Zero Dark Thirty - Anticipation/Discussion Thread

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.

but it's not a different perspective, it's conventional wisdom found in just about every crime procedural. you can find that shit in batman. zdt just says it's based on a true story.

are you saying you wish the film had be more explicitly anti-torture and anti-extra judicial killings or less explicit and more, say, avant garde and open to interpretation. (imagining a Bela Tarr shot raid sequence now...)

personally i don't think it should have been made.

but then what would we have to argue about on ilx

peace would guide new answers
and love would steer the boards

i think god spared me to argue about this on a message board

wait are you mark wahlberg?

I have no problem with the action scene leading people to "cheer for the death of Osama" (if they do) - I thought the raid was done extremely well, as non-rah rah as you could make an action sequence with DEVGRU and super-copters and all
people are going to cheer the death of someone we all agree is evil, that's just a given

It's the link between that and "torture got us here" that's problematic.

J. Hoberman: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/jan/18/zero-dark-thirty-us-election

Chastain doesn't do much for me, but my wife thinks she's, like, stunningly beautiful.

Not sure where she falls on the girls girls hate when u think theyre hot / girls girls love when u think theyre hot spectrum.

Dem 'centrists' circling the wagons

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/20/movies/hollywood-makes-its-case-for-zero-dark-thirty.html

Christopher J. Dodd, the president of the Motion Picture Association of America, raised a warning on Friday for those who are calling for investigations into the film.

“There could, in my view, be a chilling effect if, in the end of all this, you have a screenwriter or a director called before an investigating committee,” Mr. Dodd said. He stressed that he was speaking for himself rather than for the association’s member studios, including Sony Pictures, which released “Zero Dark Thirty.”

Mr. Dodd, who served five terms in the Senate before retiring in 2010, said he could not recall another movie being so heavily scrutinized by the government. He expressed concern that the military or other government agencies that have routinely helped filmmakers might withhold future cooperation rather than risk similar pressure.

“ ‘JFK’ and ‘All the President’s Men’ were controversial,” Mr. Dodd said, noting that neither of those films seemed to draw the same level of attention from lawmakers.....

After the Golden Globes, Mr. Boal flew to Europe to promote “Zero Dark Thirty” as it opened in Britain and France.

In a series of e-mails, Mr. Boal said he found the reception to the movie there to be “much smoother” than in the United States.

European interviewers appeared to regard the torture controversy more as a reckoning among Americans than as something that directly involved them, he said.

saw this last night and it left not much impression on me honestly.

it's very much the CIA's view of itself presented in a grim, heavy way

i was supposed to watch it today but I'm content with Richard Blanco alluding to "silent drones" on rooftops.

Was distracted early on by the lead interrogator's 2011 hipster dtyle: beard, ironic "bro"s and all. First 30 mins least convincing, but otherwise into it.

The most obscene defence of the film is the claim that Bigelow rejects cheap moralism and soberly presents the reality of the anti-terrorist struggle, raising difficult questions and thus compelling us to think (plus, some critics add, she "deconstructs" feminine cliches – Maya displays no sentimentality, she is tough and dedicated to her task like men). But with torture, one should not "think". A parallel with rape imposes itself here: what if a film were to show a brutal rape in the same neutral way, claiming that one should avoid cheap moralism and start to think about rape in all its complexity? Our guts tell us that there is something terribly wrong here; I would like to live in a society where rape is simply considered unacceptable, so that anyone who argues for it appears an eccentric idiot, not in a society where one has to argue against it. The same goes for torture: a sign of ethical progress is the fact that torture is "dogmatically" rejected as repulsive, without any need for argument.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/25/zero-dark-thirty-normalises-torture-unjustifiable

Writer has never seen Straw Dogs.

i'm assuming that this will be as dull and self-impressed as hurt locker tbh, not much chance i'll bother

Irreversible, too. xp

It's not as if Straw Dogs or Irreversible were "neutral" on rape. Both showed horrific psychological damage inflicted and both had the rapists' brains splattered around the floor by the end of the film.

seriously