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 tinseltown: team america and harvey weinstein
This week, fascist dictators and Harvey Weinstein. Kim Jong-Il, the North Korean dictator, might be a bit laughable with his oversized glasses and overwrought sense of self, but Kim Jong-Il the puppet is truly frightening – as only clowns and marionettes can be. With fuzzy black hair and a bulldog face, he’s the evil villain of Team America, an all-puppet send-up of a bomb-blasting, world-saving Jerry Bruckheimer flick. Created by the brilliant minds behind South Park, Team America pokes fun at everything from America’s foreign policy to high-minded Hollywood celebrities. As Kim Jong-Il swans around, blowing up the Taj Mahal, Big Ben and the Louvre, the freedom-loving superheroes that make up the titular team are held captive by a group of Hollywood do-gooders, led by George Clooney and Ethan Hawke. Will freedom reign? Will puppets save the day? Will Team America one day be remade as a real big-budget action movie with human actors, perhaps directed by Bruckheimer himself? And, most important, will Team America join the North Korean dictator-cum-cinephile’s stash of 20,000 films? In other lovable dictator news, Libya’s Moammar Qaddafi has apparently decided that the best way to continue to rehabilitate his image is a sympathetic biopic. His son, Saadi, approached Miramax head, Harvey Weinstein, at the Venice Film Festival and asked whether the studio would be interested in making the film. Weinstein reportedly replied that he’d do it if Libya recognized the state of Israel. No word yet on whether Weinstein is on his way to brokering peace in the Middle East, but I wonder if Qaddafi came up with the plan after reading about the two Hitler films opening in Germany – both depict the human side of the dictator and both are opening to much protest. Maybe now that he’s turned away from trying to build nuclear weapons and has started looking for approbation around the world, a look at his mufti days can’t hurt. Either way, I’ll bet Ben Kingsley will be on the shortlist - “Get us that Kingsley fellow, he’s aces at looking foreign.”
Jade Chang
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