SUMMARY OF THE 2013 ACADEMY AWARDS

Quoting Ian Murphy on ZERO DARK THIRTY.

Excerpted from Ian Murphy's recent 50 MOST LOATHSOME AMERICANS post on buffalobeast.com re Kathryn Bigelow:
Charges: Directed a movie which unsuccessfully tries to be both “based on first-hand accounts” of the bin Laden hunt and also a jingoist dramatization where tortured brown-faces spill leads and the poorly cast CIA interrogator is the one left traumatized. Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal defend the enhanced interrogation scenes in Zero Dark Thirty because redacting them would be to whitewash history. True. The problem, however, is that according to members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the film’s breakthrough torture intel is as real as Santa Claus.
Smoking Gun: “In the end, bro, everybody breaks. It’s biology.”

More discussion of ZERO DARK THIRTY as Oscar campaigning reaches climax.

Entirety of Tom Shone's recent THESE VIOLENT DELIGHTS blog post:

"While I found the depiction of torture to be upsetting–it seemed to me that Bigelow and Mark Boal presented it in a way that leaves it up to the viewer to decide whether or not it was worthwhile or reprehensible..." — Mike Fleming, Deadline Hollywood

Notice the baseline assumption behind Flemings comment: the torture worked. Whether it was worthwhile or reprehensible is for us to decide. This is why Boal has done such damage. Because millions now believe that torture produces good information. The baselines of public debate have, for many people, been permanently altered. 

 

Entirety of Jeffrey Wells' recent HOLLYWOOD ELSEWHERE blog post--titled "It Can't Happen Here...Or Can It?":

It's absurd, I realize, to speculate or fantasize about the absolute finest film of 2012 actually winning the Best Picture Oscar...ridiculous! The best films don't win the Oscar, dummy -- the most popular ones do. And yet Zero Dark Thirty is turning into a highly popular film with $75 million tallied + 9/11 families expressing their support + Leon Panetta giving it a thumbs-up + Martin Sheen going "homina-homina-homina...I've changed my mind!" + the Stalinist haters having been marginalized by common sense and routed by public scorn. Tables turnin', cut down to size, how ya like me now?

 

My take: I'm going with Tom Shones.  The Mike Fleming quote is inadvertently spot-on regarding ZERO DARK THIRTY's explicit desire to put torture/rendition into an apolitical vacuum.

 

I wonder if Mr. Boal/Ms. Bigelow were influenced not only by their CIA sources but also Sony exec Amy Pascal in proceeding with this "for us to decide" approach--to make it "acceptable" for a mainstream audience.

[Remembering the sexual politics of Sony's remake of THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, where Rooney Mara was on top of Daniel Craig until Craig flipped Mara over to assert the dominant male/female sex position--a marked difference from the original Swedish film version.]

 

And, though I read Wells' blog, it's rather silly/unbecoming of him to persist in the claim that people unswayed by ZERO DARK THIRTY's filmmaking/screenwriting are merely "Stalinist haters."

 

Feedback for opinionating on Jessica Chastain on ZERO DARK THIRTY.

Yesterday, I reposted comments I posted to the HOLLYWOOD ELSEWHERE site about ZERO DARK THIRTY and Jessica Chastain's lead performance as Maya.  Chastain's been a good actress elsewhere, but not in ZDT, where her performance has been overrated.

HE commenter Thunder Redux wrote:
TVMCCA is right on the money regarding Chastain. I think she was grossly miscast in this film. No idea how she got a best actress nom for this performance.

Commenter bobbyperu took strong exception:

Congratulations to TVM and Thunder for the Seriously Out of My Fucking Head But Let Me Just Be Contrarian award of the day. You guys are total fucking douches -- Chastain, as everyone knows by now (at least those with taste, frame of reference and knowledge of technique/sense of actresses currently working in America), is about the only versatile American thirty-something actress working right now. Without cataloging her dozen, diametrically opposed performances in the last year (different voices, bodies and masquerades, all of them) suffice to say that you two are clueless dicks.

But good to know that virtually no one agrees with you, based in her tally of awards this season from both press and industry.

ZERO DARK THIRTY is a low point in Kathryn Bigelow's career.

Reposting a comment I just left on the HOLLYWOOD ELSEWHERE site:
Have finally seen ZDT. Another film glorifying whatever-it-takes vigilantism--and it's stretching far too much to attach moral complexity to the job-fatigue burnout exhibited by Clarke and Chastain's characters. Earlier Bigelow films like BLUE STEEL and K-19: THE WIDOWMAKER surpass ZDT in character depth and examining the limits of bordering-on-fascist absolutism.
And Jennifer Ehle blows Jessica Chastain off the screen in ZDT. The limits of Chastain's talent and overhype have been decisively exposed.

Adding to the above: ZDT built up a lot of manufactured controversy from comments about whether torture brought about the eventual discovery and execution of bin Laden (the old Dick Cheney "torture works" argument) instead of the "why are we sinking to this level of depravity" moral inquiry sparked by the Abu Ghraib naked detainee photos. 

Is ZERO DARK THIRTY this generation's MISSISSIPPI BURNING?

"Because we're all that bad if given half a chance. We're all about as decent and humane as the next guy until circumstances and dark guidance bring out our inner monster."

The above is film reviewer/blogger Jeffrey Wells (www.hollywood-elsewhere.com) discussing Errol Morris' Abu Ghraib torture documentary STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE in 2008.

Cut to 2012.

"Are you going to tell me that if your son or daughter has been kidnapped and is being held in some secret, all-but-impossible-to-discover location and might possibly be killed if you don't find him/her...are you going to tell me that if you've captured a close accomplice of the kidnappers who refuses to talk...are you going to tell me that all you're going to do is take this guy out to lunch and feed him hummus and tomatoes, and if that doesn't work you're going to take him out for drinks and then set him up with $5000-a-night prostitute in hopes that he'll reveal the location?"
[I'm omitting a swipe at "Hollywood liberals" (plus Alex Gibney, who directed the anti-torture documentary TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE,) and fast-forwarding to Wells' end sentence.]
"It's moments like these when I'm less than proud to be a lefty. Because the way the liberal Hollywood mob is ganging up on this film is appalling, and close to disgusting. A bunch of sensitive pantywaists towing the sensitive-liberal p.c. line."--Wells in support of Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal's nondocumentary of the pursuit and killing of Osama bin Laden, ZERO DARK THIRTY.

It's not just Jeffrey Wells; other film critics including Glenn Kenny and veteran (and highly readable) wiseass Tom Carson are whipping filmmakers like Gibney and columnists like Glenn Greenwald (plus U.S. Senators) for pointing out inaccuracies in a film conceived as a docudrama (fiction and fact blended together), making political points, and not remembering "it's just a movie."  In addition: the allegations that Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal may have been co-opted by CIA pro-torture hardliners in preparing the ZERO DARK THIRTY screenplay.

Sony is almost certainly cheering the see-it-and-decide-for-yourself controversy over a film [I'll see it sometime during its' theatrical run] which, apparently due to a surface replication of Bigelow and Boal's "nonpolitical" approach to the Iraq War in THE HURT LOCKER, may turn out to have the greatest popular appeal of Bigelow's entire filmography (including NEAR DARK, POINT BREAK and STRANGE DAYS).

Tom Carson namechecked THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS in his ruminations on ZERO DARK THIRTY.  It may remain for audiences (short-and-long-memoried alike) to decide if ZDT becomes a multigenerational war film classic--or this generation's MISSISSIPPI BURNING (the semi-forgotten Alan Parker-directed 1988 docudrama which adopted an FBI-centric, civil-rights-leaders-free view of the fight against white Southern racism in the 1960s).

Let's end with this observation from HOLLYWOOD ELSEWHERE commenter "Otto":

The feigned outrage against "Stalinists seeking to quell artistic freedom" is about as genuine and coherent as the NRA's outrage that "they want to take away our guns.'

Just as no one wants to ban all guns, no one is seriously challenging the director's artistic license to depict what she wants. They are criticizing the film's claims that it's based upon fact and yet employs post-hoc logic connecting torture and intelligence that led to UBL's location. And they are criticizing the chest-pounding basement dwellers whose interrogation experience is confined to a Taco Bell drive-through, but who nonetheless delight in their insistence that torture is an effective intelligence tool.

Invoking Stalin is inapt, as Stalin effectively censored dissenters. People criticizing Zero Dark Thirty are not preventing anyone from making a movie of their choosing. Rather, like the filmmakers, they are expressing their opinions.