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 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.

The Hurt Locker follows three soldiers -- bomb tech James (Jeremy Renner) and his subordinates Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Eldrige (Brian Geraghty) into the jaws of death; it's all last names in The Hurt Locker, as seen on patches and heard in urgent radio dispatches. Early on, Bigleow establishes that people will be killed in this film -- with a bravura sequence that depicts a bomb's detonation on the macro and micro level, billowing bursts of smoke and pressure and flame intercut with gravel and dust leaping choreographed in lockstep by the pressure wave, as if God had slammed his fist on reality hard to make a point -- and while Renner, Mackie and Geraghty are fine actors, they're also unknown enough to subconsciously let us know that they aren't safe from what may happen.

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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Death is the ultimate dramatic device, but great art doesn't emerge from strong devices alone. In Take, the directorial debut of Charles Oliver, the impact of a single, startling tragic death immediately conveys the sense of watching a gravely serious movie, which is definitely the case. However, having immediately provided a tone, Oliver fails to follow up with a story powerful enough to justify it. That's not to say that the experience Ana (Minnie Driver) goes through after her son dies in a freak accident before the start of the film isn't relentlessly bleak, but there's hardly anything distinctive about the circumstances to make viewers care any more than they would if they were glancing at it in the morning headlines.

Still, Olilver has made a quietly observant work solely driven by the specific needs of two downtrodden protagonists with completely believable motives. In flashback, we learn that Ana struggled with her son's elementary school, which wants to put him in a special needs program. Meanwhile, she has a hard time communicating with her husband and finding decent work to get by. Elsewhere, reckless gambling addict Saul (Jeremy Renner) destroys his life in a whirlwind of debt. His misfortune, as it's shown in early scenes at a prison where Saul awaits execution, will lead him to accidentally murder Ana's innocent child, Jesse (Bobby Coleman).

Kathryn Bigelow should really make more movies. She's directed some terrific action flicks (Near Dark, Point Break, Strange Days), but she seems to disappear from filmmaking for long periods of time -- her last movie was 2002's K-19: The Widowmaker. Bigelow's upcoming project is a drama about the Iraq war called The Hurt Locker, and it was announced today that the film will star Jeremy Renner, Brian Geraghty and Anthony Mackie . "Who, who, and who?" you might be asking yourself. Renner recently starred in the pretty sweet 28 Weeks Later. Geraghty has done the war movie thing before, he played Fergus in the underrated Jarhead. And Mackie starred in Half Nelson and what I consider Spike Lee's only bad movie -- She Hate Me. "He Who Must Not Be Named" Ralph Fiennes and "He Who Can't Remember His Name" Guy Pearce will have cameos in the film.

The script was written by Mark Boal, a former Playboy journalist -- see! there's good articles in there! -- and was inspired "by true events and recently declassified information." The film will follow "an elite Army Explosive Ordinance Disposal team in present-day Baghdad that fights an onslaught of bombs and snipers." Renner will play the team leader. Mackie, Geraghty, and Pearce will play team members, although if Pearce just has a cameo I'd imagine he doesn't last long. Fiennes will play a mercenary. Says Boal: "The idea is that it's the first movie about the Iraq War that purports to show the experience of the soldiers. We wanted to show the kinds of things that soldiers go through that you can't see on CNN, and I don't mean that in a censorship-conspiracy way. I just mean the news doesn't actually put photographers in with units that are this elite." He adds, "It's really exciting for me, coming out of the world of journalism, to have a movie come out about a conflict while the conflict is still going on." Hell, at the rate things are going, they could delay the release of Hurt Locker ten years and it'd still be going on.

Odds and ends from Thursday:

• Whether you want it or not, they're making a sequel to the fairly engaging Danny Boyle flick, 28 Days Later. Only 28 Weeks Later (Yes, that's the name of the sequel for those of you who have been living in a hole for the past year) will have a new director (Juan Carlos Fresnadillo), a new writer (Rowan Joffe) and, now, a new star. Jeremy Renner (Lords of Dogtown) has signed on to play Sgt. Doyle, one of the sequel's brand new heroes. Pic, which finds Boyle and 28 Days Later writer Alex Garland wearing producer hats, picks up six months after the original. While Special Forces come in to try and neutralize the area, the zombie virus once again rears its ugly head and, well, sh*t goes down ... as usual.
• Looks like Brendan Fraser now has a co-star for his new flick, Inkheart, as Paul Bettany has come onboard to play a fire-eating performer in this adaptation of the popular children's book (which is part of a trilogy written by German author Cornelia Funk). Story revolves around a father who has the ability to "bring characters from books alive by reading them aloud." Yikes, here's hoping he stays away from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
• In an attempt to cash in on the demand for movie downloading, AOL has struck a deal with 20th Century Fox, Sony Pictures, Universal Pictures and Warner Bros. to begin offering selected titles from each studio online for downloading. Ranging from $9.99 to $19.99, folks will be able to own their film, as well as play it on a "limited number of Windows-based personal computers or portable devices that support Microsoft Corp's Windows Media Player technology." Yeah, put that in your Mac ad Justin Long!