THURSDAY, AUGUST 29, 2002
FILM
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN = 7
If the South had won
Film about Civil War looks at how history might have changed
By Stephen Shupe
Jayplay writer
Two KU film instructors are filming a potentially controversial, independent film about the Civil War.
The film, CSA, or Confederate States of America, is a pseudo-documentary about what the last 150 years would have been like had the South won the Civil War.
It marks the first feature-length collaboration between Kevin Willmott, CSA writer and director, and Matt Jacobson, cinematographer.
CSA evolved from Wilmott's feelings that the South "won the way of life" even into the 1970s.
CSA looks like a documentary, shown SEE C.S.A ON PAGE 16
Professors Matt Jacobson (left) and Kevin Willmott discuss Willmott's feature film script entitled "C.S.A."
John Nowak/Kansan
This movie tanked at the box office last weekend, taking in just $4.05 million. I think Niccol's financial failure reflects less on his efforts than on the efforts of the studio that released it.After
Simone
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 6
Gabriele Fauré. When Viktor inherits a computer program named "Simulation One" (or "Simone"), a star, as the trailers say, is digitized.
Still, the director approaches the twisted lands of Hollywood with a surreal spin. His last film, Gattaca (which was recently named the best sci-fi flick of the last two decades by Wired magazine), received an Oscar nomination for its art direction, and that same style lets Pacino fade into Simone's atmospherics. The whole film practically begs you to question the reality of its surroundings.
Writer-director-producer Andrew Niccol's satirical jabs hit the right notes, but surely someone would be able to see through Viktor's digital pixie dust. Even kids nowadays wonder why the new Star Wars movies look like Marvin the Martian cartoons. Niccol might have done better to set his film in the near future, when the difference between the real and the fake should be less defined.
Simone, who suggests the airbrushing of the University of Kansas playmates stretched to infinity, quickly becomes a worldwide sensation, so Viktor must scramble to keep her identity hidden.
Fed up with the limitations of live actors, Al Pacino "directs" a cyber-starlet in Simone.
all, New Line Cinema also produced the next Lord of the Rings chapter, and as I write this review Peter Jackson, the director of The Lord of the Rings, sits at a computer with his technical wizards digitizing an actor of his own — the much-beloved Gollum from the J.R.R. Tolkien book.
It looks like the studio decided to back the more lucrative franchise. Niccol evidently knows how to touch some nerves. If he keeps this up, expect to see his future movies die similarly quick deaths.
Simone
Catch Simone (PG13) at Southwind Theatres, 3433 Iowa St. You can rent these movies with comparable themes at Liberty Hall, 646 Massachusetts St.:
Niccolo's own Gattaca, starring Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman
David Cronenberg's *oXistenZ*, with
Jude Law and Jennifer Leigh Jeach