COMMENTS SUSPENDED ON THIS POST. PLEASE POST ON THE ABC SITE - SEE LINKAnyone wondering why I've been a bit quiet on the Oscars - all is revealed at ABC's The Drum today, which has published my take on the awards and why The Hurt Locker beat Avatar.
Extract:
"The Academy Awards are a great example of the brilliance of the United States' use of "soft power" to prop up its global influence. The Oscars are partly about giving Hollywood the chance to feel good about itself, but also, even more importantly, about marketing the American movie industry to the world. The Hurt Locker ticks both these boxes with aplomb.
"After films heavily critical of US policy and conduct in the Middle East such as Rendition, In the Valley of Elah, Body of Lies and Redacted, Bigelow delivered a safer option - an avowedly apolitical movie focused on the existential dilemmas of a bomb disposal unit in Iraq..."
18 comments:
Avatar certainly deserved its craft awards. Interesting about this case - Avatar's genuine and very significant advances in craft are what make it a film far more important than The Hurt Locker and one that will be remembered when the latter film is forgotten. Even it's utterly generic plot seemed to be appropriate for a film that had so much else to say on a technical and craft level.
The difference between those films and The Hurt Locker is that The Hurt Locker is a good film while those are just embarrassing messes.
Avatar was the worst cinema experience I have ever had. My eyes were straining throughout the unbearable 165 minutes. The plot was ridiculous and the dialogue was the worst dialogue I have ever heard in my life. Giovanni Ribisi's lines were embarrassing. Good luck to Cameron for making all that money but I won't be seeing this or any Avatar film again in the future.
Anonymous: I agree the dialogie was dreadful. Lots of the film had done though. Well, not counting Na'vi, obviously. If you're the same Anon who comments below on A Serious Man, perhaps you just don't feel comfortable around people of a different skin colour to yourself ;-)
(If you are a different Anon,ignore that last comment)
Dialogie? Yikes, my tryp9ing's getting werse
What I was tring to type was "lots of the film had none" (ie dialogie) Not "done".
While The Hurt Locker is generally described as apolitical (and I'm not arguing the point), I thought this comment at the end of Bigelow's acceptance speech for Best Director pretty much reveals her politics:
"They're there for us and we're there for them."
Maybe she's just being patronising, a bit like "I'd like to thank gawd", which always goes down well in public. You know, patriotic and all, or religious or whatever. Or maybe she sincerely meant that. Me, I don't think "they're there for us", though those poor bastards deserve all the support they can get, moral and otherwise.
That's a strikingly sexy theory - though the problem, of course, is that it's groundless. Ampass has never been more leftist or desperate to look like it's rolling with the times. And few things are more fashionable among leftists and liberal guilt-ists than a stringent anti-Iraq war stance. Deliver them a moderately well-made or well-calculated severe anti-Iraq film, and they'll eat it up. They're dying for one, in fact.
And the reason that Hurt Locker won Best Picture is that, unlike the mediocrities you've listed, it's intensely compelling, thought-provoking yet thoroughly accessible, solemn, macho and also resonant (plus, Ampass overdosed on liberal guilt when they awarded Trash Best Picture back in 2005, so in the years since, they've been perhaps looking to compensate by not awarding fetishistic left-baiting). That The Hurt Locker also happens to be an excellent, unostentatious, un-awards-baiting film is just a happy coincidence for cinema fans everywhere.
Its apolitical stance didn't bother me, because the script was exploring a more primal aspect to the nature of war, and it elegantly, depressingly pointed out how the soldier's experience is often so completely disconnected from politics. It also helps that the film as a whole is subtly, non-didactically anti-war. What doesn't help this argument so much is that the action and bomb-unlocking setpieces are so viscerally exciting that it made me (stringent leftie, anti-war, anti-Iraq me) want to join the army because it seemed so damn cool. I was craving some of them war drugs.
But didn't Kubrick do the same thing in Full Metal Jacket which is acknowledged by many as one of the best war films ever made? I agree with Y Kant in that The Hurt Locker is an engrossing film about the soldiers engaged in Iraq/Afghanistan but it doesn't bash its viewers over the head by politicising it with a mallet. After 6 years engaged in conflict in the Middle East, the viewer is intelligent enough to form its own opinion without a director telling them what they should think of the conflict. The incident with the young Muslim boy is probably the most powerful statement about the war that I have ever seen in any film and it does it in a compassionate, empathetic but subtle way without insulting the intelligence of the viewer. For many people, they see the current Middle East conflict as an evil construct by the old evil USA and all the soldiers are doing there is killing innocent civilians just for the fun of it. They use the conflict to justify their own political leanings and prejudices. At least, Kathryn Bigelow was smart enough not to do that!
Woody, Full Metal Jacket isn't one of the best war films of all time. The first third is.
The Hurt Locker was certainly an achievement of something, if only because for its prodigious running length I wasn't bored despite its bare semblance of a plot. It's a very fine collection of scenes from a war. It strings the viewer along with a mysterious character but it's themes in this regard are disappointingly trite and awkwardly exposited in final dialogue scenes and one kitchen scene that is a frankly almost artless attempt at show rather than tell. But it is a good film. It's good enough.
Is it political? Can a film about current a unresolved war really be apolitical? If the combatants are distanced from the conflict's issues and causes, doesn't that say something? Is the american public that dissociated from its government's agenda? Is a soldier's lot now just alienated labour? Am I just getting wanky?
I'll vote for HURT LOCKER *and* FULL METAL JACKET. One's more conventional, but both stand pretty high among war films for me. (Perhaps only THE THIN RED LINE and APOCALYPSE NOW clearly trump them among English language war films?)
Michael, completely agree with you. I would also throw in Paths of Glory. I wish Kubrick were love today. Imagine the film he would make about the Middle East conflict. Amazing.
Has no-one seen Beaufort? It's an Israeli film that screened at MIFF about 3 years ago that I think The Hurt Locker borrows heavily from, including the explosion early in the film. I also think that Beaufort is a superior film.
I've seen neither The Thin Red Line nor Apocalypse Now though for a long time Full Metal Jacket was my favourite war film. Michael, thanks for qualifying your comment with "English language" because in my mind, no war film comes close to Come and See which is just an amazing film, period.
Paul: No, I haven't see BEAUFORT - thanks for the recommend. A reminder, yet again, of how important film festivals are.
Agree completely re. COME AND SEE.
I have close friends who have been Special Forces operatives in both Iraq and Afghanistan, one is a ten year veteran of both conflicts, having been a member one of the first SF units to enter Afghanistan. There are scenes in The Hurt Locker which are just utter Bull Shite..the sniper scene is probably one of the worst researched combat scenes in war film history, shockingly bad, it simply would not play out like that, but people who made the film said it was well researched and now a real bomb disposal expert is suing the screenwriter who wrote the bollocks script..the whole film was a massive yawn..said nothing about anything and real bomb disposal units have said that it is an utter load of shite. I mean what does the film actually say..about anyhting? About anything at all, war isn't nice..really I never noticed! It was just a bad bad year for Oscars...A Prophet should have just won everything...and what about FishTank? Amazing film. Not one nomination. On the nose.
MacG, I'm with you on A Prophet. There's a film that takes a genre and completely confounds expectations. Brilliant.
Really Hurt Locker is just an Emotional Postcard, not reflective of whats going on over there at all. Yes detonating bombs is nasty work, but the main protagonist is totally reckless and would not be put in a situation of control or as a team leader in any of the scenario's portrayed in the film. Real bomb disposal untis are on the record for having said this. Bigelow got a handball, I mean Black Hawk Down was a far better film if we are going down that road, yes morally corrupt, using a bodycount like a football score, so why was the Hurt Locker up for an Oscar and not Black Hawk Down, answer..mediocre content, if the Hurt Locker had've come out against There Will be Blood and No Country For Old Men it wouldn't have gotten a sniff. If I hear one more person say that snipr seen was realistic I'll scream..anybody heard of an Air strike? Totally reatarded..and the team with Ralph Fiennes, I take it they were ex Brit SAS or something of that equivalent? Just utter tosh. Maybe a little research would've helped miss Bigelow make a film that actually had something to say. Cest le Vie A Prophet!
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