Full-length theatrical trailer for the Coen Brothers remake of True Grit, to be released Xmas, 2010.
Shorter Mattie’s-eye-view version with music by the Peasall Sisters, labeled a teaser trailer:
The Dude standing in for the Duke will be interesting to see. The trailers suggest that the Coen Brothers’ version will be darker and scarier than the 1969 Henry Hathaway original.
According to Mr. Griggs, some prospective crew members on his new documentary, “I Want Your Money,†which takes aim at President Obama’s economic policies, said they would accept jobs on the condition that their names be left off the credits. Mr. Griggs suspects that a politically motivated makeup artist even tried to sabotage the movie by giving him a distinctly unflattering look.
But his film, like “Fahrenheit†before it, is now to be released in a heated political season. And that is at least a minor triumph for one of the less visible minorities: the Hollywood right.
Scheduled by Freestyle Releasing to open in about 500 theaters on Oct. 15.
Titanic and Avatar director and noted Warmist James Cameron apparently recently chickened out of a debate with skeptics he arranged himself.
One of his disappointed opponents, Anne McElhinney, tells her story.
Last March James Cameron sounded defiant.
The Avatar director was determined to expose journalists, such as myself, who thought it was important to ask questions about climate change orthodoxy and the radical “solutions” being proposed.
Cameron said was itching to debate the issue and show skeptical journalists and scientists that they were wrong.
“I want to call those deniers out into the street at high noon and shoot it out with those boneheads,” he said in an interview. …
[A] few weeks ago… [h]is representatives contacted myself and two other well known skeptics, Marc Morano of the Climate Depot website and Andrew Breitbart, the new media entrepreneur.
Mr. Cameron was attending the AREDAY environmental conference in Aspen Colorado 19-22 August. He wanted the conference to end with a debate on climate change. Cameron would be flanked with two scientists. It would be 90 minutes long. It would be streamed live on the internet.
They hoped the debate would attract a lot of media coverage.
“We are delighted to have Fox News, Newsmax, The Washington Times and anyone else you’d like. The more the better,” one of James Cameron’s organizers said in an email.
It looked like James Cameron really was a man of his word who would get to take on the skeptics he felt were so endangering humanity.
Everyone on our side agreed with their conditions. The debate was even listed on the AREDAY agenda.
But then as the debate approached James Cameron’s side started changing the rules.
They wanted to change their team. We agreed.
They wanted to change the format to less of a debate—to “a roundtable”. We agreed.
Then they wanted to ban our cameras from the debate. We could have access to their footage. We agreed.
Bizarrely, for a brief while, the worlds most successful film maker suggested that no cameras should be allowed-that sound only should be recorded. We agreed
Then finally James Cameron, who so publicly announced that he “wanted to call those deniers out into the street at high noon and shoot it out,” decided to ban the media from the shoot out.
He even wanted to ban the public. The debate/roundtable would only be open to those who attended the conference.
No media would be allowed and there would be no streaming on the internet. No one would be allowed to record it in any way.
We all agreed to that.
And then, yesterday, just one day before the debate, his representatives sent an email that Mr. “shoot it out ” Cameron no longer wanted to take part. The debate was cancelled.
For Mr. Cameron: Monty Python’s Ballad of Sir Robin 2:02 video
Shooting of the film version of Atlas Shrugged, after years and years of rumors, actually began over the weekend, Variety reports.
No Angelina Jolie as Dagny, no (magically young again) Max von Sydow as John Galt. Also no James Cameron-scale hundred million dollar production. No major studios. Just a humble $5 million independent production.
Shooting started Saturday because the producers were contractually obligated to begin the five-week shoot or lose the rights to Ayn Rand’s novel.
I’m not sure what those two guys have to do with one another, but the video is amusing, Karen and I both like Joss Whedon‘s shows (Dollhouse not so much), and I tend to feel a personal responsibility in blogging to include as much Glenn Reynolds-friendly libertarian nerd culture material as possible. Besides, when I blog it, that means I don’t have to email it to friends.
As found in James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) by Neoneocon commenter Jim Sullivan:
It’s OK to kill things as long as you use a bow and arrow and not a gun or missile.
Teh Interwebz au Naturale of the Allmother (or whatever the f*** the Giganto-smurfs called her) beats the technology of a species that has harvested the power of the atom, is capable of celestial travel, and has armored the unholy f*** out of everything. Also:
It’s a much better way to call up your bizarro world rhino and pterodactyl allies (the ones that previously wanted to eat you) than a Tarzan call or a Conch shell. But, you still have to send the Dire-pony express to the Four Corners of the world to rally the tribes.
Soldiers are bad unless they are A) not Caucasian or B) handi-capped. All other soldiers are A)psychopaths B) mindless myrmidons or C) nameless cannon fodder (or in this case arrow fodder)
Even shallow, selfish, homicidal savages are good because they’re…savages and therefore inherently and unquestionably noble.
The best way for primitive screw-heads to fight off a technologically superior, militarily sophisticated force is to fight the superior force on their terms. Asymmetric strategy, insurgent tactics and guerrilla warfare couldn’t possibly even the odds. Not in a million years.
All scientists are compassionate and resent the very soldiers prepared to die to protect them. This is completely reasonable and in no way intellectually dishonest. Hollywood decrees it!
Subjugating other species is wrong… unless you are able to have mind-blowing ponytail intercourse and biologically hack into their brain. Then it’s OK.
When you encounter a new mineral that floats and causes whole mountain ranges to float, the coolest, catchiest, most marketable name for it is Unobtainium. After you succeed in mining it, it semantically transforms,a la magma/lava, into HaHaHa!It’sAllMine-ite.
When the nobly savage Giganto-smurfs, the Emo-scientists and their Land-networked planetary defense menagerie evict the eeevil military-capitalist Gestapo from their idyllic floating mountain paradise back to their ecologically dead world, the nature frolickers all live happily ever after. There’s no chance in hell that those same military-capitalists will return with a full blown invasion fleet. Never happen. Hollywood decrees it!
Anne C. Heller, author of the recent biography Ayn Rand and the World She Made, discusses Ayn Rand’s Hollywood years with the Wall Street Journal’s Steven Kurutz in this 3:53 video.
You are rich, immortal, a century old vampire who has all the learning and experience of very long human lifetime, the opportunity to live anywhere you choose and do anything you like, but a personal need for privacy, anonymity, and –of course– routine access to prey.
Naturally, you select the rural, 3,000 population town of Forks, Washington over Paris, London, Shanghai, and New York, attend high school and become romantically (and non-predaciously) involved with a 17 year old girl, and you dine on deer.
It was the high school part that gave Karen and myself the most serious problem. We both felt strongly that, were we vampires ourselves, we would consider high school in the upper rank of the same category of undesirable things as garlic, stakes, and crucifixes.
Karen and I actually read several volumes of the Twilight young adult series a few years ago when it began attracting wide attention. We found the novels readable enough, at least in the early portion of the series. The energy and marginal plausibility of character motivation and behavior seemed to weaken significantly in later volumes, and we quit reading before the series reached its conclusion.
As everyone knows, vampires have become a favorite theme in popular culture, offering the female audience male leads combining power and sophistication with melancholy complexity. The vampire is, of course, the bad boy par excellence offering an otherwise unequaled opportunity for any girl to give him the special understanding he needs and then to redeem him by her love.
David Kahane, at National Review Online, finds fuel for the next box office blockbuster in some recent headline.
[W]e still can’t sell scripts about “Muslim terrorists,†but a celebrity death match between the Central Intelligence Agency and the person who stands second to the vice president in the line of succession to the White House should any, you know, unfortunate accident befall the leader of the free world, is right up our alley. Which is why I was first off the mark last week when Nancy D’Alesandro Pelosi, the flower of Baltimore and the pride of San Francisco, accidentally pulled the pin on a live hand grenade in front of the fiercely independent Washington press corps and blew herself up.
She wasn’t trying to, of course. She was trying to explain to a bunch of less-than-enchanted media stenographers who would rather be covering Michelle Obama’s workout, or even Bo the dog’s breakfast, that the nasty, un-American CIA has deliberately “misled†her when discussing just precisely how they were going to insert bamboo shoots under the fingernails of a caterpillar that they would then waterboard and introduce into the cell of some totally innocent mujahedin caught up in the lawless Bush-Cheney dragnet during the hysteria that followed the inside job that was 9/11 and . . .
Zzzzzzzzzzzz.
In the other corner we have the Central Intelligence Agency, which we in Tinseltown have been depicting for years as just about the most malevolent organization in the world, outside of the Catholic Church, the Club for Growth, and the Cheney family. In movie after movie, the shadowy CIA guy always wound up as the villain in the last reel. So imagine our surprise when, during the Bushitler interregnum, we discovered that the CIA is on our side, and has been for decades! Screwed up the whole Shah of Iran thing and opened the way for the mullahs? Check! Consistently overrated and then failed to forecast the sudden disintegration of the Soviet Union? Check!! Never did quite figure out what Osama bin Laden was up to? Check!!!
To top it all off, along came super-top-secret agent/Vanity Fair babe Valerie Plame and her dashing, Graydon-Carter-tressed hubby, Joe Wilson, running a sting operation against the hapless Bush White House, whipsawing the president and the veep with Joe’s unprovoked New York Times tale of sipping mint tea with Colonel Kurtz up the Congo and all of sudden there’s shouting about the “sixteen words†in Chimpy’s State of the Union address and Valerie is outed by Cheney flunky Scooter Libby — okay, by Colin Powell flunky Dick Armitage, same thing — and then Judy Miller goes to jail and . . .
Zzzzzzzzzzzz.
[H]ere’s the script that just made me a cool $1.5 mil plus five monkey points plus two first-class tickets to the premiere: Three Days of the Dodo Bird.
We open in Abu Ghraib prison, post-“Mission Accomplished,†where a SHADOWY CIA AGENT gets the bright idea to strike fear into the hearts of America’s “enemies†by photographing completely innocent prisoners in outrageous situations (piled naked on top of each other, led around on a dog leash by a woman, forced to wear panties on their heads) calculated to offend and inflame the sensibilities of the Religion of Peace. Now, you and I both know that these kinds of things happen every week at the right Hollywood parties, and they’re tons of fun, but for some weird cultural reason the photos are deemed offensive, the super-top-secret psy-war campaign winds up on the front page of the Times every day for a year, and the Shi’ites hit the fan.
Recent political developments have made Ayn Rand’s masterpiece timely and topical and Hollywood.com reports that financing may be in the works to begin production of the film version.
Charleze Theron seems to have replaced Angelina Jolie as the front runner to play Dagny Taggart.
Ryan Kavanaugh is said to be circling the eternally stuck-in-development-hell big-screen adaptation of Ayn Rand’s self-styled ‘magnum opus,’ Atlas Shrugged.
Kavanaugh’s Relativity Media, according to the Risky Biz blog, could come aboard to finance the Baldwin Entertainment project with Lionsgate.
While Angelina Jolie was the most recent name attached to play protagonist Dagny Taggart, the blog says that other stars now interested include Charlize Theron, Julia Roberts and Anne Hathaway.
Given the book’s themes of individualism that resonate in the era of Obama, government bailouts and stimulus packages, this could be the perfect time to finally get the book to the screen.
“This couldn’t be more timely,” Karen Baldwin, who along with husband Howard is producing, told BIZ. “It’s uncanny what Rand was able to predict — about the only things she didn’t anticipate are cell phones and the Internet.”
With the recession, the book has experienced a resurgence. As of today, it is listed as top seller on Amazon in the Literature & Fiction Literary and Classics categories.
The story first appeared at Hollywood Reporter’s Risky Biz blog.
Angelina Jolie, since Laura Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), has made something of a personal specialty of portraying female comic book (or video game) heroines with superhuman abilities at striking both targets and cool poses.
In America, chicks-with-guns is (Example 1, Example 2) is a popular pin-up picture and video genre, but Puritan statism’s hostility to guns is far more advanced in Britain.
Just watching voluptuous Angelina Jolie strike provocative shooting poses could shatter British phlegm and impel legions of bowler-hatted, umbrella-toting Essex men to fly their cubicles and turn to Quentin Tarantino-style orgies of violence, or at least so evidently supposes Britain’s Advertising Standards Authority which has banned the 0:35 minute trailer for Angelina’s new film.
A television advert for the film Wanted, in which Angelina Jolie was shown firing a bullet towards the audience, has been banned by media watchdogs for glamorising violence.
The promo for the DVD release of the action blockbuster showed Jolie kissing co-star James McAvoy during a high-speed car chase before the pair turned and fired their guns in the direction of the viewer. For good measure, a voiceover described Wanted as “the coolest movie of the year”.
The advert received just one complaint from the public, but the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) said it suggested that “using guns was sexy and glamorous”, which breached the code for television.
The move follows the ASA’s decision in September to ban billboard posters for the film’s theatrical release. These featured Jolie and McAvoy holding guns in a variety of positions in a comic book-style montage of pictures.
