Tag Archives: film

Meet the Scientific Consultant for the New "Thor" Movie

by John Bui Posted on November 6, 2013

Mother Jones

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Yes, Thor: The Dark World—a new film about a Norse-myth-inspired superhero traveling through space and fighting elves with a hammer—had scientific consultants working on it. One of them was Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology.

“Marvel is very, very interested, with every movie they make, in trying to meet with scientists,” Carroll says. “With real-world sciences and the comic-book universe, they just try to make it all hang together.”

Carroll is a 47-year-old cosmologist who researches in the fields of particle physics and general relativity, and wrote a book on cosmology and time called From Eternity to Here. He was an informal consultant on both Thor: The Dark World and Thor, its 2011 predecessor. He met with the writers, directors, and production staff to help massage the scientific details.

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Meet the Scientific Consultant for the New "Thor" Movie

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Ferrari Won’t Comment on Cameron Diaz Having Sex With Their Car in “The Counselor”

by km10madrid Posted on October 25, 2013

Mother Jones

In the weeks leading up to the Friday release of The Counselor, a collaboration between director Ridley Scott and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Cormac McCarthy, the most talked about scene in the whole movie was by far the one showcasing Cameron Diaz’ deviant car-sexing. “Cameron Diaz sizzles in X-rated dance on Ferrari,” the USA Today headline read. “Cameron Diaz humps a car in new film with Brad Pitt,” the UK tabloid The Sun announced over a year ago. “The Counselor Features the Year’s Most Outrageous Sex Scene,” IGN declared.

The film’s cast is a spread of A-list talent and sex appeal: Michael Fassbender, Penélope Cruz, Javier Bardem, and Brad Pitt. The film is a tense, wild morality play about a suave attorney’s (Fassbender) disastrous foray into drug trafficking. There are plenty of memorable moments in The Counselor, both gruesome and otherwise. But it will forever be remembered as the movie in which Diaz has some crazy sex with a Ferrari.

The scene takes place in the middle of a golf course at night, with the action occurring on top of a parked 2013 Ferrari California HS. Malkina (Diaz) tells her drug-dealing lover Reiner (Bardem, with hair modeled after producer Brian Grazer’s insane spikes) that she intends to “fuck his car” and proceeds to do exactly that while he looks on in confusion and terror. “It was too gynecological to be sexy—almost,” Reiner narrates.

In The Counselor‘s press notes, Diaz describes her character as being “compelled to take the power of every man, devour it, and then break down every woman.”

It’s not clear whether or not the famous Italian automotive company is pleased with the product placement. Ferrari’s press office did not respond to multiple requests for comment about what they thought of Diaz making savagely aberrant love to their vehicle. 20th Century Fox also did not respond to requests for comment on Diaz having all the sex with an expensive yellow car.

For the record, a Bentley also appears in the film. Diaz does not have sex with it.

Here’s an illuminating GIF of a key part of the Ferrari-nookie sequence, via BuzzFeed‘s Kate Aurthur:

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Ferrari Won’t Comment on Cameron Diaz Having Sex With Their Car in “The Counselor”

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Why Stallone and Schwarzenegger’s New Action Flick Might Be the Most Left-Wing Film in Theaters

by Florencepb7 Posted on October 18, 2013

Mother Jones

Escape Plan
Summit Entertainment
116 minutes

This post contains some spoilers… but it’s the new Ahnold and Stallone movie, so I’m guessing that plot detail isn’t your primary concern.

Former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and hardcore gun-control advocate Sylvester Stallone have teamed up once again, this time for Mikael Håfström‘s jailbreak movie Escape Plan. The film is a vehicle for two legendary action stars to relive their days of vanquishing foes and dropping hot one-liners. “You hit like a vegetarian!” Schwarzenegger spits at Stallone as their characters tussle. But this action flick (written by Miles Chapman and Jason Keller) is also severely critical of military contractors, indefinite detention, solitary confinement, and private prison companies. In fact, the real villain of the movie is the for-profit prison industry. On top of this, Escape Plan presents a vigorous rejection of post-9/11, anti-Muslim fear-mongering. Call it shoot-’em-up liberal escapism, if you will.

Stallone plays Ray Breslin, a prosecutor-turned-security-expert who is paid by the government to test the security of maximum-security prisons—by posing as a prisoner and breaking out of them, of course. His team features 50 Cent as a bespectacled computer nerd, and the Oscar-nominated Amy Ryan as Breslin’s street-smart colleague-with-benefits. Their sweet, lucrative gig is ruined when Breslin is kidnapped and taken to a CIA-backed, privately-run black site that’s like Gitmo on steroids, where the guards torture with impunity (a hose shoved down a prisoner’s throat is a stand-in for waterboarding). The detention facility is described as “completely illegal” by one character. To break out of the prison, codenamed “The Tomb,” Breslin teams up with fellow inmate Emil Rottmayer (played by the Republican Governator), a man locked up for working with “Mannheim,” an international criminal who steals from the rich and gives to the poor. The Tomb’s corrupt warden Willard Hobbs (anti-stem-cell-research personality Jim Caviezel) and his staff of “Blackwater rejects” wage war on Breslin and Rottmayer. And so the fun begins.

The movie is essentially Erik Prince and Corrections Corporation of America vs. a radical-left detainee and Sylvester Stallone.

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Why Stallone and Schwarzenegger’s New Action Flick Might Be the Most Left-Wing Film in Theaters

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Real-Life Captain Phillips: The Pirates "Did Not Let Me Urinate"

by Shicsshaw Posted on October 10, 2013

Mother Jones

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Captain Phillips is a solid if ultimately forgettable “true story” movie. The film, directed by Paul Greengrass, tells the story of Captain Richard Phillips (played by a New England-accented Tom Hanks), a merchant mariner taken hostage by Somali pirates in 2009. After being held for five days aboard a lifeboat, Phillips was rescued when Navy Seal snipers took out three of his Somali captors. “I share the country’s admiration for the bravery of Captain Phillips and his selfless concern for his crew,” President Obama said in a statement on April 12, 2009. “His courage is a model for all Americans.”

Last week, Phillips attended a special screening of Captain Phillips at the Newseum in Washington, DC. Hanks was there, taking selfies with sailors. Barkhad Abdi (who plays the pirate Abduwali Abdukhadir Muse) was in attendance, as were Navy Commander Frank Castellano (one of the men who saved Phillips) and Greengrass. The 58-year-old English director is a former journalist who directed two other acclaimed docudramas: Bloody Sunday and United 93. “Films aren’t journalism,” Greengrass emphasized while introducing his film, though he argued that dramatizations are capable of conveying certain “truths.”

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Real-Life Captain Phillips: The Pirates "Did Not Let Me Urinate"

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How The US Naval Institute Gave the Late Tom Clancy His First Big Break

by rqu0hfl0 Posted on October 2, 2013

Mother Jones

Tom Clancy, the American author famous for such thrillers as The Hunt for Red October and Clear and Present Danger, died Tuesday night at the age of 66. The Baltimore-born writer passed away at the Johns Hopkins Hospital following a “brief illness.”

Starting in the mid-1980s, Clancy built a one-man empire of books, film, and video games. His name has become synonymous with the spy and Cold War-era thriller genre of American popular fiction, earning him a net worth of around $300 million. His books were widely read, the movies adapted from his novels were often big hits, and his fame and ubiquity were enough for The Simpsons to feature him on the show twice (he even got to voice himself one time).

In a way, Clancy owed his great success to the United States Naval Institute. Years before The Hunt for Red October became a critically acclaimed, high-grossing film starring Sean Connery and Alec Baldwin, it was just another manuscript in search of a publisher. This was Clancy’s first novel, which he wrote in his 30s while working as an insurance salesman. After several rejections from mainstream publishing houses, the Naval Institute Press picked it up and paid Clancy a $5,000 advance in 1984. It was the first fictional work that the Institute had published, and it attracted the praise of President Ronald Reagan (one of Clancy’s political heroes), who called it, “my kind of yarn.” The success of this first novel propelled Clancy into the the stardom he enjoyed until his final days.

Politically, he was a hardened conservative. His earlier work was steeped in cold warrior mentality. For instance, here’s a map of international alliances in his 1986 World War III novel Red Storm Rising:

ClarkK1/Wikimedia Commons

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How The US Naval Institute Gave the Late Tom Clancy His First Big Break

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Breaking Bad, Narco Cultura, and the Ballad of Walter White

by Reinold Keillor Posted on September 29, 2013

Mother Jones

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The hit TV series Breaking Bad, which, in case you hadn’t heard, concludes its incredible five-season run tonight, is known for its disorienting opening scenes—brief cryptic bits of foreshadowing before the first titles flash on screen with that now-iconic guitar and bass snippet. The technique has been employed in other shows, but never with such regularity and success as in Vince Gilligan’s Emmy-dominating opus.

But one of the teasers, appearing mid-way through Season 2, has stood out from all others: It’s a video of the Mexican band Los Cuates de Sinaloa performing a narcocorrido (drug anthem) honoring Heisenberg, Walter White’s drug-trafficking alter ego. (White is portrayed by the actor Bryan Cranston.)

If you don’t speak Spanish, the song sounds like an upbeat Mexican folk ditty. But the lyrics allude to Heisenberg’s blossoming meth business, which, at this point in the series, has left the Mexican cartels fuming over lost territory and profits. Shots of Heisenberg’s nonpareil blue meth, guns, fat stacks of cash, and a trail of bloodied bodies flashes over Los Cuates’ frenetic playing.

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Breaking Bad, Narco Cultura, and the Ballad of Walter White

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How One of The Biggest Porn Websites Helped Joseph Gordon-Levitt Make "Don Jon"

by John Bui Posted on September 27, 2013

Mother Jones

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Don Jon
Relativity Media
90 minutes

So much of this movie is just Joseph Gordon-Levitt masturbating in front of a computer, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt narrating about masturbating in front of a computer.

And it’s a testament to the 32-year-old actor‘s talents that this film, saddled to this premise, still manages to be charming and wholly enjoyable. Don Jon is Gordon-Levitt’s feature directorial debut (he also wrote the picture). It tells the story of Jon “Don Jon” Martello, Jr., a thickly accented New Jersey bartender and ladies’ man. He’s a nice-enough, church-going womanizer who soon finds the woman he believes is the love of his life: the much-coveted Barbara Sugarman, played with heat and attitude by Scarlett Johansson. The problem? Jon is a porn addict. Sure, he thinks sex with gorgeous young women is okay, and all. But the only sexual activity he truly loves is when he’s by himself, drooling over his keyboard, clicking on pornographic websites.

Sounds like a weird, godawful idea for a romantic comedy, right? But the film succeeds as a worthwhile, if forgettable, directing debut for Gordon-Levitt, primarily on the likability of its leads. (The movie also features fine performances from Tony Danza, Julianne Moore, Brie Larson, and Glenne Headly.)

Even prior to his recent years-long streak of critical acclaim, Gordon-Levitt showed himself to be a versatile and promising entertainer (click here to see him as a youngster playing blues guitar and waxing John Lee Hooker on an old clip from the sitcom 3rd Rock from the Sun). And in the director’s chair, he keeps things popping with a hip style and indie spirit. He and his crew apparently also put quite a premium on realism, as evidenced by their depiction of Don Jon’s swirling vortex of web porno. Arguably, the film’s most prominent co-star isn’t a person but a website: Pornhub, which is displayed in virtually every scene in which Jon is vigorously stroking himself. Pornhub is a Montreal-based free porn site started in 2007. It hosts a lot of amateur videos and professionally made content, as well as celebrity sex tapes from time to time. It’s one of the biggest porn websites in the world, and made news last year for marking Breast Cancer Awareness Month by pledging to donate one penny to breast cancer research for every 30 page views of its “Small Tits” and “Big Tits” videos. (This fundraising push was met with scorn by some, and Susan G. Komen for the Cure publicly refused to accept Pornhub’s donations.) At the end of their “Save The Boobs” campaign, Pornhub reportedly split their donation of $75,000 between several organization, including Cancer Sucks Inc.

And the conspicuous appearance of the website’s logo in Don Jon was no accident. It was a carefully coordinated effort by the crew, and one that’s certainly boosting the site’s profile. A representative for Pornhub has yet to confirm to me whether or not they paid for placement, but Corey Price, a vice president at the company, offered a statement outlining the collaboration: “A producer approached us in March 2012 seeking permission to use our brand in a movie starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Scarlett Johansson. The script had already been written and they were in pre-production at the time. After we reviewed the script and discussed the opportunity with the producers we agreed to take part in the movie. We also agreed to help them find adult clips to use in the movie from our content partners like Brazzers, Mofos, Digital Playground and Twistys.”

These were clips that Gordon-Levitt and his team judiciously selected from and edited into rapid-fire, sexually explicit montages in order to tell the story.

Now here’s a trailer for Don Jon:

Don Jon gets a release on Friday, September 27. The film is rated R for strong graphic sexual material and dialogue throughout, nudity, language and some drug use. Click here for local showtimes and tickets.

Click here for more TV and film coverage from Mother Jones.

To read more of Asawin’s reviews, click here.

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How One of The Biggest Porn Websites Helped Joseph Gordon-Levitt Make "Don Jon"

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"Inequality for All": A Must-See Movie For the 99 Percent

by Christopherd3o Posted on September 27, 2013

Mother Jones

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Jacob Kornbluth’s new documentary Inequality for All, which stars economist and former Clinton labor secretary Robert Reich, is being hyped as a “game changer in our national discussion of income inequality.” It probably won’t be that, since it’s preaching to the choir, but the film is a welcome addition to that discussion.

Inequality for All, which opens Friday, weaves between scenes of Reich lecturing clear-eyed Cal coeds in his Wealth and Inequality class, 1950s-style graphs and charts illustrating growing income disparity, and archival clips of happy white people in the post-World War II age of prosperity. There are also interviews with working-class people left behind by the American Dream, such as a worker at a California power plant that has hired anti-union consultants, and a mom who works at Costco and has $25 in her bank account.

Kornbluth also chats with the odd member of the 1 percent. “The pillow business is quite tough because fewer and fewer people can afford to buy the products that we make,” pillow-making millionaire Nick Hanauer explains. “The problem with rising inequality is that a person like me who earns a thousand times as much as the typical worker doesn’t buy a thousand times as many pillows every year. Even the richest people only sleep on one or two pillows.”

In a comprehensive and digestible way, Reich lays out the stark facts of income inequality (for example, the 400 Americans richest currently earn more than half the country’s population combined) and how we got here. He blames the decline of unionization, globalization, and technology for suppressing pay, and enriching the few, who then use their increasing political clout to protect their status. “When the middle class doesn’t share the gains, you get into a downward vicious cycle,” Reich explains as the film cuts to an Wheel of Fortune-type animation illustrating that cycle: Wages stagnate, consumption drops, companies downsize, tax revenues decrease, government cuts programs, workers become less educated, unemployment rises—and so on.

As Reich notes, he’s been “saying the same thing for 30 years” about growing income inequality. He worked to combat it during his stints in the administrations of Presidents Ford, Carter and Clinton, and now he’s fighting it from the outside, writing books, recording commentaries, and trying to instill his righteous fire in others. On the last day of class, he gives an inspirational sendoff, telling his students to go out and “change the world.”

The ending of Inequality for All is predictable, but that’s okay, because Reich is so likable—and he’s right.

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"Inequality for All": A Must-See Movie For the 99 Percent

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"Homeland": The Broadway Musical!

by Frederick Cunningham Posted on September 26, 2013

Mother Jones

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Homeland, Showtime’s Emmy-winning drama, returns for its third season on Sunday. While they’re waiting, fans of the series can check out Homeland: The Musical. It’s a small production, blending the show’s war-on-terrorism thrills with jazz-hands theatricality. “Homeland is such a serious show, a big time drama; it was time for a lighthearted spin on it,” says Brendan McMorrow, a producer with Above Average, a NYC-based entertainment platform created by Lorne Michaels‘ Broadway Video. “There was some on-the-fly choreography, some throwback to Bob Fosse moves in there…Carrie Mathison is like something out of Chicago, and we have a little bit of Guys and Dolls thrown in there, for example.”

The musical will not, however, be debuting on Broadway any time soon. The video is a parody—a four-minute promo for a garish and fake musical adaptation. It was posted to this week to the YouTube page of Above Average, which specializes in promoting original comedy shorts. The sketch and lyrics were written and performed by comedian Eliot Glazer, the guy behind “Shit New Yorkers Say.”

Homeland: The Musical was intended as both a loving send-up of the Showtime series and as a riff on Broadway’s addiction to adapting popular on-screen fare—Legally Blonde, Catch Me If You Can, Billy Elliot, The Wedding Singer—to the stage and pumping them full of song, dance, and artificial cheer. Glazer pitched the idea to McMorrow about six months ago, but shelved the idea until the season-three premiere got closer.

In the past month, they booked their cast of Broadway singers and actors and quickly recorded vocals at a Broadway Video facility. Production and editing then took roughly two weeks. (Scenes were shot in the Producers’ Club, a small improv theater in Manhattan.)

McMorrow says that as of this week, there are no plans to extend their short into a full-blown Homeland musical. “Our office sits next to The Book of Mormon playing at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre, though, so we might be in a good position to do that,” he says. Glazer is about as open to the idea. “Could I write a whole Homeland musical? It’s definitely a possibility,” Glazer told Mashable. “It would be very Sondheim, if Sondheim was lobotomized and hadn’t seen a live play since 1988. Sorry, 1978, not ’88.”

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"Homeland": The Broadway Musical!

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"Prisoners": The Strongest Anti-Torture Argument That Has Come Out of The Movies in Years

by Charlie Smith Posted on September 20, 2013

Mother Jones

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Prisoners
Warner Bros. Pictures
153 minutes

Prisoners is one of the year’s finest films. It’s a riveting and superbly acted two-and-a-half hours, carefully and smartly crafted by director Denis Villeneuve and screenwriter Aaron Guzikowski.

The film focuses on the Thanksgiving kidnapping of two daughters, one from the Dover family and one from the Birches. Hugh Jackman commands the screen as Keller Dover, a father who abducts and terrorizes Alex Jones (played by Paul Dano), a mentally impaired young man who Keller is convinced took the girls and knows where they’re being held. The police investigation is led by the ultra-dedicated Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal). The movie scores high marks as a gripping mystery, and as a terrifying human drama. It’s also the best argument against torture that has emerged from the film industry in a long time.

Last year, a lengthy debate began regarding Zero Dark Thirty‘s depiction of the United States’ use of torture during the Bush administration. Some anti-torture commentators were rather generous. “It is an exposure of torture,” Andrew Sullivan wrote. “It removes any doubt that war criminals ran this country for seven years and remain at large, while they scapegoated the grunts at Abu Ghraib who were, yes, merely following their superior’s own orders.” This point, made by Sullivan and many others at the time, is (to put it politely) excessively generous, given that ZDT offers a severe mangling of recent history that gives the viewer the impression that torture was crucial in tracking down Osama bin Laden. (It simply wasn’t.) With Prisoners, however, there is no hedging on the matter. The film has nothing to do with politics or the abuses of the War on Terror, but it does depict the prolonged, illegal, and sloppy interrogation of someone for vital information.

Very quickly, Keller (Jackman) looks more like a villain than a determined and sympathetic family man. Alex’s face is swollen and bloodied beyond recognition. Shards of glass protrude from his flesh. He’s been drenched in streams of scalding water. There are serious doubts about whether Alex had anything to do with the abduction, and Keller’s “hurt him until he talks” policy grows increasingly unsuccessful and problematic.

It is an ugly, frightening, and self-defeating act that is committed out of love and desperation. And it’s a punishing depiction handled responsibly and masterfully by Villeneuve, and his cast and crew. It addresses a question we’ve heard many times before. For instance, in a 2006 episode of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, the panel discussed the issue of Bush-era torture and “enhanced interrogation.” Actor Jason Alexander stated that if a prisoner had information on the location of his kidnapped child, he would without hesitation go “Quentin Tarantino” on him. That seems like something many parents would say, and it’s not hard to understand why. But Prisoners intelligently explores the failings of that logic. What if you have the wrong person? Is this undermining effective police work? What do you lose of yourself if you go down this road? Prisoners strips any hint of heroism or romanticism from the notion of doing “whatever it takes” to save your family. Take that, Jack Bauer.

Here’s a trailer for the powerful film:

Prisoners gets a release on Friday, September 20. The film is rated R for disturbing violent content including torture, and language throughout. Click here for local showtimes and tickets.

Click here for more TV and film coverage from Mother Jones.

To read more of Asawin’s reviews, click here.

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"Prisoners": The Strongest Anti-Torture Argument That Has Come Out of The Movies in Years

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