Zero Dark Thirty - Anticipation/Discussion Thread

i was trying to work out exactly why i wasn't bothered with the hurt locker while i'm so bothered with this, but issues of "authenticity" aside, hurt locker had intense set piece after intense set piece, and some career-making performances.

also i didn't know how it ended

In that interview, Obama definitively states his opposition to torture; in the foreground of the frame, Maya’s hardened colleague Jessica (Jennifer Ehle) shakes her head as if to suggest the president’s ignorance—she’s been in the field, he hasn’t. If Bigelow and Boal want to insist they haven’t made a movie that validates torture morally, that’s fine.

maybe bigelow wanted to make a movie about a CIA that made very clear to its young new president that it wasn't going to be fucked with for what it did under the old one and got away with everything

Lots of critics-of-the-critics are getting the criticism confused: few people are arguing that Bigelow thinks torture is ok - just that this film misrepresents torture's (lack of) efficacy.

x-post: yeah that struck me as a major thread. that scene in particular (Obama as a distant voice from outside the CIA) seemed particularly important as a moment in which the bubble is, if not burst, as least shown as a bubble. the repeated sheepish remarks about iraq WMDs seemed to perform a similar function.

Would like a count of how many times Jason Clarke says "bro" in the first 10 minutes...

is ZDT better than Hurt Locker? worse? same?

only seen the latter and liked it.

LOL why did no one tell me that John Barrowman was in this? Kudos to Bigelow for casting the real life Troy McClure.

As a typically ignorant American, feel gutted that it took this film to realize the hotel I stay in more often than not while in London is adjacent to an infamous 7/7 bombing location (Tavistock).

I was like "hmmm this looks familiar, there's that Starbuc..." [bomb goes off] "oh man..." then when I get out of theater I immediately wiki and learn of my stupidity.

basically an overly long, remarkably boring ep of Homeland IMO. lead was annoying and I would have broken her hand off the 57th day she came and marked on my office window with a red marker.

(and while i missed all the 'utility of "enhanced interrogation" and the message it sends' debate that apparently was going on on the internet a month ago, i thought it was p clear that the actionable intelligence came from bribery)

and is Mark Duplass the hardest working dude in the biz right now?

not the ONLY actionable intelligence. In the most infamous quote associated w/ this movie, there was that "civilized lunch" (tell us or we'll string you up again).

xp

you guys are really most fascinated by the three dozen underwhelming bit roles in this huh

I purposely avoided watching it yesterday afternoon, balking at its length.

otoh will be #1 this weekend

ah you're right, Morbs.

on both points!

basically an overly long, remarkably boring ep of Homeland IMO. lead was annoying and I would have broken her hand off the 57th day she came and marked on my office window with a red marker.

― Still S.M.D.H. ft. (will), Sunday, January 13, 2013 8:36 AM (44 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haha yes the marker schtick was so dumb, and it was just a really weird choice to stick an ahistorical torture power hour at the beginning of the movie, and the final shot what a fn cliche, i did not really like this that much it was p gross

u guyz just don't like STRONG WOMEN

its weird she was the star of the movie but her character seemed really underdeveloped, maybe that was the point she had kinda an empty life just sort of ambitious and obsessive, but even that seemed underdeveloped

seal bros are way cooler than the cia is what i learned from this movie

im not sure it's underdeveloped--it's made pretty clear imo that this is literally all she's ever done. she's pretty much a black hole of grief and empty revenge.

i feel like the procedural is such a staple of television shows (did anyone compare Zodiac to tv?) that it's hard for a film procedural to separate itself, but the relative patience and moral swamp of this one certainly did that for me.

people even if theyre black holes of grief and empty revenge tend to have observable characteristics, i didnt get much sense of personhood out of her, i got what the filmmakers were trying to say about her, but not much past that

ryan have you seen blue steel

I did hear a critic compare this character to Jamie Lee in Blue Steel, wd have to rewatch to evaluate.

i have not. would like to though.

def recommended if you want patience in a moral swamp

Bigelow is an interesting director for this material. She is interested in the ways her characters live dangerously for philosophical reasons. They aren't men of action, but men of thought who choose action as a way of expressing their beliefs. That adds an intriguing element to their characters, and makes the final confrontation in this movie as meaningful as it can be, given the admittedly preposterous nature of the material.

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19910712/REVIEWS/107120303/1023

"final confrontation" implies some Big Boss fight like on NES games at the end of a level

interesting interested intriguing

not on netflix sadly but I'll track it down. Sounds great!

did anyone actually click through to see what movie that was referring to

Blue Steel was great but Ron Silver had me convinced as a kid that everybody with a beard was evil

Ralph Fiennes with long hair?

xpost

xxpost HAHAHAHAAHAHAHAAHA

everybody with a beard was evil

sry we're too busy pressing our bodies against naked men to notice how cold it is WINTER THREAD gay homo queer &c 2013

303 posts and no one's mentioned the Rorshach song in this?

Not sure what I thought of this.

Even with all the controversy, I didn't realize going in that virtually THE ENTIRE FIRST ACT was about torture.

There were some really good tense moments in this but over all it just felt kind of empty.

And kind of yucky, too. People in the theater were cheering and clapping during the raid scene, especially after the "for god and country" line. Ick.

Whatever the film's boosters want to say about it, it's not a movie that challenges the audience in any real way.

I agree about the emptiness but found that a profound virtue. disagree about it not being challenging. people are gonna bring their jingoism to the theater with them but the movie doesn't congratulate them for it. You can fault it for not explicitly challenging those notions but I don't think that would improve the movie or what it's really trying to do.

OTM

I don't really see that flat empty docudrama style to be compelling. I find it to be a dishonest affectation that filmmakers use to stand in for seriousness.

Actually most of my gripes about the movie's aesthetics are really just symptomatic of how movies treat this subject matter in general. This film is only the biggest most recent example.

That's really the irksome thing about it, too: it's getting all these raves but it really isn't even that formally interesting. There's some really well-executed moments of tension but not much else.

critics are really impressed when filmmakers aren't afraid to tackle the big stories and make streamlined narratives out of them

I agree about the emptiness but found that a profound virtue.

― ryan, Sunday, January 13, 2013 3:38 PM (47 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

dear god

"emptiness" perhaps not the best word, but there's a sense in which it's dehumanizing and vacant. Systems of control swallowing up people. I found the movie quite harrowing for that. Of course, that's after only one viewing. But it seems to me an awful lot of critics see fit to critique this movie for its genre and not what's actually put on screen, or at least the (to me) complicated relationship it has to genre. This is a western, essentially, but more like those 70s anti-westerns.

you know, "Geronimo" and all that. Final shot with same pathos as the searchers. (Tho of course not as a great a movie.)

i guess it's hard to find a portentous pseudo-authentic procedural profound when you know bigelow can get portentous about surfing bank robbers