The Hurt locker Tagged Articles at Cinematical

I'm in Savannah, Georgia to spend a week as a guest blogger for the Savannah Film Festival, an eight-day fest hosted in the historic Southern town by the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD). [Read my entries in the "Voices from the Fest" section on the festival website.] As the town prepares to kick off the 12th annual festivities with the Iraq film, or rather post-Iraq film, The Messenger, I'm wondering how SFF's growing success might reflect or even influence the rise of film festivals that similarly fall somewhere in between the biggies (Cannes, Sundance, Toronto, Venice) and the little guys.

For starters, a brief look at SFF's line-up and star-studded guest list. The festival begins today, October 31, with The Messenger, a Sundance entry that has Oscar possibilities but more likely will make a run at the Indie Spirit Awards. Stars Woody Harrelson and Ben Foster will be in attendance. (I will be attempting to run into them at the local Starbucks or wherever it is that Hollywood actors hang out when they visit other cities.) Another Oscar hopeful, the Emily Blunt-starring period biopic The Young Victoria, is screening the following day.

And then there are the almost certain Oscar pictures: George Clooney in The Men Who Stare At Goats; Lone Scherfig's An Education; Michael Haneke's Cannes winner The White Ribbon; Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker, with star Jeremy Renner in attendance; and Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, which will bring both director Lee Daniels and his star Gabourey Sidibe to town.

Read on for more about this year's Savannah Film Festival.

IFP's Gotham Independent Film Awards kicks off the awards season in November each year with an impressive list of nominees, and this year's list is no different. While it includes big names like the Coens for A Serious Man and buzzy films like The Hurt Locker and Big Fan, it also gives deserving nods to smaller films like Amreeka, a wonderful film about a mother and son from the West Bank who move the Illinois. The awards also include tributes to the careers of Natalie Portman, Stanley Tucci, and The Hurt Locker's director Kathryn Bigelow, as well as producers Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner, who both worked on A Serious Man, The Soloist, State of Play, and a slew of other projects.

Previous Gotham winners include Frozen River, Trouble the Water, Into the Wild, Sicko, and Half Nelson, just to name a few. Check out Cinematical's preview coverage of the awards here.

The full list of nominees is after the jump.

Last week, Peter Bart of Variety wrote "Unlikely Rivals on the Oscar Circuit," outlining how Jane Campion and Kathryn Bigelow were a part of the Oscar race with Bright Star and The Hurt Locker. But rather than simply outlining their accomplishments and discussing their talents, Bart gave the piece this weird, "at odds" theme, kicking it off with their looks. It's apparently strange that the "cerebral, somewhat severe, leans toward post-hippie attire" Campion could helm an all-out romance* while Bigelow -- the "tall, model thin" director with a "gracious manner" -- could bring us The Hurt Locker. As if looks are inextricably tied to theme. As if Wes Craven has to look like Freddy Krueger, or James Cameron has to be a beefy Terminator.

To be fair, kind words are given to both filmmakers; it's just fueled by this strange desire to make things at odds. Its execution doesn't relay a sense of distaste in Campion's and Bigelow's accomplishments, but rather an inability to discuss them without noticing a woman's physicality, without struggling to make connections between their looks and interests. It continues right down to the final line -- "Keats vs. Iraq: Now that's downright weird." -- as if Campion's Piano didn't already face off against the likes of Schindler's List and The Fugitive, as if Juno never faced off against No Country for Old Men, and so on and so forth.

As if women are some sort of alien species that cannot be understood without their physical presence -- they must be judged by it, defined by it.

*Let alone the ridiculousness that Campion has to be characterized as the "severe" woman to Bigelow's cuteness.

How would you go about programming a weeklong retrospective of Kathryn Bigelow double features? We could put the vampire movie with the futuristic sci-fi movie, and then maybe the skydiving/bankrobber movie with the biker movie. Let's see... then we could put the war movie with the submarine movie, but then the time-switching murder story would have to go with the lady cop movie. Hmm. Let me start over...

Or rather, let me just take a minute to gush about one of my favorite directors, who just now seems to be getting the praise she has long deserved for her current movie The Hurt Locker. She began her career by attending the San Francisco Art Institute and studying painting, which slowly segued into film. Her bold, painterly images can be seen to this day, throughout all her work. She has taken a tough, genre approach to filmmaking, following in the footsteps of such ultra-masculine directors as Howard Hawks, Samuel Fuller and Don Siegel. But to her, she's not really doing anything unusual; she's just making the kinds of films she wants to make.

Unfortunately, few of her movies have ever shown any kind of financial success, so she's not exactly in good standing with the studio heads. She's strikingly beautiful in person, and also whip-smart, a combination that, in meetings, could work both for and against her. On the plus side, some of her films have generated passionate cult followings, including Near Dark, Strange Days and especially Point Break, which has a fervent fan club worthy of Rocky Horror.

Welcome back to another edition of Insert Caption -- the game that every boy wizard is instructed to play on Fridays while attending Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Last week we asked you to churn out some laughs for a photo from a very unfunny (but still awesome) film called The Hurt Locker. Congrats go out to our solo winner, who provided us with a caption too good (and hot and fuzzy) to pass up.




1. "You have no idea how badly I want to shoot this gun in the air and shout aaargh" -- Anthony T.

See full image and all captions






This week is a doozy ladies and gents, as it's finally time to celebrate the return of a dude named Harry Potter. Yes, on July 15th we'll all finally get to cram our sweaty summer selves into theaters and watch Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince TM. In honor of this momentous occasion, we're giving one lucky person a whole bunch of Potter awesomeness. The grand prize winner behind our favorite caption this week will fly away with one Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince TM laptop sleeve with embroidered patch, one Quidditch bag, one Mask paperweight, one Slughorn hat with screen-print & patch, one Avada Kedavra T-shirt, one Kids' custom dyed Slub Worm Potter Quidditch T-shirt, one Kids' custom dyed Girls' Ginny Weasley Ultra Worm T-shirt, one women's Avada Kedavra T-shirt with velvet print, one Sublimated Luna Lovegood women's T-shirt, one Next Level Quidditch T-shirt, one Nose biting tea cup, one 4x6 sheet of tattoos and one set of buttons. Phew. Now sound off below!


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Indie Roundup reviews the past week of news from the independent film community and provides a peek at what's coming soon.

Opening. Three indie flicks open on Friday: Jeffrey Levy-Hinte's terrific music doc Soul Power, Chris Nahon's live-action adaptation of anime horror thriller Blood: The Last Vampire, and a reissue of Francois Truffaut's 1969 crime romance Mississippi Mermaid, with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Catherine Deneuve. After a good start in New York and Los Angeles (see below), action thriller The Hurt Locker expands into 50 selected markets.

Deals / Articles of Interest. Our friends at indieWIRE reported on three recent acquisitions with upcoming theatrical releases planned: Chris Fuller's critically-acclaimed teen drama Loren Cass (Kino; July 24); Rebecca Miller's The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, with Robin Wright Penn and Alan Arkin (Screen Media, October); and Dror Zahavi's thriller For My Father (Film Movement, Winter 2010). Eugene Hernandez considers Chris Anderson's new book Free: The Future of a Radical Price and suggests that Anderson's "ideas and examples" are applicable to the "evolving marketplace for movies."

On-Demand Viewing. Anne Thompson posted a clip at Variety for Michael Almereyda's post-Karina drama New Orleans Mon Amour, with Elisabeth Moss and Christopher Eccleston. I saw it at SXSW last year and couldn't get into its very deliberate pacing; its virtues might be better appreciated on a smaller screen. It debuts on cable VOD on July 15. Blogging at The Huffington Post, filmmaker Adam Hootnick compares recent events in Iran with the situation in Gaza after Israel's withdrawal from its settlements in 2005. That's the subject of his film Unsettled, which is now available on iTunes and Amazon VOD.

After the jump: Indie box office results -- and a year-to-date report.

Bomb squad. War zone. Malfunctioning robot. In the opening sequence of The Hurt Locker, director Kathryn Bigelow expertly sets a tone of anxious, sweat-soaked drama. The film has been playing in New York and Los Angeles, expands to selected cities this Friday, and then goes wide on July 24. You can watch the first eight minutes online at Hulu (or after the jump).

And if that doesn't grab you, I don't know what will. I saw The Hurt Locker at SXSW, and that opening sequence pinned me to my seat. Guy Pearce leads a bomb squad that includes Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty. They're already suited up in protective gear as the scene begins, wisecracking and otherwise demonstrating an easy camaraderie. A small wheeled robot has a minor mechanical malfunction, requiring Pearce to walk into harm's way to fix it. The team's wary conversational bravado continues, even as they shift into high alert on the mostly empty street. Civilian bystanders could be friendly -- or they could be waiting to trigger the bomb.

Jeremy Renner, who turns up a little later in the picture, stars as a new member of the squad. He's a confident expert, but his reckless methods cause the others to question whether his devil-may-care attitude is needlesssly endangering their own lives. Ralph Fiennes, David Morse, and Evangeline Lilly also appear in small roles. I fully agree with James Rocchi, who wrote in his review: "You'll want to see it at a theater near you, in fact, on the largest possible screen with the best possible sound." Don't miss it.

Something funny happened at our local press screening for The Hurt Locker this week, and not in the film itself, which is decidedly not funny. The trailer attached to the film was for Sorority Row (pictured), a dumb-looking I Know What You Did Last Summer knock-off in which college students are harassed by a person they thought they'd killed. It was incongruous to see a cheesy horror flick advertised in front of The Hurt Locker, a complex action drama that many critics consider one of the year's best films. It was like screening There Will Be Blood with a trailer for Land of the Lost in front of it.

The reason for it, of course, is that The Hurt Locker and Sorority Row both have the same distributor, Summit Entertainment. When you go to the movies, some of the trailers are just whatever's in rotation, but one or two are usually from the same studio as the film you're watching, sent out with prints of that film with explicit instructions that they be attached. Big distributors (Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox, etc.) usually have plenty of upcoming products and can choose trailers that target the same general demographic as the movie they're paired with. But Summit is small -- all they had to choose from was Sorority Row and The Twilight Saga: New Moon. (A Sorority Row trailer in front of New Moon -- now that would make sense.)

So I understand why this particular trailer came with this movie. But it was still a funny juxtaposition. I can't imagine anyone wanting to see both Sorority Row AND The Hurt Locker. Has anyone else ever noticed this phenomenon? If you've seen The Hurt Locker in theaters, was this trailer in front of it, or was it just for the critics' benefit? What other strange combinations of trailers and features have you noticed?

After the jump, the Sorority Row trailer, so you'll know what I'm talking about.

By: James Rocchi (reprinted from The Toronto International Film Festival, 9.13.08)

Based on journalist Mark Boal's real experiences following bomb disposal experts in Iraq, The Hurt Locker isn't just a welcome return to big-screen action from director Kathryn Bigelow (who has wrung both fame and infamy from her art with Near Dark, Strange Days and Point Break). It's an assured, confident, swaggering piece of moviemaking that manages to not only evoke every war of the 20th century but also, despite the claims by makers and some reviewers that it's an 'apolitical' film, speaks very specifically to the Iraq war. Even so, plunging us into the thick of things alongside the highly-trained men (and they're all men here) who defuse bombs for the Army, Bigelow and Boal avoid the speeches and postures and long, contemplative talks of home front films like Stop-Loss and In the Valley of Elah by staying in Iraq, and they shun the loopy, loony formal experiments of Brian De Palma's Redacted. Boal and Bigelow stay laser-focused on one group of men with a singular mission, and make us live in the constant possibility of death. Viewed from half a world away, a bomb is a political concern; viewed from less than a foot away, a bomb's just a high-stakes exercise in problem-solving, where making a mistake means a final, terminal education in the physics of expanding gases.

(By James Rocchi - reprinted from the Toronto International Film Festival, 9/10/08)

The Hurt Locker sees director Kathryn Bigelow craft a big, booming tale of tension based on journalist Mark Boal's experiences and interviews with bomb disposal experts in the streets of Iraq. Toronto didn't just see The Hurt Locker earn raves from many critics; it also saw the film get picked up by Summit Entertainment for distribution. Cinematical spoke with Bigelow and Boal in Toronto about breaking the audience's unconscious link between an actor's salary and a character's destiny, whether or not their film is really apolitical, the fun and excitement of blowing things up on-set, how making the movie yourself is the best way to be sure you make the movie you want to and much more.Cinematical's podcast content is now available through iTunes; you can subscribe at this link. Also, you can listen directly here at Cinematical by clicking below:



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