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Caught this last night and it is awesome. Finally an Iraq film that isn't ruined by politics. She got outstanding perfs from the 3 relatively unknown leads. Plus it was shot in 16mm rather than video so looks much better than the DV Iraq flicks like that godawful DePalma abortion.

Bigelow did a lengthy Q&A that was remarkably vacuous. She's smokin' however \:D/. And when some chick in the audience asked her what it was like to be a female director she basically told her to fuck off.

It is being released theatrically in the US on June 26.

You must be excited about this then, I'm sure...

I also saw this last night--um, it was a fun, mindless action movie....no more, no less (and I wouldn't expect anything else from Bigelow).

How does it feel to have had a brush with Barmy?

Was he the one drooling when they introduced Bigelow?

Saw the film in Toronto. It had a handful of really good scenes, but it fell apart toward the end when Bigelow and her screenwriter decided that Jeremy Renner's character and his internal anguish was the emotional core of the film. Removing the dynamics between him and the men around him made the whole thing feel vacuous. Not to mention that this "look at me, I'm in mental anguish" bit was built up through a series of cliched devices including a good, old-fashioned, fully-clothed curl-up-and-cry-in-the-shower.

It had the potential to be absolutely fantastic, but blew it.

neal wrote:a series of cliched devices including a good, old-fashioned, fully-clothed curl-up-and-cry-in-the-shower.

Yes, has anyone ever done this in real life? I always think my reaction to finding myself crying, clothed, in the shower would be similar to Gene Wilder's in The Producers after Zero Mostel's rant: "I'm wet! I'm wet! I'm hysterical and I'm wet!"

Wow, this looks better than I'd anticipated.

From last Sunday's NY Times, an article on Kathryn Bigelow.

And the AV Club interviews Bigelow.

I caught this at SIFF a few weeks back and thought it was very good. I think the film succeeds mostly because it pointedly avoids political bickering or finger-pointing in the same way you feel like the soldiers on the ground might. Instead it's about the very basics of war - surviving day-to-day and trusting your comrades - and I haven't seen a comparable film about that in the era of modern warfare (I think Black Hawk Down is the only point of reference that comes to mind). I agree with one of the previous posters that the film loses a bit of steam at the end when it delves a bit too bluntly into the psychology of one of the characters, but the performances are solid and everything up to that point is fantastically tense film-making (the sniper set-piece in particular is brilliantly conceived). I whole-heartedly recommend it with one caveat - if you're the type who gets motion sickness from Bourne-like shaky-cam, sit in the back or wait for the DVD.

Stephanie Zacharek's review is up.

I have to say I'm more curious now, simply because of Jeremy Renner. I loved him (and damn near the entire cast) of the sadly short-lived The Unusuals, and that has made me more interested in this film because it's on his shoulders.

NY Times review.

A.O. Scott wrote:So let me put it another way, at the risk of a certain cognitive dissonance. If “The Hurt Locker” is not the best action movie of the summer, I’ll blow up my car. The movie is a viscerally exciting, adrenaline-soaked tour de force of suspense and surprise, full of explosions and hectic scenes of combat, but it blows a hole in the condescending assumption that such effects are just empty spectacle or mindless noise.

Keep in mind that Scott just sat through Transformers 2, so perhaps The Hurt Locker looks that much better by comparison, but now I really wanna see this.

Has Scott ever given a bad review? Don't think I've ever seen it.

Joe Morgenstern, [i]Wall Street Journal[/i] wrote:Kathryn Bigelow’s film, which was written by Mark Boal, manages to be many things at once—a first-rate action thriller, a vivid evocation of urban warfare in Iraq, a penetrating study of heroism and a showcase for austere technique, terse writing and a trio of brilliant performances. Most of all, though, it’s an instant classic that demonstrates, in a brutally hot and dusty laboratory setting, how the drug of war hooks its victims and why they can’t kick the habit.

Scott Foundas, [i]The Village Voice[/i] wrote:With her strength of revealing character through action, Bigelow comes closer to the tradition of Anthony Mann, Sam Fuller, and other bygone practitioners of the classic Hollywood war movie than to today's dominant breed of studio A-listers, who create (mostly incoherent) action at the expense of character. Not that The Hurt Locker, which I take to be the best American film since Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, much resembles any war movie we've ever seen before.

knives wrote:Has Scott ever given a bad review? Don't think I've ever seen it.

Lots of 'em. His delicious takedown of Seven Pounds is legendary.

Well that's better.

Ooof, that is a rough one.

knives wrote:Has Scott ever given a bad review? Don't think I've ever seen it.

In addition to calling Transformers 2 "cretinous,", there's this doozy:

A.O. Scott wrote:[M]ake no mistake: Mr. Bay is an auteur. His signature adorns every image in his movies, as conspicuously as that of Lars von Trier, and every single one is inscribed with a specific worldview and moral sensibility. Mr. Bay’s subject — overwhelming violent conquest — is as blatant and consistent as his cluttered mise-en-scène. His images, particularly during the frequent action sequences, can be difficult to visually track, but they are also consistently disjointed. (And proudly self-referential: the only director he overtly cites is himself, with a shot of the poster for his movie “Bad Boys II.”) The French filmmaker Jacques Rivette once described an auteur as someone who speaks in the first person. Mr. Bay prefers to shout.

Jeff wrote:His delicious takedown of Seven Pounds is legendary.

Made even better by his interpretation of the MPAA's rating:

A.O. Scott wrote:“Seven Pounds” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Swearing. Soulful sex by candlelight. Car accident. Eggplant parmesan.

On the subject of The Hurt Locker:

Joe Morgenstern, [i]Wall Street Journal[/i] wrote:Most of all, though, it’s an instant classic that demonstrates, in a brutally hot and dusty laboratory setting, how the drug of war hooks its victims and why they can’t kick the habit.

I heard (twice) on NPR today that the film opens with this exact sentence in the form of onscreen text: "War is a drug, etc etc."

I've seen a number of critics quoting that exact phrase.

The same thing happens all the time. Most mainstream critics are so blind to the subtext and nuances of a film that they scratch their heads over 'meaning' unless there's a message that's explicitly communicated in a neat little monologue. Sometimes there truly are multiple levels of depth worth discussing in a picture, but you wouldn't know it with 50 different publications never going beyond talking about the 'themes' that make themselves obvious in the film. I'm being a little kind there...it's probably from the press kit.

It's like that Chabrol quote where he says that if he wants critics to mention Balzac in relation to his film, he'll put in a shot of a Balzac book.

Meant to post this earlier, but here's a video interview with Bigelow and Mark Boal.