of humor and an uncanny ability to transform himself into the kind of diffident European grandee that African officials are accustomed to exploiting -- and being exploited by -- well into the 21st century.
Along with my Libertas Film Magazine co-editor Govindini Murty, I sat down with Brügger at the Sundance Film Festival to talk about his funny, horrifying and highly controversial new film. With a shaved head, and wearing a skull ring from DC Comics' The Phantom, Brügger arrived looking very much the part of an experimental European director.
Apuzzo: What got you interested in [corruption in the Central African Republic] as subject matter for a film?
Brügger: I like doing films that divert from their own genre. I wanted to do an Africa documentary without all the usual semiotics and codes of the generic Africa documentary. You know -- NGO people, child soldiers, HIV patients, and so on. But also I wanted a film where you would meet all the people you usually don't get to see - you know, the kingpins, the players, the ministers who live a very secure and comfortable life away from the scrutiny of the media. So I thought that if I could purchase a diplomatic title, I could gain access to this very closed realm of African state affairs and politics. It's pretty much a 'let's-see-what-happens' project. Once we set off to do this, who will we meet? What kind of people will I run into?
Apuzzo: How did you prepare to become a corrupt European diplomat?
Brügger: [Laughs.] I prepared for almost three years, because I wanted to really go into detail with my persona. I would go to receptions, embassies in Copenhagen, especially the Belgian embassy because they have a lot of African diplomats coming there. I noticed all the telltale signs, the do's and don'ts of how diplomats behave and carry themselves. For instance, when they're having cocktails they like to fold their napkin into a triangle and then wrap it around the glass. I think it's because they don't want to leave fingerprints, but I don't know for sure. [Laughs.]
The most popular cigarette amongst African diplomats are red Dunhills. The most popular liquor is Johnny Walker Black Label. You know, things of that order. At the same time, I also wanted my 'character' to be packed with various archetypes, and characters from comic books: Dr. Müller in Tintin, Bernard Prince (a Belgian comic book hero), even the Man with The Yellow Hat from Curious George.
Apuzzo: I thought that one of the key things that sold the character, so to speak, was his personal narcissism - in terms of the clothing, the demeanor, the portrait that you had of yourself in the diplomatic suite. Was that narcissism a key component of how you interacted with people there?
Murty: In other words, was that narcissism a way of interacting or seeming believable to people of the tyrannical mindset -- since narcissism is a key element of tyranny?
Brügger: Exactly. There's narcissism in it, but also: you know the theory about 'mirror neurons'? That when you're meeting somebody you start emulating them, on an unconscious level.
I think it played out well -- that by looking like something from a Graham Greene novel from the '60s or '70s I would attract people who are on to the same fantasies that I display, which is what I think happened. I was the ultimate fantasy of a white businessman-diplomat, because Africans themselves also have fantasies about white people. Usually they deal with these scruffy-looking NGO guys in sweaty T-shirts. I thought that if I would look very rich, very well-off, very eccentric, I would make African ministers think: if he looks like that he has to be very rich, very powerful, probably also very naive and idiotic. But that's OK. You know, 'we will not kill him - we can use him.' So there's also a survival strategy in it.
Apuzzo: Two really key figures out of the whole film were 'Dr. Eastman,' who is this sort of secretive, shadowy European figure pulling the strings and selling the diplomatic titles - and also Emperor Bokassa [former dictator of the Central African Republic], whom you mentioned you had a personal fascination with.
Brügger: Yes, very much so.
Apuzzo: Emperor Bokassa representing the worst of 1970s-era African despotism ...
Brügger: ... and madness.
Apuzzo: And with 'Dr. Eastman' almost representing the European side of that madness, almost like an Ernst Blofeld or a Bond-villain.
Brügger: Exactly.
Apuzzo: It seemed that what allowed you to get away with what you did was that you were fulfilling stereotypes and fantasies that a lot of Africans themselves had about white European businessmen.
Brügger: Yes, it has a lot to do with 'magical thinking,' which is something very important in Africa. Bokassa, as you know, he was the ultimate expression of this particular kind of madness. He was this carnivalesque figure trying to emulate Emperor Napoleon. He had this Napoleonic coronation, costing the national GNP times one hundred.
Murty: You had some footage of it in the film.
Brügger: Yes, it really is unbelievable. That, of course, also has a lot to do with this very painful relationship of the 'colonial master' with its subject.
What's so interesting is that there is this Werner Herzog film called Echoes from a Somber Empire, and he went in the early '90s to the Central African Republic together with a journalist named Michael Goldsmith, who was almost beaten to death by Bokassa, personally. And they go back to re-track the history of Bokassa - and at the end of the film, we learn that Michael Goldsmith is now dead because he had gone to Liberia to cover the civil war where he gets killed. So there are some very interesting intertextualities between [Herzog's] film and my film.
Murty: You briefly alluded to Conrad's Heart of Darkness in the film. You said that if the Congo is the 'heart of darkness,' then -- and you put a humorous twist on it -- then the Central African Republic is its 'appendix.'
Brügger: Yes, exactly.
Murty: So much of what Conrad depicted seems to still be existing in Africa today, over a century later. Were you consciously thinking of Conrad and what he depicted as you set out on your own journey?
Brügger: Look at the Head of State Security [the obese ex-French Legionnaire shown in the film]. He's like Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now. He is in 'the horror,' you know. [...]
It's a total dog-eat-dog world, and the new boss on the block is definitely going to be the Chinese. They are all very worried about the Chinese. They were personally telling me, you know, 'be careful about the Chinese.' And I would ask, 'but where are they?' 'Are they here at all?' And they would say, 'yes, they are here -- but they are very sneaky. We never see them, but they are here.'
Apuzzo: I wanted to ask you about that, because there was a statement you made in the middle of the film about a 'new Cold War' between the U.S. and China. You're obviously very concerned, having done The Red Chapel, with communist tyrannies, and so forth. Do you actually think there's a coming Cold War between the U.S. and China?
Brügger: I think that could very well be. Just look at what China's doing now in the Pacific ... and the scale of what they're doing in China is mind-blowing -- how much money they're bringing in, how many natural resources they're bringing in. They're bankrolling, for instance, Mugabe -- who is like an African Hitler, basically. He is the devil incarnate. By buying his diamonds, they keep his regime going -- which is criminal, I think.
For me, the defining moment with Sino-African politics is China inviting [Sudanese President] Omar al-Bashir to Beijing. He is a wanted criminal, wanted for crimes against humanity [the Darfur genocide], and yet they take him to Beijing and treat him with a state banquet, which is really depraved. And for sure there are tensions in Africa between the West and China, and they will become worse, I believe.
Apuzzo: Changing subjects, there's this idea we have in the West nowadays that it is the West that is exclusively victimizing Africa. And you depict quite a bit of that in your film, obviously. But it seems that the breakthrough of your film is in showing how through these despotic tyrannies Africans also victimize themselves.
Brügger: About 8 million people were killed during the time of Belgian rule, but what is going on today has a lot to do with what Africans are doing to themselves. Also, you know, they have this 'zero-sum' thinking. So if it's going well for you, an African would tend to believe 'something is going wrong for me.' It's not possible for you to do good, without somebody else doing bad. So they will start to envy you, and hate you. And that kind of thinking, you know, really destroys a society.
Murty: One of the other things that was heartbreaking was that scene where M. Gilbert is being confronted by his wife at the diamond mine. There's some sort of a fracas, and he says: "don't shame me in front of the white men." That was a very interesting moment, that there's still this sense of inferiority vis-a-vis 'white' culture, and a feeling of subservience, and how that mindset is hard to break.
Brügger: It has to do with how complex a thing racism is in Africa - because there's white vs. black racism, but there's also black-on-black, black-on-Chinese, blacks being racist toward white people ...
Apuzzo: Tribal rivalries ...
Brügger: ... tribal rivalries, which are also tearing countries apart. So it [racism] is really a very sinister thing in Africa.
Apuzzo: I want to ask you about your relationship with the pygmies. [Brügger employs members of a pygmy tribe to work in a match factory that will serve as the cover for his attempted diamond smuggling in the film.] What was that actually like behind the scenes?
Brügger: Pretty much as it was in the scenes. Actually, I think they were severely damaged from binge drinking. They do drink a lot, the pygmy people, at least in the vicinity of Bangui. But we were, of course, worlds apart. There wasn't much that connects me with a pygmy. What is there to talk about, you know?
Apuzzo: Let me tell you something that I found interesting about their [the pygmies] presence in the film -- that reminded me of something in The Red Chapel. In The Red Chapel you went over to North Korea with the handicapped comedian, Jacob Nossell -- and the thing that occurred to me watching The Ambassador was that you were actually depicting in both films how handicapped people, or the weak, the infirm -- how they end up being treated in these despotic societies. The way that the pygmies were outcasts from society, just the way your friend Jacob was treated in North Korea.
Brügger: That's true. When North Korean people met Jacob, in that regard he was like the black swan. They would ask him if he was drunk, or if he was sick, because they'd never seen a person with his kind of handicap before. As with Albert and Bernard [the pygmies in The Ambassador] and with pygmies in general, they are outcasts, they are abused, they are looked down upon, there's a lot of racism regarding pygmies. And there are these horrible occurrences in the Congo where rebels have killed and eaten pygmies - it's atavistic, to get part of their 'magical powers' inside them. So, you know, the ones paying the highest price for dysfunctional African states are the pygmies.
Murty: It's interesting how so often in societies that live according to mythological thinking the outcast figure -- the sacrificial figure, as it were -- is also considered the figure who can bring magic, and who must be controlled or exploited in some manner. I guess the pygmies were those figures in that community. I just feel very sad for the pygmies, themselves. [...]
You also bring up the fact that it's next to impossible to do business there. For people who are well-meaning, Western people who want to do development in Africa and help -- the whole idea of development being that you don't give people hand-outs, but you build things so they can run them themselves ...
Brügger: That doesn't work there.
Murty: Is there any hope? How will things improve there?
Brügger: I think it's a situation of utter despair. Some of the diplomats in Bangui told me they believed that within the vicinity of 15 or 20 years the country will no longer exist, because they can barely uphold their own sovereignty. They only have two thousand soldiers to protect an area the size of Texas. They have the Lord's Resistance Army there - this crazy, border-crossing, rebel group headed by a transvestite wizard called Joseph Kony. You have two or three different rebel groups. You have highway robbers from Chad.
Apuzzo: On that point I wanted to ask you something that was touched on in the film - the possibility of M. Gilbert's terrorist ties or connections ...
Murty: ... to an organization that was one of the funders of Hamas.
Apuzzo: What did you make of that?
Brügger: Hassan el Bakas? Well, I discovered for sure that Hassan el Bakas exists, and he's a real figure, so that checked out -- what the State Security guy was saying. And that he is a very shady and sinister guy. [...]
Apuzzo: Who are your favorite filmmakers?
Brügger: Werner Herzog, of course. A Swedish director called Roy Andersson, he's not very well known outside of Scandinavia. Lars von Trier, he's really a master. Todd Solondz. I like his sense of humor; I really like the film Palindromes -- I think it's his best film ever.
Murty: What about classic Danish filmmakers? For example, Benjamin Christensen in the '20s made Haxan/An Account of Witchcraft and Magic through the Ages, and then also Dreyer, The Passion of Joan of Arc ...
Brügger: Of course Dreyer is on my list, you know, he was probably the biggest Danish filmmaker ever.
Apuzzo: This is the second film in a row you've done, the purpose of which is to expose corruption. Is that how you conceive your mission as a filmmaker and as a journalist?
Brügger: Of course, journalism and humanism go hand in hand. And I think of them as very humanistic films- - almost to a spiritual level.
Murty: In your films, underneath all of your satire, and your exposure of the horror of what you're seeing -- you have a deeply humanistic vision, a sense of outraged morality at your core. Of course, coming from northern Europe, there's a humanistic tradition that goes back to Erasmus ... I see your films and I also think of paintings by Brueghel or by Hieronymus Bosch in terms of the grotesque human behavior you expose. Do you see yourself as part of that tradition?
Brügger: Well you know [looking abashed], I don't think of myself in terms of Brueghel and the classic painters, but Denmark is in many ways the ultimate expression of humanism -- which you can also feel in the way Danish people trust the state. Danish people believe that people of authority are like The Smurfs. Benevolent people. [Laughs.] But that is because there is so much trust among citizens in Denmark, among citizens and the authorities. It's one of the least corrupt societies in the world, you know.
At the same time, it's also a very matriarchal society. Most of the schooling system, the universities, are defined by and led by women. And this creates a situation in which a lot of men of my generation have problems with authority. I sure do. That also in many ways defines the kind of journalism that I do.
Murty: Were there other things in your upbringing that shaped your particular vision as a filmmaker - in terms of either you family, or your education?
Brügger: Well of course my mother and father being journalists ... My father was the editor-in-chief of Denmark's biggest business daily, the Financial Times of Denmark, while my mother worked for twenty years at Denmark's biggest tabloid, exposing scandals about politicians. In some ways I am a synthesis of this - the tabloid/yellow press thinking, and the more traditional business journalism. In a way, it is a strange mix of Borat and The Economist.
Murty: You mentioned the humanistic vision of your films - but also about the spiritual element, as well. What is your own spiritual inspiration as you tackle these very difficult subjects?
Apuzzo: In other words, what sustains you as you descend into hell?
Brügger: [Laughs.] In Danish we have an expression, "to do the white cut." That is a Danish expression for a lobotomy. It is also a metaphor, to "give yourself the white cut." ... It's an act of letting everything else go. Just doing it.
Murty: Almost like a Zen-type moment. Entering the void. Losing your mindfulness.
Brügger: Yes, going 'all-in.' Without any considerations of what will happen to you, what will happen to other people, just doing it. So when I'm in it, I'm 'all-in.' ]]>With Great Power: A Conversation with Stan Lee at Slamdance 2012tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.12458312012-02-01T09:22:23-05:002012-04-02T05:12:01-04:00Jason Apuzzohttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jason-apuzzo/
With hits like Thor, Captain America and X-Men: First Class dominating the box office in 2011, and upcoming films like The Avengers and The Amazing Spider-Man looking to light up the summer in 2012, you'd think that a man whose career in comic books began just prior to World War II might want to slow down.
Think again -- because this 89 year-old dynamo is named Stan Lee.
This year's Sundance Film Festival offered a smorgasbord of art-house delights, but its competitor across the street -- the scrappy Slamdance Film Festival -- presented one of Park City's best events last week when it hosted comic book legend Stan Lee for a two-hour master class associated with Slamdance's screening of the new documentary, With Great Power: The Stan Lee Story. Just two days after receiving the Vanguard Award from the Producers Guild of America, Lee breezed into Park City to spend a special two hours with filmmakers and journalists prior to the With Great Power screening, discussing his extraordinary career as the creator of iconic characters like Spider-Man, Iron Man, the Hulk, Thor, the X-Men and the Fantastic Four.
And if anything was clear at the end of the master class and screening, it was this: The keys to Stan Lee's ongoing success are his earthy humor, humanity and incredible vitality. The man simply doesn't know how to slow down. As Lee says in With Great Power about being the impresario of today's comic book cinema: "I'm having fun! Don't punish me by making me retire."
A flinty and funny raconteur with a baritone New York accent, Lee spent much of his time at the Slamdance master class describing his colorful early days in which he was alternately a rebellious office boy for a trouser manufacturer (he made a mess of his store after being fired two days before Christmas), an obituary writer (he found the job morbid), and even a Broadway theater usher (he once tripped and fell flat on his face while escorting Eleanor Roosevelt to her seat at the Rivoli Theater in New York).
Lee finally got his big break in late 1941 when he became interim editor at Timely Comics, which would eventually evolve under his leadership into Marvel Comics. Then known as 'Stanley Lieber' (his name at birth, as the son of Romanian-Jewish immigrants), Lee was first given the chance to provide text filler for a May 1941 edition of Captain America Comics -- and he hasn't looked back since.
A passionate reader, Lee described in detail how literature fueled his imagination as a young person. "I read everybody when I was young -- Charles Dickens, H.G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, [Edgar Rice] Burroughs' Tarzan. I read everything I could get my hands on." Lee also cited Shakespeare as an influence on the style of language for Thor, drily noting that Thor "was supposed to be a Norse god -- I couldn't have him talk like a guy who was born in Brooklyn. I loved Shakespeare, and I read Shakespeare when I was young. I probably didn't understand most of it, but I loved the sound of it." Lee's fascination with Shakespeare continues to this day, with Lee and 1821 Comics collaborating on the new graphic novel Romeo and Juliet: The War, a sci-fi retelling of Shakespeare's classic love story which debuted last week.
Lee also developed an early love of the movies. When I asked Lee what movies had influenced him, he was quick to cite Errol Flynn's adventure films of the 1930s and '40s.
"I watched everything that was adventure -- anything that Errol Flynn was in. He was my idol, I wanted to be Errol Flynn! In fact, I would leave the theater when I was about 12 years old -- I'd have a crooked little smile on my face the way he [Flynn] smiled, I had an imaginary sword at my side, and I was looking for some little girl that a bully was picking on so I could protect her. I wanted to be Errol Flynn so badly. And of course I liked King Kong, Dracula, Frankenstein -- any of those big movies of those days. And I also liked the 'real' movies with Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable."
Lee's career would take off in the 1960s, beginning with the launch of the Fantastic Four series. Lee described what was arguably his most important innovation at that time: bringing realistic psychology and more recognizably human frailties to his superhero characters. When I asked him what he'd learned over the years about creating compelling characters like Peter Parker (Spider-Man) or Dr. Bruce Banner (The Hulk), he talked about the need "to make make the character empathetic and likable as best you can."
"When you create a character, no matter how fantastic the character is, you try to make him in some way believable -- as if there could be somebody like this. And then you try to make him likable so that the reader really hopes that the character succeeds at whatever he's trying to do. Beyond that, I don't know how to explain it. You do whatever you can to make that character appealing to a reader or to an audience. And you do that by the way you have the character talk, by the personality you give the character. What you're doing is creating -- you're like a sculptor, you're creating a being. And you can either make the being dull, or you can make the being interesting."
Since the 'Silver Age' of comic books in the 1960s, Lee's most vivid characters -- Thor, Iron Man, the Hulk, the Silver Surfer, Spider-Man and others -- have become part of American pop-mythology, similar to creations from Walt Disney, Mark Twain, Jim Henson or George Lucas. Not surprisingly, the highly erudite Lee -- who can still quote long passages from Shakespeare -- associates some of this with having steeped himself in mythology as a young man. "I read Greek mythology, Norse mythology, Roman -- whatever I could find. I love mythology, I love fairy tales. I love anything bigger than life and imaginative and dramatic."
When my Libertas Film Magazine co-editor Govindini Murty asked Lee whether he believed his characters are mythological figures for today, he smiled and became philosophical. "It would be nice if some day in the future they were thought of as our mythology," he explained. "That would be great."
Lee's full cultural impact is explored in the new documentary With Great Power: The Stan Lee Story, which was picked up for distribution by the EPIX channel just prior to its screening at Slamdance. With Great Power is a comprehensive and heartfelt account of Lee's life and career from his early days growing up in the Depression to his rise as the prime mover behind Marvel Comics and today's comic book revolution at the movies.
Over 60 interviews were conducted for With Great Power, and the film features appearances from Samuel L. Jackson, Nicolas Cage, Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst and many of Lee's colleagues. The film, a labor of love for its production team, also provides a rare, at-home glimpse into the man behind the Marvel phenomenon. With Great Power (which derives its title from a line in the original 1962 Spider-Man story: "With great power there must also come -- great responsibility!") is the result of over five years of work by a trio of directors -- Terry Dougas, Will Hess, and Nikki Frakes -- as well as a significant archival effort that unearthed Lee's work on over 500 pop-culture characters.
Although Lee's diehard fans will likely be familiar with Lee's story from the 1960s forward, With Great Power also takes an in-depth look at many of his early challenges -- including censorship battles waged against the comic book industry during the 1950s by psychiatrist Dr. Fredric Wertham. Wertham and his followers believed that comic books promoted youth 'delinquency,' and their lobbying and regulatory efforts nearly derailed Lee's career before Lee mounted a major comeback in the 1960s.
With Great Power also documents Lee's extensive efforts to give credit to his colleagues (particularly Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko) for Marvel's success. Importantly, the film also introduces fans to Lee's quick-witted and vivacious wife of almost 65 years, Joan Lee, and explores their touching relationship and the vital role she plays in inspiring her husband. With Great Power debuts on the EPIX channel on April 27.
Of course, with huge successes over the past decade and a seemingly endless array of projects now in the pipeline (at the end of the master class, it took him almost 20 minutes to describe all of his current projects in development), Lee has made the full transition from promoter of 'delinquency' to national institution. His fans, once mostly teenagers, now include a worldwide readership of every generation, along with filmmakers, scholars and even presidents. Indeed, With Great Power begins with Lee receiving the National Medal of Arts from President George W. Bush, and during the master class Lee proudly recollected how President Reagan had been an avid reader of Spider-Man.
But Lee clearly takes his greatest pride in his many characters, the imaginative creations that form his legacy. Of his many characters, Lee singled out the Silver Surfer as possibly his favorite. "I had the Silver Surfer make what I thought were philosophical comments about man, and where we're going, and why we're the way we are. [...] I tried to put all the things I think of into the Silver Surfer's dialogue, so that's why I enjoyed him very much." (Lee's favorite of his villains? Dr. Doom.)
To say that Lee's plate is full these days would be a Hulk-sized understatement. On the immediate horizon he's launching a new line of 'reality' comic books, a series of children's books, a new YouTube partnership with Michael Eisner, a live rock opera, a new website, a new slate of international superheroes (hailing from India, China and South America), and he has two TV series and four new movies in development.
And, of course, Lee is looking forward to The Avengers and The Amazing Spider-Man this summer, along with Marvel's forthcoming Ghost Rider sequel. Speaking about The Avengers, the voluble Lee nearly jumped out of his chair: "Wait till you see my cameo in that one! It's the funniest one I've done yet. I can't wait to see it myself. And it's the same with Spider-Man -- it's unusual."
When it comes to advice for young writers, Lee urged his audience to first and foremost write what they themselves enjoy.
"I write stories that I think I would like to read, and I hope there are enough people who have the same taste I do. I'm not that unique -- I'm adorable, but I'm not that unique," he quips. "I just write to please myself. [...] I have to confess: I am my biggest fan. I love everything I write, because if I didn't love it, I wouldn't write it."
It's fortunate that so many generations of Stan Lee's readers love what he writes, as well.]]>Why The Cold War Is Back at the Movies in The Iron Lady, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy & Mission Impossibletag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.12052042012-01-13T18:04:16-05:002012-03-14T05:12:01-04:00Jason Apuzzohttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jason-apuzzo/
This weekend moviegoers can watch Meryl Streep portray ardent Cold Warrior Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, Gary Oldman root out a dangerous Soviet mole from the British intelligence service in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and Tom Cruise race to prevent a Cold War-style nuclear exchange between America and Russia in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol.
These films form part of a major Hollywood trend toward reawakening memories of the Cold War -- an era that is suddenly returning with a vengeance on the big screen, with long-term implications for our popular culture.
Currently in the midst of an awards-season run, for example, Clint Eastwood's J. Edgar tells the story of legendary FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's decades'-long confrontation with Soviet infiltration of America. Also in the midst of an awards-season run is the ominous new documentary Khodorkovsky, which depicts how little Russia's authoritarian governing style has changed since the dark days of the old Soviet Union.
And the trend doesn't stop there. If Santa slipped new Blu-rays of Transformers: Dark of the Moon, X-Men: First Class, Apollo 18 or The Kennedys into your Christmas stocking, you just got another healthy dose of Cold War nostalgia from those films -- because 2011 was a watershed year in Hollywood for reviving America's long-standing rivalry with all things Russian and/or communist.
So, what's going on here? Why is Hollywood suddenly reviving Russian communists, spies and autocrats as the go-to villains of choice?
The simplest answer may be that the old Soviet Union is gradually replacing Nazi Germany, Imperial Rome and space aliens as Hollywood's favorite antagonists. In an industry still hesitant to make films about today's War on Terror, and with memories of World War II fading, Russian authoritarians -- including those of the present day variety -- are on their way to becoming Hollywood's safe, consensus villains of the moment.
This trend began in 2008, with, of all things, an Indiana Jones film. Set in 1957 at the height of the Cold War, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull featured Soviet communists as the villains, and despite grumbling from critics and internet fanboys the film played well in middle America -- taking in over $317 million domestically (a figure even Ghost Protocol seems unlikely to match) and $786 worldwide. Perhaps just as significantly, the fact that the film had been made by Steven Spielberg and George Lucas seemingly gave the green light to other left-of-center filmmakers that depicting Reds as the villains was OK again.
Soon Angelina Jolie was hunting sleeper Soviet agents in Salt (2010), Ed Harris and Colin Farrell were escaping a brutal Soviet gulag in Peter Weir's extraordinary The Way Back (2010), and even Richard Gere and Martin Sheen were getting in on the act -- smoking out a Russian mole in The Double (2011). Released here in the U.S. in 2010, Fred Ward played Ronald Reagan in the French Cold War spy thriller Farewell, and Renny Harlin's action-drama 5 Days of War (2011) depicted the brutality of Russia's recent invasion of Georgia.
To be fair, Russians haven't been the only villains in this trend. MGM's forthcoming remake of Red Dawn (read a review of an early cut of the film here) depicts a communist invasion of America by the North Koreans and Chinese, similar to the invasion of Australia depicted in Stuart Beattie's recent thriller Tomorrow, When the War Began (2010). Bruce Beresford's touching Mao's Last Dancer (2009) recreated in heartbreaking detail the restrictions in Chinese communist society on artists. And perhaps no recent film captured communist tyranny more vividly than Mads Brügger's gonzo documentary from 2009 on North Korea, The Red Chapel.
This movie revival of the Cold War -- in its many Russian, Chinese and North Korean variations -- has intriguing implications. For the past generation, many left-of-center filmmakers have been deeply invested in the notion that the Cold War was a kind of paranoid mirage, a tragicomic figment of Ronald Reagan and Whittaker Chambers' imaginations. With few exceptions, the basic image created by these filmmakers of the Cold War -- codified in films like Dr. Strangelove (1964), or more recently in Good Night, and Good Luck (2005) -- has been one of an artificial conflict fueled by American militarism and bourgeois small-mindedness. The sardonic The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming (1966) serves as perhaps the sine qua non of this genre.
This vision of the Cold War appears to be changing, however, among younger, less ideologically driven filmmakers. These filmmakers view the Cold War simply as a fertile field of storytelling possibilities about the struggle for freedom, in much the same way an older generation viewed World War II. Filmmakers today seem more eager to tell such stories about the Cold War, unearthing the past and depicting the sharp political divisions between East and West, perhaps because these filmmakers detect a continuity between communist tyrannies of the 20th century and similarly repressive regimes today.
After all, Brezhnev and Mao may be gone -- but an ex-KGB man still runs Russia, and communists still run repressive regimes in China and North Korea. And America's relationship with these nations sometimes seems no better than it was before.
Today's Hollywood seems alive to these realities as never before, as reflected in a slate of new projects in the development pipeline that channel Cold War themes. Along with sequels to Salt, X-Men: First Class, Die Hard (with Die Hard 5 set to take place in Russia), and even Top Gun, work is also underway to re-boot the Jack Ryan franchise with Chris Pine in a new thriller called Moscow. Remakes of famous Cold War properties like Ice Station Zebra, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and even Colossus: The Forbin Project are also in development -- along with adaptations of the books Londongrad, The Reluctant Communist, and the Red Star comic book.
On TV, HBO and FX are working on competing series about '80s-era Soviet spies in the U.S., and HBO reportedly has another series in development about Cold War spies in Berlin.
As if that were not enough, Gerard Butler and Ed Harris will soon be trying to stop rogue Russian generals and KGB agents from starting World War III in Hunter Killer and Phantom, respectively. Or if your sensibilities run toward the art house, Andrzej Wajda is currently directing a biopic of Polish Solidarity leader Lech Walesa.
Granted, it shouldn't be assumed that these films will express a uniformity of opinion about the Cold War, or about current international tensions. Indeed, several recent films like The Iron Lady, J. Edgar, and X-Men: First Class express a pronounced ambivalence about the Cold Warriors they depict.
Watching The Iron Lady, for example, you would hardly know why the Soviet Red Army newspaper labelled Margaret Thatcher "the Iron Lady" in the first place. The film is weirdly evasive of Thatcher's vital role in ending the Cold War -- barely alluding to it except in brief moments of Thatcher with Reagan and Gorbachev, or attending an event commemorating the end of the Cold War. The Iron Lady seems more concerned with Thatcher's current state of physical fragility than in her momentous alliances with Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II and Lech Walesa in hastening the collapse of the Soviet state.
Still, the fascination that films like The Iron Lady or J. Edgar have with Cold Warriors of the past is obvious. And certainly none of these recent films bothers to romanticize the communist cause. Indeed, the days in Hollywood of dueling Che Guevara biopics (Che, The Motorcycle Diaries) -- or of Katherine Hepburn wearing a frayed Mao jacket to the Oscars -- seem long gone.
The Cold War is back in Hollywood, but this time the idea seems to be to support the winning side.]]>
