The promise of Iron Sky is a great and wondrous one. It’s Moon Nazis. Moon Nazis, people. Swirl it around in your mind for a moment. Those two words alone should put enough fuel in the car to get it to the theater, but with a concept like a Fourth Reich hiding on the dark side of the moon, the movie can only take one of two paths. Sadly, all too sadly, it takes a wrong turn and ends up riding the highway all the way into the city dump at the end of it. Stupid, cheap and aiming above its IQ, this movie is the bad kind of garbage.

It goes without saying that there’s a good kind. Some of the best spoof movies have fallen under that category. Like all tones, there are right and wrong ways to handle them, and although director Timo Vuorensola‘s long-awaited sci-fi explosion of bizarre alternate history starts off with decent overacting and wacky antics, it forgets its B-Movie roots halfway through. That’s its fatal mistake.

Not that it was headed for greatness early on, but it was at least headed for the kind of mild enjoyability that makes bad movies worth watching. Udo Kier is Kortzfleisch, the new dictator. Julia Dietze is the Earth Expert and schoolteacher, Renate Richter, who’s convinced that the Nazi way is the way of peace. Götz Otto is Klaus Adler, the next in line to rule with an impotent anger. Christopher Kirby is James Washington, the black astronaut who shocks the Moon Nazis and threatens to disrupt their invasion plans.

It sounds excellently ridiculous. Too bad it’s no good.

To its credit, the team behind it clearly knows the better movies that came before it. The Great Dictator is a plot point, and there’s a reference to the iconic alien hand syndrome of Dr. Strangelove. It’s a limp, poorly played reference, but it’s there. That’s something. Unfortunately, it’s not enough. While the absurdity is piled medium high, and a handful of the gags work beautifully, the movie gets so weighed down by a lost focus and its attempted poor man’s political theater that the jokes get fewer, farther between, and facile.

It should have been a huge tip off when the President of 2018 is a Sarah Palin mock-off (Stephanie Paul) that the movie’s “relevant” comedy would be too easy and too blunt. It’s so on the nose that they should have gotten a mortgage on the left nostril. When it’s Nazis on the Moon, the jokes come with a lightheartedness that mostly works. Kortzfleisch keeps eating candies, Richter is sucked out toward space solely to strip her down to her underwear, and something else probably happens that’s decently funny.

When it’s strident political commentary, the production comes off like a small child repeating a joke it heard on the nightly news. Plus, that small child just happens to have written the joke on a hammer and is swinging it repeatedly at your face.

Simply put, when it nods to Dr. Strangelove, things are at least okay. When it tries to be Dr. Strangelove, things go horribly, horribly, wrong.

Beyond getting stuck on a tired, one-note joke for its second half, the movie is plagued by being average. It never swings for the fences. Had it been offensively bad, it might still have been entertaining. As it stands, it’s so bland that shrugging seems like it would be giving it too much credit.

To be fair, it’s a few lightyears ahead of what the Asylum puts out, but it’s still far from enjoyable. Kirby is a generic hero who has no ups when he’s trying to go over the top. Dietze is stronger as the hot Nazi (a Hot-zi?) and the true lead of the film. Its successes are usually tied to her, and she’s funny even though she’s not given much to work with. However, it’s unsurprisingly Udo Kier who steals scenes like it was his job. Trivially, it’s awesome that he was both in Melancholia and this within the span of a year, but he is the only actor here who truly 1) gets how dumb all of this is and 2) plays along with a straight face.

Is it cheap? Sort of. The CGI is up-to-date, which gives it a visual boost, and there are plenty of large set pieces complete with explosions and people running in the streets. They probably pale in comparison to the difficulty of putting a black man in whiteface and a Nazi uniform and parading him on the daylight avenues of New York City, but they’re sufficient in giving the movie a strange air of credibility.

What’s cheap is the script.

Frankly, there aren’t enough jokes and there aren’t enough jokes that work. If there were a stronger plot, it could take some of the burden, but it doesn’t grow much beyond “There are Nazis on the moon, and they are going to attack.” At the same time, even with the high concept, the damned thing is overly complicated. It shifts from one group of characters to the next, trying hard to find which one is consistently funny, and no one is to be found. There are elements worth a giggle – Washington turning into an albino hobo warning people about the Moon Nazis attacking for example – but the overall result is incredibly, disappointingly flaccid.

What’s worse is the completely misguided swerve into intelligent humor. The script just isn’t smart enough for it, and cramming lame political snipes  into a movie that’s already established itself as throwaway zany fun with an army that goose steps in low gravity makes it even more obvious that the joke writers didn’t get their own punchlines. The clown shouldn’t try high satire, especially if the clown isn’t that funny to begin with.

It’s impossible not to have hopes dashed here. It’s a hell of a premise that was given a half-assed treatment, and that’s always uniquely tragic. At the end of the day, with an idea like Moon Nazis, everyone should be cheering for it to excel. Unfortunately, this is the movie equivalent of the baseball team that gets an ace pitcher only to lose all of its games. So much promise, so little delivery.

Unless of course that delivery is headed toward the town dump.

Complete Berlinale Coverage

On a hillside overlooking the beaches of Normandy, American soldiers surround a Korean and a Japanese man wearing Nazi uniforms. This is the second-most intriguing image of Mai-wei, the WWII epic from writer/director Je-gyu Kang. What’s even more fascinating is that the image is drawn directly from real life. How they got there (and into Hitler’s army no less) is a story told while trudging through the freezing mountains of Russia and the hot open plains of Korea.

It’s an enormous movie, told through a decade as two competitive marathon runners – Jun-shik Kim (Dong-gun Jang) and Tatsuo Hasegawa (Jo Odagiri) – begin as alienated enemies and become friends through the brittle evolution of battle.

Certainly its most striking achievements are the extended, highly-choreographed war scenes that steal the breath right out of your lungs. The visual style is an angrier version of Saving Private Ryan, but instead of beginning with Normandy, Mai-wei ends with it, and instead of having a few huge battles, Mai-wei has a solid half-dozen.

Make no mistake; it’s a movie that slams your head into the wall without giving you a helmet.

To the movie’s credit, everything is turned up to eleven. Its depiction of war is unrelenting and raw. At times, it can be overpowering with the camera equally interested in the landscape of explosions as it is the microscopic detail of dirt lifting off the ground and resettling after a man’s blood-drained face slams to the earth for the final time.

It’s violence made beautiful, but the visuals are robust purely because they hold steady as bullets rip through flesh or tanks roll too-slowly over legs and torsos.

All of it is packaged in the context of a war fought by slaves – a frustrating situation where each man loses his freedom and control of his own destiny. More than just citizens conscripted for service, Jun-shik Kim, as a Korean man living under Japanese rule, is forced alongside his friends to fight for a country he doesn’t even belong to. That group is an unsurprisingly ragtag group led by the heroic Kim and his congenial best friend Jong-Dae (In-Kwon Kim). Why is unsurprising? Because the other aspect of the movie’s tone is how broad and cliched it is. Je-gyu Kang does brilliantly when the war is raging, but he has no patience or economy to turn the volume down for everything else. Just as the violence is bombastic, each moment of triumph is met with a sweeping score and an over-the-top semi-slow-mo style just in case the audience couldn’t catch that it was an important scene. The problem? He makes every scene “important” which leaves no room for the calm reality of real life.

The worst offense comes when the soldiers play a too-smiling game of soccer on the Normandy beach after a hard day of setting up blockades and waiting to be shot in the head. It’s the Korean War Movie answer to Top Gun‘s volleyball scene.

Besides the massive dose of sugar this movie didn’t need, everything else is above and beyond excellent. The sports movie aspect, complete with its own cheese, is a fantastic element that puts the two leads on display as competitors who need each other to get better. Fortunately, the movie is also complex enough to realize both the frivolousness of grown men playing a game and the incredible necessity of engaging in something social and aggressive without people being killed. War makes their marathon aspirations both petty and vital. It’s enough to bring every small act into greater focus, and Je-gyu Kang and company never lose sight of that.

Dong-gun Jang and Jo Odagiri are both massive stars in the world of Asian cinema, and they are more than capable here, but the story is the real star. At its heart is the mystery of how two men from East Asia found their way far beyond the western front, and the lifeblood is the continual examination and re-examination of what war does to change good men. For some, it will erase their souls. For others it will fulfill a sense of duty. For most, it will wipe them off the face of the planet.

As hammy as some of its scenes are, Mai-wei is limber and nuanced when it comes to illustrating the break downs and epiphanies that occur when you’ve lost most of your men fighting off ten tanks only to see forty more crest the hill.

Thankfully, the sweetness and hand-holding is left out of the action. If war is hell, this movie is the ninth circle.

That’s important, because the cost of war is high and real, and the production here both understand and honor that. Unfortunately, the movie falls well short of being a masterpiece. With its too-obvious flashbacks to remind the audience of elements that echo each other, and a healthy slice of cheese added to certain segments, the enormity of the powerless (and perhaps pointless) situation that everyone finds themselves in is diminished to a size small enough to fit on the spoon we’re being fed with.

That’s a shame, but it’s still a damned fine movie that is, at times, physically affecting and philosophically challenging. Plus, even if that were stripped away, it’s a classic story about friendship, dedication and sacrifice that’s told on a gorgeous grand scale.

The realm of 18th century France is a dusty one. Period dramas, especially lofty costume dramas, are so numerous that you can barely toss a powdered wig without hitting one. With Farewell, My Queen (Les Adieux à la Reine), writer/director Benoît Jacquot tears off the wig, pulls down the drapes and sets fire to both.

The wonderfully un-stuffy film stars and is told through the eyes of Sidonie Laborde (Léa Seydoux) who acts as a cipher for the manic last few days of Marie Antoinette’s (Diane Kruger) reign in the late 1700s. It’s Laborde’s story, meaning it’s the story of a voyeur who watches from doorjambs as the business of being extravagantly wealthy and powerful becomes not only meaningless, but fatal.

The vantage point is a bold angle that comes with its own set of challenges. Instead of following the leader, it makes Versailles an insular cocoon where rumors float down candle-lit hallways on sleepless nights and the people trapped by their own excess are revealed more through reaction than action. Yes, it’s a challenge, but it’s one that Jacquot and company handle with something close to greatness.

If the perspective is one reason this film bucks the period trend, its pacing and aggressive nature are real reasons to praise it. This is no dry wheeze where polite society hems and yawns through subtext and things unspoken. It’s direct. It’s nasty. Beyond forcing the main perspective and anchor into the lower class, it pivots off of a vision of perfection that is rarely seen. Opulence is hard to take seriously when it demands that dozens of loudly-dressed patrons shuffle-run down the hall in order to appear poised and proper like statues who have always stood in the place where the King and Queen are about to emerge.

It’s a desperate awkwardness born from trying to force things to appear a certain way. Instead of being played for laughs, it’s more often played for pity.

On the acting front, Seydoux makes it all look easy. She’s cunning and clever, but she’s appropriately weighed down by her station. She has the intricate task of existing not as a true main character, but as the character that’s onscreen the most. Even though she’s a constant presence, the story seems to happen around her as she observes and acts accordingly. It’s a steamy essence that she brings to everything, and her crisp slyness rings throughout.

However, even with stunted screen time, it’s Kruger that radiates the most here. She’s so strong a force that Antoinette is in every room and thought without being seen. Kruger doesn’t play her as an uncaring hammer – she creates a monarch that’s sometimes childlike and fearful behind the shrewd wielding of her influence and position.

When the two are together, there’s a strand of tension tied tightly between them, and they (and all women in the film) seem to play each conversation as if a fight or a passionate kiss is about to erupt. That subtle, semi-violent sexuality hangs on the coattails of each scene – used for both titillation, drama and insecurity.

Sadly, the movie falls off its pedestal for two reasons. For one, Jacquot (and/or his cinematographer Romain Winding) approach the camera work like a fidgeting little child tugging on his mother’s dress in church. It’s as if they received a shot-style-of-the-day calendar and just had to use it. The best segments come when the director calms down and lets the dialogue move on its own. The lack of cohesion is irritating, but why it shifts back and forth from steady to handheld is baffling. No matter the answer, it injures the overall product and gives the appearance that Jacquot had the camera move simply because he didn’t know what else to do while people were engrossed in long bouts of talking.

For two, a handful of the scenes feel staged and overly produced. There’s a false-feeling choreography to some of it that tends to value a poetic movement of people over something that would feel more natural – especially considering how organic the core of the story emerges.

The damage is there, but the movie is still a fantastic piece of period work that doesn’t follow any of the rules that make costume dramas so drab and dull. It’s innovative without being crudely rebellious, and the acting on display is formidable and incendiary. It goes without saying that the production design, make-up and costuming is strong – that’s the very least a film like this can do. What’s really magical about Farewell, My Queen is that it gives the audience something to do other than stare at the scenery. It’s thrilling. A rare example of something antique feeling genuinely brand new.

Complete Berlinale Coverage

Echoing throughout the concrete of the subway between Stadtmitte and Potsdamer Platz is a young man slamming out a guitar chord like it owes him money and singing out “I want to see the movies of my dreams.” His droning twang sounds more like it was unearthed from the soil of North Carolina, but the Euro coins in his case and the writing on the wall prove he’s in Berlin.

His sentiment is a powerful and timely one as the red signs everywhere shout out the presence of the Berlin International Film Festival. Just a dozen feet above that young man’s head is the shuffle of mud-covered feet swishing through snow as more of it falls on the ground. An ice cream parlor is inexplicably still open and doing good business nearby.

It’s 21 degrees outside, but it feels like 8, and that creates a kind of energy. People are moving quickly to both to keep up with the lazy first day rush and to keep their bits from freezing off. Maybe that will make getting into a darkened (and heated) theater all the sweeter. At least that’s the hope on the largely movie-less, paper work-heavy start to the Berlinale.

Beyond the scattered preparations and disparate schedules cluttering the mental nodes and notebooks, there’s the spirit of the place. As the night and the temperatures fall together, it breathes hard and heavy with the anticipation of the opening film – a  period piece from Benoit Jacquot called Farewell, My Queen where Diane Kruger wants everyone to eat cake. Outside now, there’s a red carpet filled with women who haven’t even seen cake in years, all stuffed into dresses with sizes as low as the Celsius temperature. That they’re baring their arms and cleavage in such frigidity is a testament to the kind of noble stupidity that only keeping up appearances can inspire, and the bearded men they use for warmth waltz them from huddle to huddle of cameramen and forest to forest of black microphones. They’re waving and smiling as the odd mixture of black sludge that comes when dirt marries snow drops from their heels and clings to the carpet-covered ground. It collects there, turning the red more and brown, but the cameras don’t shift their gaze.

On a large screen, I’m watching celebrities I don’t recognize. It’s a jarring feeling. Everyone is clamoring for enough of their attention to get a good flash bulb broken, but I can’t place a face or a name.

I don’t know the people that everyone else knows.

There’s something both alarming and freeing about that. Alarming because I’m a stranger in a familiar land and freeing because it makes it just that much easier to find a darkened corner in a fancy hotel to contemplate and reflect on what I’ve just seen. My movie, the same movie, will start an hour after theirs a handful of subway stops away without any muddy red carpets or dancing bears. There will be no pomp or circumstance welcome, and that’s probably the way it should be. It will just be the movie, naked as it came, waiting to be loved, loathed, or something not as dramatic.

For me, it will be the first of many opportunities to see greatness. Like any film festival, Berlin is more casino than kino. In a hotel three blocks north of the Potsdamer Platz subway exit there are half a dozen movies playing every two hours hoping to get a distributor or an invitation to the next festival. An equal distance south, there’s an entire building of projects trying to secure the last bit of funding or impress a buyer. Tonight, I’ll take Marie Antoinette by the hand and walk into the next days where filmmakers trying to make a mark either grab audiences by the ears or fail to grab them at all.

Like any film festival, it’s the hope of the first day that will resonate like a foreign folk song off of underground German concrete walls. With any luck, the energy of Berlin will come from more than just the cold. There’s potential floating in the air, and just like that scruffy busker, I want to see the movies of my dreams.

Berlinale, let’s see what you’ve got.

On the eve of the Berlinale, Swedish director Daniel Espinosa joins us to talk about waterboarding Denzel Washington and the mind games of Safe House. Plus, we look forward to a few films to catch in Berlin, and it’s Matt Singer versus Alison Willmore in a Filmspotting: SVU showdown of Movie News Quizzing.

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On This Week’s Show:

Movie News Pop Quiz: [Beginning - 17:00] It’s Singer vs. Willmore, and we discuss Redbox‘s dominance of suburbia which they plan to take to the streaming world.

Our House: [17:00 - 33:30] Punk rock director Daniel Espinosa talks about cranking up the action in Safe House, the connection between Scandinavia and the US, and working with iconic cinematographer Oliver Wood.

Kino Berlin: [33:30 - End] In the final moments, I toss out a few movies we’ll be trying to see at the Berlin International Film Festival as we check out next year’s Oscar contenders when they make their world premiere.

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Why Watch? In 1988, Pixar’s Tin Toy won the Oscar for Best Animated Short. The studio’s history after that is well known, but one of the shorts that it beat out for gold was just about as symbolic as you could ask for. Technological Threat, from Brian Jennings and Bill Kroyer, was a blend of rudimentary computer animation and hand-drawn traditional that told the story of computers taking over all the artist jobs. It predicted the future the very year that it started coming to pass.

The movie itself is an homage to Tex Avery-style cartoons, with dogs in suits trying desperately to draw while burdened by exhaustion, sneezing fits, and a need to stay hydrated. The robots, of course, don’t face the same problems, and as the room fills up with them, one dog fights back.

Of course, unlike the story, there was no beating the tide of computer animation, making this a bizarre historical object and a hand-drawn crystal ball. Plus, it was nice of them to thank Brad Bird in the credits.

What will it cost? Only 4 minutes.

Skip Work. You’ve Got Time For More Short Films.

So you can’t afford the plane ticket (or you’re afraid they’ll show Mr. Popper’s Penguins on your cross-Atlantic flight). So you can’t stand to wait outside in freezing temperatures. So you can’t figure out why an international film festival is showing A Prairie Home Companion in a one-film Robert Altman retrospective. So what?

That’s why we here at FSR are going to do all that for you. In 24 hours, I’ll be boarding a train, and 6 hours after that I’ll arrive at the apartment where I’ll sleep on Tim League’s floor for a week, catching all of the strange, the challenging, and the Oscar-worthy films of the future right here in the cold as hell country of Fritz Lang, Werner Herzog and Uwe Boll. That’s right sports fans, it’s the Berlin International Film Festival (also affectionately known as the Berlinale).

It’s my first time, so we might all feel a little pinch, but I go undaunted into the morass of venues, celebrity sightings and movies in search of the flicks that demand to be cheered and shared. Coverage starts Thursday and will head on into next week.

Berlin! It’s like Cannes except colder and more Prussian! Aren’t you glad you can experience it from home?

In 2010, Patrick Wilson got haunted in Insidious. In 1999, Lili Taylor got haunted in The Haunting. Now the two are heading back into the haunted house together with Vera Farmiga and Ron Livingston in James Wan’s The Warren Files.

Now they’ll have children to look after as ghosts chase them around in New England.

According to Variety, Mackenzie Foy (Twilight) and Joey King (who will play young Talia Al Ghul in The Dark Knight Rises) have both been tapped to play young members of the based-on-real-life Perron family who claimed they were living with spirit from beyond in the 1970s. Taylor and Livingston play the adult members of the family, while Wilson and Farmiga play ghost investigators The Warrens.

So, for those keeping track, with Insidious, The Warren Files and Insidious 2, James Wan is going to be telling ghost stories for a long time.

It’s official. In a stunning turn of events that almost certainly mean it’s Opposite Day, Robert Rodriguez will make a movie he promised he’d make. Jokes aside, Deadline Michoacan is reporting that Rodriguez has secured the financing for Machete Kills, the sequel to the absurdly ballsy action flick starring Danny Trejo.

Talks are under way to bring Trejo back on in the hopes of an April production start, and Rodriguez is pointing to the bleachers, claiming a bigger, badder movie. As proof, the second film in a planned trilogy will feature Machete as a hired gun for the government, heading into Mexico to take on a drug cartel and a vicious bad guy who plans to build a space weapon. Yes, it’s getting even deeper into spoof territory with an Austin Powers twist.

This character sure has come a long way since Spy Kids, right?

“It is absolutely patently false that there has been any discussion about Harrison Ford being in Blade Runner. To be clear, what we are trying to do with Ridley now is go through the painstaking process of trying to break the back of the story, figure out the direction we’re going to take the movie and find a writer to work on it. The casting of the movie could not be further from our minds at this moment.”

That’s Alcon producer Andrew Kosove busting a vein to deny the previous rumor about Ford jumping aboard the forthcoming sci-fi project from Ridley Scott. So, yes, the headline is a joke, but isn’t it a bit incredible how Scott has captured our attention with Prometheus and promises of more replicants? The internet movie nerd world hasn’t seen this level of passionate/absurd argument since nipples were put on the Bat Suit. And it’s all over the distinction of whether Scott’s stories will be continuations or prequels or have the same DNA. It’s downright bizarre, because the movies will be what they are, and the only thing that will matter is if they excite us and transport us. Hopefully after they hit theaters, no one will care anymore what their label is.

As for Ford, it’s a harsh rejection from Alcon. They seem more than a bit defensive about the rumor – perhaps because it would injure their ability to craft the story, perhaps because they’re trying to avoid Ford and the credibility/baggage he would bring to the role, perhaps because they’re just generally defensive about any stories leaking early.

Or maybe the studio behind Dolphin Tale, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 and What To Expect When You’re Expecting realize they’re playing in a totally different sandbox with this one.

In Wreck-It Ralph, a villain (voiced by John C. Reilly) whose job is to bust up 8-bit buildings finds himself longing for more. It’s just like that time Donkey Kong started writing poetry and listening to The Cure. What did you think that funky Kill Screen was all about? Exactly.

It’s a cool concept from Disney trading on nostalgia that includes multiple worlds (theoretically for Ralph to adventure through). There’s the racing game “Sugar Rush” and the space fighting game “Hero’s Duty,” and Disney has delivered the first look with three pictures (via CineHeroes).

They’re all beautiful, but that’s par for the course at Disney. Check them out for yourself:

This movie just keeps sounding cooler and cooler. Especially since Katy Perry probably lives on Sugar Rush Island (or in its clouds).

Even better, this is the feature directorial debut of Rich Moore, who has directed a ton of Simpsons and Futurama episodes. The only question is what kind of tone this flick will go for. Sarcastic and hip? Family-friendly with a little bit of adult humor?

And when will the inevitable video game tie-in be available? The people demand to destroy buildings while talking like John C. Reilly.

Do you want to see it?

Why Watch? Brilliant concept, thrilling execution.

This stunning animation from virtual republic takes the sheet music for the 1st violin of the 2nd symphony, 4th movement by Ferdinand Ries and transforms it into a heart-pounding experience. It’s a cunning way to use the eye to prove how soaring and effective music can be.

What will it cost? Only 1 minute.

Skip Work. You’ve Got Time For More Short Films.

As if it were 1982 all over again, Harrison Ford is in talks to star in Blade Runner. According to Twitch Film, Ford is in the early stages of discussing the possibility – meaning that it could be a reunion for the movie star of the modern blockbuster with Ridley Scott, the director who’s revisiting his modern blockbusters.

That must mean that Ford and Scott have truly reconciled. Ford publicly stated he disliked the process of making Blade Runner, noting that he fought with Scott and absolutely hated having to go back and do the moronic voice over narration (and rightfully so). Scott on the other hand once responded to a question about the biggest asshat he’d ever worked with by calling up Ford’s name. Good to see them working together again. If the deal gets made.

It’s still a long way until that happens and until the movie gets made. Scott has Prometheus coming out this year, and there is a slate and a half of possible movies and television shows for Scott to dig into next.

With any hope, these two share some ink and take us into the near future in the near future.

Normally the blue birds that deliver the mail sing a song as they fly along, but today they seemed grim and despondent. Perhaps it’s because they had to drop the lump of coal that is the press release announcing a greenlit Atlas Shrugged: Part 2 into the old inbox. Or perhaps they’ve just been sick.

Either way, a follow-up to the completely inept filmmaking of the first film will be standing awkwardly in front of cameras soon. Not only that, it will ambitiously seek to have the movie ready for theaters by October of this year at the zero hour of, what the release calls, “a fever pitched presidential election season.”

It even comes with its own poster and a spooky teaser trailer where pundits can’t agree on how pronounce Ayn Rand‘s name:

 The production boasts the inclusion of Duncan Scott, who was producer and editor on the Ayn Rand adaptation We The Living, although it’s unclear exactly what role he’ll play. He has experience as an assistant director, which would put him already ahead of the first film’s director, Paul Johansson, although Johansson almost assuredly will be involved as he played John Galt in the first. Or they’ll replace him. It probably won’t matter too much either way.

Pessimism and politics aside, the first failed on purely cinematic levels. Why? Because it was the vanity project of a producer (John Aglialoro) who had never made a movie before who also wrote the script for it, the text was dense and difficult to adapt, and the director was wet behind the ears with a cast that wasn’t doing him many favors. With those ingredients, it wasn’t a surprising outcome to see a train wreck onscreen.

Maybe this second swing will be better.

Why Watch? Short films weren’t honored at the first Academy Awards in 1929, but it didn’t take long for them to be added to the docket. After all, the film industry owes its origins to short work (which may be part of why Hugo is damned popular this year). In 1932, the award for Best Live-Action Short Film and Best Animated Short Film celebrated work from Laurel and Hardy and Disney respectively.

Disney’s contribution was Flowers and Trees – a movie that was supposed to be in black and white, but ended up being the first cartoon made with the three-strip Technicolor process. It bridged technologies, was loved by fans, and got the gold. Plus, it teaches the lesson that grumpy trees shouldn’t play with fire.

What will it cost? Only 7 minutes.

Skip Work. You’ve Got Time For More Short Films.

James Wan is back. Leigh Whannell is back. Insidious is back.

That loud burst of discordant music you just heard is all part of the plan to scare you out of your seat. The cat that just ran by isn’t part of it; your house is just infested with cats.

According to Variety, the green light has been given to Insidious 2 which means a continuation/birth of a horror franchise that genuinely delivered excitement to a big audience. It’s screenwriter Whannell’s goal to have the main players from the first film return. That also means that Whannell has what he and the team assume to be a solid creative idea for the next installment. Last year, producer Jason Blum claimed they wouldn’t move the massive moneymaking beast forward simply for more large checks. Looks like they’re smart enough to do it for the right reasons and to strike when the iron is hot.

Now what would spell story success for the sequel?

According to The Hollywood Reporter, newcomer Matthew Lieberman has been signed to write the Short Circuit reboot going on over at Dimension Films. He’d previously written the not-at-all-liked Dr. Doolittle: Tail to the Chief which went straight to video on the coattails of the Eddie Murphy movies, but this project is an interesting way to get a foot in the door of the feature world.

What’s more important is that Tim Hill is set to be the director. Hill’s recent work includes Alvin and the Chipmunks, Hop and Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties (apparently everyone involved loves “tail” puns). All of that sounds awful, but once upon a time, Hill also directed Muppets From Space. How someone got from weird and wonderful to boringly broad and homogenous is anyone’s guess. Forget it, fans. It’s Chinatown.

That’s sad, but the most fascinating thing about bring back Johnny Five to life is that instead of appealing to a movie geek crowd, the production is attempting to take a character from a strange little 80s movie that’s been reduced to a catch phrase and make him a children’s entertainment icon. To do that, Hill and company will be able to sidestep the treacherous balance between old fans and new by completely disregarding old fans.

Of course, the bigger question will be whether a robot movie like this will fly in a time where actual robots are running our lives for us. Will Johnny look like an Erector Set that talks or will he look like that creepy Japanese lady-bot that scares everyone all the time?

With the Oscar nominations out terrorizing the community, we turn to IMDB Managing Editor Keith Simanton to discuss why the Academy Awards still matter, how the voting environment works, and why Harvey Weinstein always seems to control the conversation. Plus, Landon Palmer explores the death of the movie star and the rise of franchises. Could it help the revival in independent filmmaking?

As if that weren’t enough, Cinema Blend‘s Editor-in-Chief Katey Rich squares off with Hollywood.com Movies Editor Matt Patches in a Movie News Pop Quiz that will change everything.

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On This Week’s Show:

Movie News Pop Quiz: [Beginning - 20:00] It’s Rich vs Patches in an impressively fought Movie News Pop Quiz that leads us to discuss Sundance and whether anyone really cares or not. ‘Tis the season.

Take My Envelope, Please: [20:00 - 43:20] A different kind of Oscar discussion. Keith Simanton sits down to discuss what really goes on with voting and why we all still watch.

Rust Era Hollywood: [43:20 - End] The days of Rock Hudson and Cary Grant are long over. With movie stars no longer being manufactured, how will the industry change? Landon Palmer brings his Culture Warrior thoughts to a tough subject as we explore the shift and share a vision for the future.

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We’ll be packing for the Berlin International Film Festival and talking with Safe House director Daniel Espinosa.

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The Motion Picture Association of America must die. It’s a monopolistic behemoth that poisons creativity and commerce while hiding behind the failed task of educating parents about film content, and the time has come to call for its dissolution.

The above logo is what we, as movie fans, are most familiar with when it comes to the MPAA because we see it on trailers and home video, but that symbol is really a trick of PR. The goal of the MPAA is not to rate movies, even if that’s the product we know and loathe best. The MPAA’s founding, fundamental aim is to maintain the corporate dominance of its members – the six largest studios.

It does not serve fans. It does not serve families. It does not serve filmmakers.

A Too-Quick History

Unfortunately, it’s always been this way. In 1922, Famous Players-Lasky (the Adolph Zukor-led studio behind the first Best Picture winner, Wings), Metro-Goldwyn, and First National (which would merge with Warner Bros. 6 years later) banded together to create a trade association called the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America. It’s also always had a history of questionable practices. When the organization was 3 years old, it rightfully came under attack from independent filmmakers and the Motion Picture Theater Owners of America. Their problem? The studios had created a trust to help each other hold tight to profits. An extensive report was filed with the Federal Trade Commission, a few changes were made, but nothing was done to stop the MPPDA’s domination.

In 1930, the Big Three, with former Post Master General Will Hays as their head, created the Hays Code which detailed what was acceptable and not acceptable in movies. It was a restraining self-censorship that affected the films being made and being seen by the public. This became their public image – a morality police for moving art. It just so happened that they owned the studios, so if your movie wasn’t made by their specifications, it didn’t get played.

It wasn’t until 1948, after a name change to how we know them now, that the ruling in United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. applied the Sherman Antitrust Law to break up the monopoly by making it illegal for the film studios to also own the distribution houses. The decision is a vital one, and it injured the industry by taking away an unfair market blocking tool. It should have changed everything, but it didn’t.

A Legal Monopoly

The accusations of 1948 still hold true at their core today. Instead of owning the theaters, the studios create pressures that force the theaters to abide by their rulings (specifically how the revenue will be split between them). This relationship hasn’t been all that public until the massive push-back from the National Theater Owners Association when Universal proclaimed it would make Tower Heist available on Video On Demand just two weeks after opening in theaters. It took that atomic threat to rally NATO together, and it worked, but they are still very much at the mercy of the studios by virtue of the business structure. Without movies, they have nothing to lure people into their high-priced popcorn trap. Legally, the studios are playing by the book, but it’s understood that studios can still survive on home video sales and new platforms (if they figure out how) while movie theaters are at risk of disappearing or at least diminishing significantly. To add pressure, the Blockbuster Mentality delivers a few movies into theaters every year that are must-haves. Imagine if your income depended on making sure your relationship with Warners was solid so you could get reels of The Dark Knight Rises. The lesson? Play nice or perish.

Part of playing nice involves abiding by the MPAA ratings. By and large, the big theater chains agree not to show unrated movies, the studios stay happy, and the control continues. That control also extends out to filmmakers. The MPAA has always maintained that their ratings system is voluntary, but filmmakers submit their movies voluntarily the same way someone getting mugged hands over their money. It’s a simple equation: The MPAA controls the ratings, the big movie chains won’t play anything that’s unrated, so if you want your movie to screen in a bigger market, you’ve got to knock on the MPAA’s door and submit to their judgement.

And who controls the MPAA? The studios. According to the MPAA website, its purpose is to:

“champion the creative and artistic freedoms of filmmakers, while working to rally public and private institutions around the world to the cause of safeguarding intellectual property rights, advancing technology-driven innovation, and opening markets to the uniquely powerful and increasingly global medium of film.

Throughout its history and into the modern era, MPAA’s core mission has remained the same — to advance the business and the art of filmmaking and its enjoyment around the world.”

Just below those flowery words? The logos of Disney, Paramount, Sony, Fox, Universal and Warners. This isn’t a true representation of filmmakers – it’s a representation of the biggest and wealthiest that works stridently to protect those economic interests through market-controlling tactics. It’s not that the studios have the MPAA in their pockets. It’s that the studios are the MPAA. It’s the schoolboy writing the questions on the exam. When an outside filmmaker knocks on that door for a rating, they’re knocking on a door financed by six studios that have a vested interest in quelling competition.

That’s why it’s incorrect to think of the MPAA ratings as self-policing. It’s not an industry looking out for its consumers – it’s a conglomerate of the wealthiest companies deciding what rules everyone in the business has to abide by. It’s rule by the few, and you won’t be seeing the MPAA sending out applications to join them any time soon. Hell, even a powerful force like The Weinstein Company isn’t allowed to play.

But if the MPAA is a trade association, isn’t that legal?

That’s a tricky question. To answer it, here’s attorney James Kopecky: “Trade associations (especially the MPAA) exhibit textbook anti-competitive behavior and should be labelled as trusts that violate trade laws.  But, they can skirt by in certain areas that allow them to avoid such labels.”

Those loopholes, according to Kopecky, include:

1. The MPAA being “separate” from the studios because they’re not direct employees.
2. Even though the studios are paying for the MPAA, they’re doing so under the auspice of protecting the industry and not individual interests.
3. The major studios can still consider each other competition.
4. They aren’t price-fixing or controlling what types of movies are made.

In common sense terms:

1. Even though the studios give them all their money, the MPAA employees are not paid directly by them.
2. While the MPAA lobbies the government and represents the interests of the studios, those are somehow also the direct interests of all filmmakers.
3. The Big Six still face off when they release movies, even while they’re all one team behind the MPAA.
4. The first part is true, but while they don’t control what gets made, they help control what gets shown in theaters.

Creative Differences

To outline all of the examples where independent filmmakers were slighted by the MPAA while the studios were given preference (since the MPAA is the studios) would take far too many words. Plus, no one can sum up the core problems quite like Matt Stone and Trey Parker talking about South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut:

There are no objective rules, leading to a nebulous ratings system spearheaded by a group of anonymous parents. When Jack Valenti became chairman of the MPAA in 1966, he created the new ratings system as a direct response to the emerging crop of new filmmakers during the New Hollywood era, but that welcomed change has turned out to be a wolf in bureaucrat’s clothing. It’s the movie industry version of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell – purporting to sidestep a problem of censorship instead of solving it while still placing that regulatory power in the hands of the people the system is meant to regulate.

He also specifically wanted parents to decide how movies would be rated, but there are myriad problems with that set up (even with as democratic as it appears to be). First of all, the anonymous and insular nature of the process means that the MPAA is heavily guarded against real oversight. That’s not to say that there is any malfeasance going on in their hallowed halls, but their structure facilitates the possibility that corruption could be as normal as lunch at noon, and no one from the outside world – that’s greatly effected by the MPAA decisions – would ever know.

Secondly, the ratings board of “normal” parents from Los Angeles is of the same mind considering their track record on judging scenes of homosexual sex and their grand pass on violence. They’re also presumably in the same age range with no one close to be under 40 years old. Perhaps it’s a sampling problem: when you ask for people to come judge the morality of art, you get a certain type of person volunteering. Regardless, it’s yielded some unsavory decisions that – yet again – prove advantageous to the larger studios who trade in mass-market, mostly uncontroversial filmmaking while leaving independent and foreign filmmakers outside of the lobby in the cold.

Examples of the double standard abound and were gracefully explored in Kirby Dick’s This Film is Not Yet Rated. The biggest recent example of obvious bias came with Black Swan (released by Fox Searchlight) and Blue Valentine (an independent distributed by The Weinstein Company). The one with ties to the MPAA got an R-rating. The one without, got an NC-17. This, despite no quantitative difference between two scenes of oral sex. In the end, The Weinstein Company successfully got the MPAA to change the rating, which is great, but also proves that their ratings system is arbitrary to begin with.

This also happened around the same time that David Schwimmer’s Trust was bizarrely slapped with an NC-17 for a scene that involved implied sexuality and zero nudity. Compare that with a movie like, say, Forgetting Sarah Marshall (from MPAA member Universal) which got an R-rating with sexual content and graphic nudity. The argument is not whether each film deserved a certain rating; the argument is that there should be clear guidelines in place that apply evenly to both studio and independent movies. That’s currently not the case, and it’s economically advantageous to the studios.

In general, as the anecdote in that Stone/Parker clip revealed, studios are given an easier time navigating the MPAA because 1) they tend to make the movies the MPAA finds ethically clean and 2) they, you know, own the MPAA.

As a small aside, judging art ethically comes with a peculiar unintended consequence. With the MPAA getting more and more detailed in how they describe the possibly offensive content, they deliver massive spoilers for movies. Landon Palmer recently joked with me about them ruining a key scene in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by spoiling it right under their rating. The irony in all of this is that we’re supposed to be upset by the scene, but the MPAA recognizes its potential to upset, and publicizes it in an effort to keep viewers “safe.”

Digressions notwithstanding, the third problem with having parents decide how movies should be rated is that parents have no idea what might really be harmful to children – at least not on that large a scale. It’s imperative that parents be armed with the tools that will help them decide what content should and should not be seen by their offspring (personal responsibility is key), but does that mean other parents should make the determinations and classifications? Probably not.

To that point, Barbara J. Wilson, PhD makes a strong case for child psychologists and child behavior specialists weighing in on the subject. What would research-guided standards dictate? In several cases, rules that would counter to how the MPAA makes its decisions now. For example, it would consider the context of violence and not simply the amount of it. It’s a more vibrant system which could lead to more nuanced rules that could be converted into a truly workable system that doesn’t depend on the type of day that one of the ratings board members is having.

The Final SOPA Straw

Beyond their monopolistic tendencies of market control and inability to simply provide parents with meaningful content information without 1) de facto dictating it or 2) issuing too-detailed accounts of what’s in the movie before we see the movie, the MPAA and its chairman Chris Dodd overplayed their hand in a way that rightfully incensed the public with their concept for and pressure to create SOPA. It was a bill intentionally designed to injure freedom on the internet so that the major studios could more easily hunt down piracy – a phenomenon which demonstrably hurts indie filmmakers but hasn’t been shown to hurt the bottom line of the Big Six. Now, it’s certainly plausible to theorize that profits are diminished, but it doesn’t help their cause when the MPAA publishes falsified/grossly incorrect data on piracy’s effect on sales.

Dodd’s infantile rant after SOPA and PIPA went down in a flame war should be a clear enough message to everyone that the MPAA has one core principle, and it doesn’t involve expanding creative freedom for artists, it doesn’t involve supporting or growing audiences, and it doesn’t involve aiding anyone who doesn’t pay the light bills in their building.

Possible Solutions to a Difficult Problem

The problem of the MPAA is two-fold.

1. The group is too closely connected to the major studios.
2. The ratings system is unfair and used to control market practices in a biased way.

The possible solutions for this are obvious: either dissolve the MPAA and strike it down as an illegal trust or shift control of the ratings system over to an uninterested third party not funded by those who directly benefit from their rulings. It’s simple, but incredibly difficult because we, as movie fans, have zero power over the MPAA or the studios. Which raises a big question.

So What Do We Do Now?

Unfortunately, there isn’t much we can do. That’s the difficult position we’re in. Back to James Kopecky for even worse news:

“Labeling [the MPAA as] a trust is going to be even harder now that Citizen’s United survived Supreme Court review.  If a corporation can use the free speech and free expression protections of the First Amendment to donate money to political candidates, then I have to believe they will eventually use the same case to ensure free association protection from the First Amendment as well.  If a corporation is a person, and people can freely associate with whoever they chose, provided they don’t explicitly break any laws, then a corporation should be able to do the same thing.”

That’s no good. Plus, since the MPAA is a private entity with no legal ties to the government, they’re untouchable unless a lawsuit is brought against them by 1) someone who has been injured by their practices, and has 2) a discerning lawyer who can gain legal access to the MPAA’s internal documents to show 3) compelling evidence that they’ve severely, disproportionately favored the studios that keep their doors open over independent filmmakers including the one that brings the suit. That’s a tall order.

What we can do is not much, but sometimes your only course of action is the right course of action. Recently, a Texas man named Michael L. started a White House petition to have Dodd investigated for his comments on Fox News regarding political candidates not looking for their large donation checks if they weren’t going to help the entertainment industry on SOPA. It currently has over 31,000 signatures on it with more still coming in.

It’s a fine model to utilize, so we’ve started a petition through the White House system to call for an investigation into the MPAA for violations of anti-trust laws. It makes no sense that an insular group using market pressures and tools like the ratings system to stifle competitors can both purport to speak for the entire filmmaking industry and to claim that it’s a legal trade association.

It’s a wild card move, and it’s a Hail Mary play to be sure, but it’s the only move left on the board for the unwashed masses that simply love watching movies. Even though legally we’re barred from making any real noise, we still have a dog in this fight. The decisions and actions of the MPAA affect us just as they affect the livelihoods and potential growth of independent filmmakers.

If you agree, please sign the petition. Share it with friends. Share with enemies that happen to agree with you on this. Share it with your grandmother. If our voice is loud enough, it might just be heard.

Why Watch? With the celebration of classic movies currently going down at the Oscars, it was the perfect year for The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore to share its love of silent films, Buster Keaton, The Wizard of Oz, and a familiar cartoon tune. No wonder it was nominated for Best Animated Short.

What former Pixar employee William Joyce and co-director Brandon Oldenburg have done here is nothing short of amazing. They’ve used the newest technologies to create a wondrous, incredible, transportational fantasy story that reaches back to the roots of motion picture history. It’s a movie that’s imagination is only trumped by its beauty.

What will it cost? Only 14 minutes.

Skip Work. You’ve Got Time For More Short Films.