Zero Dark Thirty - Anticipation/Discussion Thread

Stephen Dillaine and John Barrowman were also kicking about.

No, I'd checked those guys (just checked again). Wish I could quote a line...Anyway, I'll figure it out eventually--I don't want to sidetrack the thread going through the whole cast.

If you pause this at exactly 1:54, the actor I'm trying to identify is sitting to Chastain's left; he turns his head and looks right at her. I can't put a name to him...he's really well known, I think.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAtWcvCxPhc

Mark Duplass?

I think it's gotta be Jeff Mash, Mark Duplass, James Gandolfini, John Barrowman, Stephen Dillaine, or Jason Clarke.

Jeff Mash (CIA Deputy Director) is the closest visual match.
http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BMjE5MDM4MDE4M15BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNDA4OTUxMg@@._V1._SY314_CR19,0,214,314_.jpg

Once you mentally tilt his head forward 10 degrees and put less flattering side lighting on his malar bags.

Thanks--so it's Mark Duplass, and I know him from Safety Not Guaranteed.

dude gets a lot of work these days

Opinion piece in a LGBT paper, guns ablazin', by one Susie Day.

See the pale, strawberry-blonde woman help US agents starve Muslims, strip Muslims naked, drag Muslims around on dog leashes, water-board Muslims, kick and punch Muslims, scream in Muslim’s faces, hang Muslims from the ceiling, and cram Muslims into tiny wooden boxes — all without losing an ounce of her femininity.

These interrogations are hard to watch. Why are these interrogations hard to watch? Because they are hard on the Muslims? No, because they are hard on the CIA interrogators. See the cruel Muslims forcing the CIA interrogators to wring accurate information about bin Laden out of them.

Poor CIA interrogators. They must do their job, yet their interrogation work is both banal and evil. The interrogators are sad. Wait, sad interrogators! Here is something you can be cheerful about: Hannah Arendt is no longer alive to write about you!

http://gaycitynews.com/zero-dark-thirty-the-womans-guide-to-success-thru-torture/

Tired of people writing about films when they don't know how to read films.

Appreciate the link though.

John Barrowman cameo had many in the theatre guffawing. Most incongruous cameo ever. What is up with the casting?

Hard to really call it a "cameo" in the traditional sense since about 20 people in the US watch Torchwood.

I can't believe I didn't recognise Edgar Ramirez, and I've seen Carlos three times all the way through!

lol

oh, and henry francis doesn't have a line in this either

she reads it about like I do, Gukbe, you simply don't agree with her political framing.

who the fuck is John Barrowman?

nah, Henry Francis had a line. I think

It's not the political framing, it's the "this Is what happens from a narrative perspective so is is what the film means" mentality.

John Barrowman is everyone's favourite American-Glaswegian who played the pansexual Captain Jack Harkness on Doctor Who and the spin-off Torchwood. Also occasionally does panto.

Should add that you and I, Morbs, are probably pretty much exactly the same in regards to our political stances on this subject.

http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lxr8vzatJc1qca7yw.gif

Not to stereotype, though he is pretty hammy.

See the 3,000 human beings who tragically perished in the World Trade Center attacks on September 11. Do NOT see the hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of human beings who tragically perished in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan due to subsequent US invasions, bombings, and drone attacks. Do NOT see flashbacks of the United States creating and supporting dictatorial regimes to facilitate oil drilling in the region. Do NOT see Western sanctions imposed on Iraq years before September 11, 2001, which killed an estimated 500,000 Iraqi children. Also do NOT see people having qualms about the wisdom of killing bin Laden in the first place or the ethics of assassinating anyone based on a president’s secret “kill list.”

I feel like this is pretty much completely misreading the film as well as not understanding how to engage a film.

"engage" as a verb that way = gtfo

it's easy to play the "that's not what the film IS" game when the film is so little

yeah people with strong political beliefs about the movie are ranting about how all the film is is a glum progression through a "osama has got to be got" narrative that hops from one terrorist event to the next climaxing with ubl's death

i should say strong political beliefs about the real life events that the movie exploits to no end other than "I think we can all agree torture happened and this shit is heavy"

anybody who pulls some "oh, please leave it to the cineastes" crap needs to realize this isn't just playing in arthouses and isn't trying to

i mean i realize that some filmies get upset when people judge a movie for what it isn't rather than what it is, but when you make a reductive blockbuster out of one of the hottest topics in us foreign policy and call it journalism sometimes you just gotta deal with that

I can still bitch about it though. And seriously, where this film is playing is irrelevent.

not if you're going to complain that people who care more about politics than movies are daring to discuss the movie

part of WHY you have more links to pundits than critics here is that the movie is more interesting as op-ed fodder than crit fodder

I'm not sure that's true but the political links are the only ones that people respond to. Granted, I get most of the links to write-ups about the film from Glen Greenwald's twitter feed, so I'm a bit to blame on that front.

I'm not complaining that people are talking about the film that aren't cineastes, it's just that a lot of these pundits are projecting so much of their own shit onto it (which is possible because, as you point out, it doesn't explicitly say much itself) that they've outright refused to consider what's going on with the movie.

a large part of the problem is that editors tell newspaper critics not to do "politics" in their reviews

so the critics judge the film on formalist grounds that are by nature amoral.

we all project our own shit onto the things we consume, they prob wldn't be understandable without us doing that - y'know, viewer + object = meaning

is what's going on in the movie really that noteworthy? people with a professional stake in america's understanding of foreign policy are mad that america is being asked by hollywood to accept a simplistic CIA narrative - huffing that they don't acknowledge they're being asked to wearily accept a moody simplistic CIA narrative seems silly.

That's true, but a lot of the writing I've linked here from critics has been about the politics of it. J. Hoberman just released a book that deals with how Hollywood and cinema dealt with post 9/11 issues like the Iraq war and terrorism, so when he writes for the guardian about ZDT and it's politics and depiction of torture, he's not judging the film as amoral.

Xpost to Alfred

i would love to see a pundit acknowledge that the insidiousness of the film (as i see it) is that its portentousness allows for people to have conflicted feelings about torture etc while still accepting a dubious Love The Troops narrative of What Happened, For Better Or Worse. But if they just say "ZDT is propaganda bullshit" while ignoring that nuance, I don't feel high'n'mighty about it because they're not wrong.

I saw that aspect differently than you and Zizek.

But I really enjoyed that Zizek article, which I guess is crucial to my griping. It's not about disagreeing, it's about how they're reading what's actually on screen and then discussing it in a banal and unenlightening blog post.

just gonna repost bigelow's read of her own movie

War, obviously, isn't pretty, and we were not interested in portraying this military action as free of moral consequences.

In that vein, we should never discount and never forget the thousands of innocent lives lost on 9/11 and subsequent terrorist attacks. We should never forget the brave work of those professionals in the military and intelligence communities who paid the ultimate price in the effort to combat a grave threat to this nation's safety and security.

Bin Laden wasn't defeated by superheroes zooming down from the sky; he was defeated by ordinary Americans who fought bravely even as they sometimes crossed moral lines, who labored greatly and intently, who gave all of themselves in both victory and defeat, in life and in death, for the defense of this nation.

Yes, but what Bigelow says for promotional purposes, or even what she genuinely believes, isn't the end all be all.

"ugh, none of these people know how to read this movie, to deal with what it's actually saying"

"here's how the director reads it"

"well she might be lying and who cares"

No, not at all. I do think there is a degree of "look at how hard these people worked and how some died for it" - though I think the film lays Ehle's death down at her own stupidity - I just think it's more ambiguous than that. I know people who saw THL as a glorious ode to the troops, and maybe Bigelow thought that way when she made the movie, but the end product is, when it's at it's best, a critique of the Noble Warrior mentality that Americans tend to view the military with.

i'm just saying that, if you're going to mock others for not being able to engage with the movie, you might consider that the ambiguity you admire is fairly superficial from an auteurist perspective (from curtis to keanu to chastain, she's implied that being the Good Guy is no fun and not without moral dilemmas) and, from political perspective, arguably mere window-dressing.

and that bigelow herself has reduced it to "sometimes they crossed lines, but"

Well we can disagree about the politics and the ambiguities, and I think it's reductive to say that bigelow's comments are "well they crossed a line, but...". I'm not mocking the people who interpret the film differently, I'm mocking the people who approach this as "hey what about drones and dead afghanis and dead Iraqis..."