Election Day is upon us; go out and vote! Now! Then, to celebrate that crackle of nation-changing excitement hanging in the air, see how Presidents from Ike to Obama (and some of history’s lesser-successful White House hopefuls) seized the hearts and minds of the American people as seen in this riveting, superbly-edited campaign ad supercut.
The more things change…
Props to Hugh Atkin for the supercut; watch more of his videos on YouTube.
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Also in Tuesday morning’s news round-up: Osama Bin Laden raid pic Seal Team Six is a big Nat Geo hit; Cate Blanchett heads to Middle East jury duty; And Imodgen Poots eyes a Zac Efron romantic comedy.
Stars Campaign For Barack Obama at Election Finale
Jay-Z, Natalie Portman, Anne Hathaway, Eva Longoria, Maggie and Jake Gyllenhaal, Jon Hamm and Jennifer Westfeldt, Chris Rock, Samuel L. Jackson and many other stars have been lending their support to President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign, Yahoo and US report.
Anheuser-Busch Not So Thrilled By Flight
“Anheuser-Busch InBev, maker of Budweiser, has asked Paramount to remove the beer from its hit film Flight, which centers on an alcoholic pilot who guzzles alcohol and takes drugs both before and after he prevents a malfunctioning jetliner from crashing,” THR reports.
Seal Team Six Lures 2.7M to Nat Geo
The number gave the National Geographic Channel its top broadcast of the year. The Weinstein Company backed project recalls the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden, Deadline reports.
Cate Blanchett To Head Dubai Film Festival Jury
She will head the jury that will pick the winner of the Dubai International Film Festival’s IWC Schaffhausen Filmmaker script award, which carries a $100K cash prize. The award, which began earlier this year, is intended to help the winning filmmaker transfer their vision to the screen. IWC Schaffhausen is a Swiss watchmaker, THR reports.
Imogen Poots Eyes Are We Officially Dating?
She will star opposite Zac Efron in the romantic comedy about three male friends in New York who make a pact to stay single as each of them begin to fall in love. The project is being sold at the American Film Market, currently underway, Deadline reports.
David Fincher can’t help but direct. The Social Network and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo helmsman does what he does best and bosses around a couple of guys from Blur Studio in this Kickstarter campaign video for an animated adaptation of Eric Powell’s very cool comic-book series The Goon. Fincher, who’s teamed up with Powell, Goon publisher Dark Horse Entertainment and Blur directors, Tim Miller and Jeff Fowler, joins those last two men in the clip to attempt to raise $400,000 so that they can produce a finished first reel of the film. And he’s not about to leave the driving to them.
After Miller and Fowler begin their appeal, Fincher bigfoots the two guys and decides that a series of niche spots are the way to go. He then proceeds to sell Powell’s world of zombies, vampires, fish-men and giant squid to Little Orphan Annie fans, liberals (“Put a caring man back in the White House”), conservatives (“Put the right man in the White House”) and arch conservatives (“Put a white man back in the White House”) as well as fans of hip hop, R-rated movies and movie trailers.
Okay, so the humor is pretty lame, but the footage included in the Kickstarter clip (via FirstShowing.net) is beautifully bad-ass and features voice work by Clancy Brown as the Goon and Paul Giamatti as Franky’s swashbuckling pupil-less friend Franky. (Now do you get the Little Orphan Annie reference? ) The airborne car scene with Franky spraying machine-gun fire from the hood of a sweet convertible muscle car is dreamy. [FirstShowing.net]
There’s also this “proof of concept” video. Good stuff.
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Oscar-winner George Clooney lent his voice to President Obama’s campaign for a video introduction Thursday night to close out the Democratic National Convention, but it was a trio of leading ladies — Kerry Washington, Scarlett Johansson, and Eva Longoria — who gave the DNC a rousing jolt of star power in Charlotte, NC.
Washington, who manages political crises on ABC’s Scandal, introduced herself as “not just as an actress but as a woman, an African-American, a granddaughter of immigrants who came through Ellis Island, a person who could not have afforded college without the help of student loans and as one of millions of volunteers working to re-elect President Obama.”
Her rallying cry was an embracing of the Constitutional phrase “we the people,” delivered in a passionate three minute speech at the DNC podium. “I love that phrase so much,” she said, “because throughout our country’s history, we’ve expanded the meaning of that phrase to include more and more of us. And that’s what it means to move forward. And that is what this election is all about.”
(Funny enough, Washington has a movie out next year called We the Peeples. Coincidence?)
Taking a more personal approach, Johansson appealed to the emotionally-charged shared experiences of America’s middle class, citing her own family’s upbringing and dependency on public and nonprofit programs. “I grew up in New York City, I grew up with four siblings, my father barely made enough to get by. We moved every year and we finally settled in a housing development for lower middle income families.”
“My girlfriends from high school to this day still depend on Planned Parenthood and often Medicaid for important healthcare services,” she continued, urging young voters to register and commit…
Full Story »The Campaign, the new comedy starring Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis, faces the challenge that troubles all political satires these days, which is coming up with material that can rival what’s actually happening in the news. And that’s not a point made in some hacky stand-up comedian way — “Those crazy folks in D.C., am I right?” No, it has become a legitimate, daunting task to come up with anything that can surpass, for instance, the wild reality show that was the recent Republican primaries.
Director Jay Roach has, of late, mixed HBO dramatizations of contemporary political events like Game Change into a career otherwise dedicated to comedies like the Austin Powers franchise and Meet the Parents. The Campaign should theoretically fall nicely into the Venn diagram intersection between these two realms, but while frequently funny, it’s a film that also feels disconcertingly and disappointingly mild, ignoring all sorts of specific, choice ammunition in favor of a storyline about how far political discourse has gotten from actual issues (while itself skirting any actual issues).
The villain in this case is unassailably soulless “big money,” embodied by Dan Aykroyd and John Lithgow, playing scheming billionaires whose real-life counterparts you may just be able to make out from the fact that they’re named the Motch brothers — and even in that, the film doesn’t really have any sting. It feels akin to setting a film in North Korea and then filling it only with jokes about accidentally ordering dog meat at restaurants. There’s a giant elephant (and donkey) in the room.
As a goofball comedy, at least, The Campaign generally works, pitting Ferrell at his most obliviously pompous against Galifianakis in full, mincing weirdness. Ferrell’s Cam Brady is the incumbent Congressman in the fictional 14th district of North Carolina, a Democrat (not that, as mentioned, it matters in the least) with a…
Full Story »“Obamacare.” “Romney Hood.” The political name-calling sounds like campaign season is well under-way (though does it ever end or begin?). The art of the possible will get a comical twist this weekend with the release of The Campaign, starring Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis. The pic follows two rivals who clash in an election that will decide who will head to the U.S. Congress from their North Carolina district (Ferrell appears to even flash a not-so-subtle coif similar to former V.P. candidate John Edwards). The film, which opens this weekend, prompted ABC’s Political Punch reporter Jake Tapper to offer up his Top 10 political films of all-time (documentaries were excluded) and “political film” was kept to a narrow definition. See if you agree with this list and let the campaign begin.
10. In The Loop, directed by Armando Iannucci (2009)
Starring Tom Hollander, Peter Capaldi and James Gandolfini, the 2009 Sundance premiere is a satirical play on the build up to the war in Iraq and the relationship between the U.S. and the U.K. In the film both countries are on the verge of launching a Middle Eastern war and the story follows a behind-the-scenes drama in which there are officials trying to promote armed action and those trying to stop it. A British government minister tells a radio interviewer that war may be inevitable, but is then shot down by the Prime Minister’s aide, played by Peter Capaldi. But then, the aide himself makes a further mistake saying there may be a need to “climb the mountain of conflict,” further muddying a delicate situation.
9. The Parallax View, directed by Alan J. Pakula (1974)
Based on the 1970 novel by Loren Singer, Warren Beatty plays a newspaper reporter who takes on…
