Zero Dark Thirty - Anticipation/Discussion Thread

I don't think The Searchers is all that good

― the little prince of inane false binary hype (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, January 16, 2013 9:46 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's ok if you remove every scene that's indoors

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ahhh shit... wrong thread

sorry every1... ha ha

lmao

centering the whole story on manti te'o, the higher-ups who are skeptical and don't believe him, the website screaming at them and slamming its hand on the table about doing their f***ing jobs, he becomes close to this other football player who you know is making up a fake woman for him to date because that's what happens in the movies.

I've never watched Westerns (except Leone, Corbucci of course).

OF COURSE grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

Zero Dark Thirty didn't seem to be aiming for morally ambiguous, I thought it was a very very familiar narrative in which our heroine is doubted by everyone and has to fight her bosses and loses a close friend which is extra inspiration or something and of course she is right and persistent enough to get the bad guy in the end. And you can make it look gritty and realistic with the way it's filmed, but it still came off to me as so Hollywood and not challenging in the least! There are moments that I suppose are meant to make you think more than that, but the overall (again, super super conventional) plot had the effect of overwhelming them. I'm not too interested in Homeland for the same reasons

― seriously, THIS GUY (daria-g), Thursday, January 17, 2013 3:34 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark

yeah i guess when you put it like that, it brings to mind Hurt Locker and the disparity between the sophistication of the filmmaking and the primitive screenplay. i think ZDT takes that to the next level, one thing i - I dont know if i admired, but i at least found notable was how consistent the aesthetic in ZDT is. the camera for the most part doesnt 'break character' to underline things clumsily. as JD noted, the film doesnt provide cues, which is why it's amazing to me that people were applauding it

people don't need cues to applaud the death of bin laden

imagining this movie just them going after some unexplained guy in central asia or where ever

people don't need cues to applaud the death of bin laden

― da croupier, Thursday, January 17, 2013 12:33 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

but which precise part do you applaud at? as soon as you realize its him? when you see a flash o' white beard? the film never creates a space for it, his killing is presented, cinematically, as a mundanity - no more important than any of the other guys getting plugged. there's no moment of triumph, so the audience i guess arbitrarily settled on one of their own

you clap when the seal says i killed the third floor guy

Chastain's Jon Stewart appearance makes someone nervous.

a simply extraordinary actress, by the way

http://www.buzzfeed.com/jwherrman/zero-dark-thirty-twitter-touts-our-specialized

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a simply extraordinary actress, by the way

lol hormones

That's a quote from Sullivan, whose hormones swing the other way.

well the gays have a whole other weird thing goin on with her, which i was apparently inoculated from.

ive been waiting to be blown away by her and it hasnt happened yet. i thought she was solid in this, though unconvincing in that scene where she's supposed to rage at kyle chandler and threaten to stuff congress in his butthole or whatever she said

She was fine in her trio of 2011 films but she looks like a blank lead.

i kinda like actors who are basically interesting faces-- i think she has one (if also a conventionally pretty one).

trio? wasn't it more like seven? xp

best so far in the Michael Shannon-crazy-or-not thriller for me.

yeah she was fantastic in that

Yeah, easily her best.

fyi the Milius Red Dawn is on TV now if you want to know what a movie that wants you to cheer on the violence looks like.

well we're starting from a higher baseline here, i thought

since Bigelow declared herself "a lifelong pacifist"?

I forgot about Coriolanus – forgettable in that one.

fyi the Milius Red Dawn is on TV now if you want to know what a movie that wants you to cheer on the violence looks like

that's the thing - just because ZDT isnt over-the-top bad propaganda doesn't mean it isn't propaganda

people aren't taking offense to ZDT because they think it's rambo

it's sort of like how some people don't think children of men is sci-fi even though it's about a dystopian future with a ridiculous scientific conceit. we're so used to corny sci-fi were people with a ton of make-up ask for futuredollars that some people can't even recognize it for what it is when it's done well.

propaganda isn't really a genre it's an identification of intent.

thanks, but the point remains - saying "oh no, delta force, now there's a movie that encourages you to support us foreign policy" ignores that jon stewart's never going to be swayed by delta force

KB's choices are constrained by the action movie/western/procedural templates that she chooses for this movie. and to the extent that she chose them the film is complicit in their logic---however that doesn't prevent the film from presenting those templates in ways that push back or invite interpretation or critique of those logics. it makes it a complex text, but it certainly doesn't make it propaganda (which nicely smoothes over any interpretive complexities anyone might bring to bear on the film).

zdt allows you to cheer for osama's death (even if you disagree, people ARE cheering), allows you to feel queasy about torture, allows you to love the player but hate the game, but it asks you to accept a narrative where something horrible happened, and US operatives entered a moral quagmire to get the guy who did the horrible thing and they did. it leaves out a lot of details and debate because however much kathryn bigelow wants to acknowledge the quagmire, she made clear in her op-ed that she wants audiences to Never Forget and Honor The Brave.

serious question: would it even be possible to film UBL's death without 'allowing you to cheer' for it? you could show an explicit closeup of his face getting shot and linger on it for two minutes and some of the audience would still be cheering.

Regardless of her op-ed, what's wrong about presenting the moral quagmire without staking a definitive opinion on it? xpost

Also I'll say it again: If this is CIA propaganda, it is terrible CIA propaganda.

serious question: would it even be possible to film UBL's death without 'allowing you to cheer' for it?

if the death were shot by Bela Tarr.

jd, that's true, but why are we filming it in the first place?

the problem with saying "definitive opinion" is that, yeah, this isn't necessarily rambo. i can say by using terrorist events as the impetus for flash-forwards, the film suggests that bad things are going to keep happening if The Job isn't Done, even if we have ish with how it got done. But you might say oh yes, the lead character says that, but through long shots I sense a certain anguished distance from the sentiment. People have political beef with the narrative the film presents because it simplifies a complicated issue. and while some say "judge it as a movie," honestly i don't see much argument for the value of the movie outside of its zeitgeist-tapping.

Gukbe, the problem with saying this is "terrible" CIA propaganda is that it depends what the goal is. If it's saying the CIA are a bunch of awesome guys that don't do gross things, yeah it's bad. but if the goal is grim acceptance of what we did in the '00s, it looks like it's working quite well.

But I think the film leaves that "grim acceptance" up in the air, which is pretty much the opposite effect propaganda is meant to have.

so this sounds like United 93 shot by Kathryn Bigelow? That film had no value outside vague propaganda.

Except that film was a clear construction of a moral good. This one is trickier.

gukbe they might not be "accepting" the excusability of the actions, but they're accepting the narrative

They're presenting a narrative.

if anything, when pundits get uptight about zdt, fans of the movie should be glad. they're doing it the favor of assuming it might actually sway someone to accept the film's logic and let it shade their perception of our foreign policy. if you're saying "bah, it couldn't do that" then i have to ask what the hell it could do other than be CSI: Pakistan.

croup i think perhaps the big sin of the film (on my interp of it) is that it's offering an aesthetically motivated, and quite mournful, depiction of self-alienation and ethical compromise and a sly critique of groupthink (i personally don't think it's even ambiguous on these points) at a moment when generating outrage is perhaps the more urgent task politically and ethically speaking. but for me it's all the more relevant for not placing itself in political or ethical terms (it doesn't have to take "sides") because by doing so frees itself to observe, yes, ethics and politics by not being part of those discourses.

it's trying, successfully or not, to offer a different perspective to better discuss and understand these things.