"Radical Aspirations"
In a highly unusual and highly admiring interview piece, thorny N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis speaks with Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow in tomorrow's edition (i.e., Sunday). Are the Times editors telling Manohla to step outside the critics' box and write more to beef up page views, or did she ask to interview Bigelow out of personal passion? Perhaps a little of both.
Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow during filming in Jordan.
Bigelow's film, says Dargis, was "greeted with rapturous praise and some misapprehension" after its Venice Film Festival premiere nine months ago. "Mostly, it seems, because its extraordinary filmmaking, which transmits the sickening addiction to war as well as its horrors in largely formal terms, doesn't come wedded to a sufficiently obvious antiwar position. One British critic went so far as to say that while the film had 'excellent acting, camerawork and editing, it could pass for propaganda.'
Except The Hurt Locker "doesn't traffic in the armchair militarism of Hollywood products like Top Gun and Transformers," she says, "[and] neither is it an antiwar screed. It's diagnostic, not prescriptive: it takes an analytical if visceral look at how the experience of war can change a man, how it eats into his brain so badly he ends up hooked on it.
"And, like all seven of Ms. Bigelow's previous feature films, this new one is also as informed by the radical aspirations of conceptual art as it is by the techniques of classical Hollywood cinema."
Posted by Jeffrey Wells on June 20, 2009 at 12:29 PM
comment #1
Circumvrent
says ...
Jeff, over the last few months, you have completely convinced me on this movie. I'm very excited to see it in the next few weeks.
Posted by Circumvrent
at June 20, 2009 2:36 PM
comment #2
erniesouchak
says ...
I liked "Hurt Locker" quite a bit, but Dargis is way off the mark. In order to see how war changes a man, you'd have to get a sense of what that man was like before the war, and the film doesn't give you that. Instead, it seems pretty clear that Renner's addiction to risk, etc., would have manifested itself some other way in private life if he'd never enlisted. In this case, war made the most of capabilities/inclinations that were already in place.
Posted by erniesouchak
at June 20, 2009 2:54 PM
comment #3
StoneFan1
says ...
"Strange Days" is one of the most underrated films of the last 25 years!
Posted by StoneFan1
at June 20, 2009 3:56 PM
comment #4
CitizenKanedforChewingGum
says ...
Good point there, ernie.
I also love me some Strange Days. I don't know about all that "last 25 years" hyperbole, though...
Posted by CitizenKanedforChewingGum
at June 20, 2009 4:36 PM
comment #5
StoneFan1
says ...
I said "one of" not THE most underrated.
Posted by StoneFan1
at June 20, 2009 6:40 PM
comment #6
Asokan
says ...
Saw this one on Friday and had mixed feelings. On the one hand you have a very tense, if episodic and overlong thriller about the impossible daily life of these rather sketchily drawn soldiers, but one the other hand the lack of any political comment and the treatment of the "natives" as just some sort of darker-skinned alien species out to get the heroes gives the film a certain abstract quality and lack of any political comment.
It's like a sci-fi-action-adventure most of the time with our heroes moving in green spacesuits through a barren, white, mars-like wasteland. This way the movie ends up not being about the War in Iraq in particular, but rather about the weird excitement of war in general. It's as visually impressive and lacking in depth as most of Bigelow's flicks.
Watched "Near Dark" recently again and enjoyed it a lot. Need to revisit "Strange Days", though.
Posted by Asokan
at June 21, 2009 12:22 AM
comment #7
Markj74
says ...
Saw 'The Hurt Locker' at the edinburgh Film Festival on Thursday night. It was excellent, visually and intellectually absorbing and shows up Michael Bay as the cinematic infant that he is. Great to see Bigelow back with her A-game.
Posted by Markj74
at June 21, 2009 5:39 AM
comment #8
Gordie Lachance
says ...
It's a shame that Hurt Locker is going to top out at 12-15 million. If only Bigelow could have bent a little and changed the names up a bit.
For example, instead of Iraq, give it a name like Middle Earth or Tatooine or something. And instead of 'Army bomb squad unit', call them Jedi's or Terminators or almost anything else. This thing could have made 200M if only she'd let people escape the make-believe real world violence and enjoy some make-believe fantasy violence.
Posted by Gordie Lachance
at June 21, 2009 6:24 AM
comment #9
StoneFan1
says ...
You cold view "Strange Days" as a counter argument to "JFK."
Posted by StoneFan1
at June 21, 2009 7:56 AM
comment #10
StoneFan1
says ...
You could view "Strange Days" as a counter argument to "JFK."
Posted by StoneFan1
at June 21, 2009 7:59 AM
comment #11
fredderf
says ...
"...and I watched, from a rather lower vantage, her unfurl her slender six-foot frame. It was like watching a time lapse of a growing tree." -- Manohla Dargis in the article.
Posted by fredderf
at June 21, 2009 10:45 AM
comment #12
erniesouchak
says ...
I think Dargis has a crush!
Posted by erniesouchak
at June 21, 2009 11:08 AM
comment #13
COCO
says ...
I like KB's world view...she grows as a film artist.
Renner is one to watch.
Posted by COCO
at June 21, 2009 6:32 PM
comment #14
gafi
says ...
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Posted by gafi
at May 23, 2011 5:49 AM