Tag: The Producers

The pimp and the hippie

Since “Get Him to the Greek” has been on our mind lately, and if you haven’t read my mammoth press day interview thingy with cast members Russell Brand, Jonah Hill, Rose Byrne, and writer-director Nicholas Stoller you may do so now, or at your leisure. I’m also happy to report that, whatever the recently returned Nikki Finke is saying, it’s doing somewhat better than expected and defeating the really horrid looking (and, not surprisingly, horribly reviewed) “Killers” as of this moment at the Box Office.

Be that as it may, inspired by a fun piece over at the Playlist on fake bands from movies, along the lines of Aldous Snow’s Infant Sorrow from “Greek.” This weekend, I’ll be presenting some great moments with great fictional cinema bands. I’ll lead with one of the best moments from 2004’s “Hustle and Flow.” I think this was the moment I realized what I was watching was going to be a little more like “The Commitments” and a little less like “Superfly” when I saw it cold at Sundance. (Did I really declare it “the sweetest pimp movie of all time”? Oh, I was young and foolish then.) Since this is a rap tune created by an actual, fictional, pimp played by Terrence Howard, all the usual work-related provisos apply. Also, I wonder about those subtitles on the video. Just how do you translate “Whoop That Trick” into Greek? For that matter, how do you translate it into English?

And now for something completely different. A lot of you are probably familiar with the gay Hitler from the musical version of “The Producers” but fewer of you may know the hippie Hitler played to insane perfection by Dick Shawn in Mel Brooks 1968 original comedy cult-classic. Here, Lorenzo St. Dubois, call him “LSD” for short, sings “Love Power” and grabs the Broadway glass ring with the help of his all-female back-up band.

Thursday night movie news dump

I usually do this on Friday, but the interesting film related stories have been coming fairly hot and heavy all week and it’s time to play catch up. I’m telling you right now, as long as this post is, whatever the most important and interesting story from this eventful week turns out to be, it’ll be the one I skip.

* When I first heard about the project a week or so back, I was taken by the prospect of screenwriter Dustin Lance Black segueing from a biopic about the first openly gay U.S. politician in “Milk” to one about by far the most powerful closeted gay man in American history, J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover was the first director of the FBI starting in 1935 and, in a real blow to our democracy, intimidated several presidents into keeping him in the position until his death in 1972, a shocking 37 years later.

An already interesting project got even more interesting, however, a couple of days back when word got out that none other than Clint Eastwood, who will be joining the very smal club of octogenerian directors this May, might choose to helm it. (The Playlist broke the news on the 10th that Eastwood was “set” to direct; yesterday Borys Kit of The Hollywood Reporter wrote that he was merely “eying” the project.).

Taken together with “Invictus,” this would be the second time the right leaning but independent-minded Republican would be taking on subject matter that deals obliquely with a significant moral failure of American conservatism. Nearly all well-known conservatives tacitly supported both the racist and fascist pre-Mandela South African regime and Hoover’s uninterrupted reign.

In the case of “Invictus,” the idea of him doing it turned out to be more interesting than the film. However, for the man who embodied “get tough” law enforcement concepts as Dirty Harry to take on a law enforcement figure who enjoyed getting tough with anyone who dared to espouse politics he deemed radical — but not the mafia — that’s a horse of a potentially very different color. One to watch.

Clint Eastwood will take your question later

Continue reading »

In which “Basterd” week gets going (updated)

It wouldn’t be the week of a new Quentin Tarantino movie without a little controversy. Now esteemed critic, film historian, and occasional hair-up-his-keister provocateur (not that there’s anything wrong with that!) Jonathan Rosenbaum helpfully supplies it in discussing a Newsweek piece, comparing good ol’ QT to both Holocaust deniers and Sarah Palin in one short blog post. (H/t David Hudson.)

Unlike Rosenbaum, I haven’t seen the movie yet so I’ll withhold comment. However, my bias is obviously pretty pro-Tarantino and pro- not seeing it as some kind of dangerous revisionism. What’s one boldly ahistoric movie against thousands made before it? It’s not like Tarantino’s deleting them from Netflix. I also fail to see how Rosenbaum can even begin to speak for the reaction to the film of real-life Holocaust victims. It’s putting an awful lot of power on the movie to imagine it’s causing any real distress to them without some evidence.

I’m a pretty proud secular Jew myself, so I take the Holocaust seriously. At the same time, I take the sort of ownership some Jewish thinkers take over the history of what happened at the time, and how filmmakers deal with it, with a huge lack of seriousness. Some years back, Roberto Benigni’s Holocaust tearjerker, “Life is Beautiful,” started a different sort of controversy and I felt many took excessive offense. I was moved by the movie, almost despite myself, but I could certainly understand why a lot of people disliked it. However, the level of vituperation still puzzles me. I once listened to two well known Jewish critics verbally bludgeon a well-known Los Angeles rabbi for daring to speak well of the film on a local public radio station. What gave them to right to decide how the rabbi was allowed to react?

Many years before that, Mel Brooks took some heat for daring to make fun of Hitler in the original film of “The Producers.” Even the deadly serious, extremely well received, riveting and thought provoking historical drama “Downfall” worried some because it presenting the monstrous dictator as a human being. That was, I thought, deeply wrong. It’s crucial that we remember, always, that Hitler was as human as any of us lest we start to act as if we are beyond evil, a popular belief among the actually evil.

Of course, adding comedy to anything touching on the Holocaust is really asking for trouble from some quarters. I haven’t been able to dig up a review of “Downfall” by Rosenbaum online, but I wonder what Rosenbaum thinks of the “Downfall” subtitle Internet meme? Would he agree with the take offered below?


UPDATE:
Roger Ebert’s e-mail interview with Tarantino deals with “Basterd” history and actual film history.

© 2023 Premium Hollywood

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑