Oscars 2012 — Page 8

I sure hope Helen Mirren doesn't get a nomination for anything. (she would be supporting, when Watts would be leading, though, no?). Mirren's role was small and a thrown away role. It had nothing to it, and Mirren could and probably was playing it in her sleep. Waste of talent.

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Strummergirl- you're not alone in that thinking in re: Argo. The last third of the movie, in particular, is a point of contention, when the film suddenly turns into a thriller with a (fictional) chase scene.

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I can assure you, Zero Dark Thirty does not celebrate the CIA.

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"...I don't know if that's the general consensus though."

It's all over the place. There are people who disagree with that on this very thread.

And what were your thoughts on the movie besides that? If anything that is why I am having a hard time finding actual engagement with whether or not the film is good because people seem to want just 'is it or is not condoning torture' discussion. Both can be had but I doubt critics are showering it with praise and awards because of that one contention.

strummer,

I'll say that it's a really great piece of film-making...but that's what it feels like. Film-making. From Chastain's technical, but actressy performance, I felt that the whole enterprise had a Soderberghian antiseptic quality. It also felt long (like every other friggin movie this year. WHY THE 2:45 RUN TIME FOR EVERYTHING!? The only movie I didn't mind watching at that length was DARK NIGHT RISES...and that was a major surprise to me).

I certainly was engaged, and I certainly didn't think it took a pro-torture stance. And it was exciting...at times. But the further I get away from the experience in the theater, the less I feel connected to it. Unlike, say, LINCOLN, which has stayed with me for weeks. Or even THE DARK KNIGHT RISES, which I avoided in the theaters because I heard such mixed things, but ended up loving and even being moved by it.

With LINCOLN, of course you can see and feel the emotional wheels turning thanks to Spielberg's tendencies. But the beautiful, wordy script actually worked against that and made the film feel completely alive. Here, Boal and Bigelow seem to be working from the same place, so the technical wheel-spinning was obvious. It was still exciting and interesting...but obvious and a little self-congratulatory (towards the filmmakers, not the CIA).

So I finally saw Zero Dark Thirty. It is definitely the goods. I would compare it to All the President’s Men and Zodiac, the latter of which is not everybody’s tea and neither is ZD30 for similar reasons, but I dug the length and the murkiness of it all.

I liked that they showed the CIA as a mixed group of careerists, sadists, and people who did fail and screw up big time. The movie begins with biggest intelligence failure in modern history, followed by minor but very costly intelligence failures trying to ‘right’ that major one. I think showing the post-9/11 attacks or thwarted attempts showed that this was not a battle just for UBL but how declaring a war against the act of terrorism overwhelmed the agency in how futile and very confusing it could be to even them. When Joseph Bradley lashes out at Maya by calling out that this is her obsession and it was just futile was the heart of the film for me.

This is not really like The Hurt Locker at all- for anybody skeptical about this. Even the Seal Team 6 scenes, although incredibly tense and sometimes a little more sobering than thrilling, do not really wield the American Western mythos that I have found in a lot of Bigelow’s other films (especially The Hurt Locker).

Chastain’s performance is definitely a hard nut to crack. I really do not think she was made to be ‘too relatable’ even if she has moments (I thought wearing converse and drinking Red Bull in a niqab stood out). Clarice Starling is a good comparison but I also thought Redford and Hoffman as Woodward and Bernstein are a lot like that performance. I can’t say Chastain’s performance is irreplaceable but I do admire her showing range in her work going from Tree of Life, Take Shelter, and even an on the surface comparable performance in The Debt. I don’t care if it does get censored but, “I’m the motherf***** who found this place!” better be in her nomination reel. I also really liked seeing Jennifer Ehle early on, Kyle Chandler as Joseph Bradley, and seeing Edgar Ramirez in a sizable role in the middle part. John Barrowman’s in it for like 2 minutes, btw.

The only time I felt like my trance from watching the film was broken was in minor casting choices. James Gandolfini will always be Tony Soprano to me and although I am not sure which character actor could play then CIA director Leon Panetta. Ditto for Stephen Dillane’s transatlantic accent as a WH National Security Advisor (likely a hybrid of Tom Donilan and John Brennan). It worked as Thomas Jefferson but not in this. Luckily they are in it for about ten minutes tops.

**Spoilers**:
The film progresses from the immediate post-9/11 response of torture to the blowback of the ‘enhanced interrogation’ program to a few desk jockeys at the agency openly opining how Gitmo and Abu Ghraib destroyed their chances on capturing UBL and other terrorists. They seem to know torture looks bad but are convinced that it works. Maya thought so too but she also wanted to bomb the UBL compound, so what she thinks does not make her right. And I really hate to say it but anybody who espoused torture as wrong would be a man on the island at the CIA and likely would still be in the minority at Langeley today. Creating some stock character who condemns it within the agency would have rung false. The film does show non-cohersive means of getting witnesses/suspects to talk and also showing classic CIA cases of bribery and forging alliances with some dirty people- your taxpayer dollars at work- that seemed to be more at play with getting UBL than the torture from YEARS ago.

Those torture scenes, that are indeed disturbing, are practically taken word for word out of the leaked torture memos that got a lot of attention. The people in the film are pro-torture and hawkish to the core. But this ain’t propaganda. If you had an opinion one-way or the other, this will not sway you. It is shown as nasty work, no different from Errol Morris’ re-enactments in the great documentary on Abu Ghraib, Standard Operating Procedure. I never rooted for Dan in those scenes and was more fascinated by his low depths. I actually felt more for the two suspects in custody.

If anything torture is shown as defamiliarizing and dehumanizing the people who ordered and performed those programs. That one scene where the group is stopped in their tracks by then presidential candidate Obama’s public stance against torture on TV to me showed them looking into the outside world seeing somebody with differing point of view about to enter their world and try to change their culture that they are more than comfortable with. They are all very silent but I can just see the air bubbles in their heads about what they think about that statement. It shows a really screwed up culture. Dan, who performs most of the torture in the film, is not really shown to be this great hero but as somebody very ambitious person and willing to go the deepest parts of hell to get a job promotion at the CIA.

It is a murky movie that will probably not sway people who want to celebrate these folks or want them tried at the Hague but I do feel the presentation of the CIA, its employees, and its culture post-9/11 are not celebrated. Why show that many intelligence failures, particularly ones not even associated with UBL, if you want to make the agency look good? Seal Team 6 gets as close to a sense of glory, and I like that they are shown as guys who really know their stuff and that they have a contentious relationship with the CIA though subtle.

I also think the inclusion of Joseph Bradley having to leave Pakistan because he was revealed to give he go-ahead on a drone strike showed the change of course with the agency that was pretty interesting, if perhaps a comment on current foreign policy. It showed a changed character, once telling Maya that their job was to ‘protect the homeland’ but gets his career ruined for a drone strike in Pakistan that could not seem further away from the homeland. I think aside from robots, drones are as detached as you can get. That it was Bradley to me was significant (I am not sure how directly based he is on the actually CIA employee though).

Fairly predictable DGA nominees:

Affleck
Bigelow
Hooper
Lee
Spielberg

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I think "Mama" could hurt Chastain's chances, much like "Norbit" did for Eddie Murphy. Then again, Jennifer Lawrence didn't help herself in the press last week.

That awful film is not the reason Eddie Murphy did not win for "Dreamgirls." I'm sure it didn't help, but couldn't have cost him many votes if any at all. If Melissa Leo can make her own FYC ads draped in a fur coat by a swimming pool and still win, anything is possible.

There is never a big 'reveal' moment in the torture sequences where there is information gathered and the detainees are depicted in incredibly sympathetic terms that you do not think these people are threats or people who have the goods when they 'break'.


You see more cases of detainees just talking one-on-one revealing much more.

Spencer Ackerman explains it better than I do:

"These are not “enhanced interrogation techniques,” as apologists for the abuse have called it. There is little interrogation presented in Zero Dark Thirty. There is a shouted question, followed by brutality. At one point, “Maya,” a stand-in for the dedicated CIA agents who actually succeeded at hunting bin Laden, points out that one abused detainee couldn’t possibly have the information the agents are demanding of him. The closest the movie comes to presenting a case for the utility of torture is by presenting the name of a key bin Laden courier, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, as resulting from an interrogation not shown on screen. But — spoiler alert — the CIA ultimately comes to learn that it misunderstood the context of who that courier was and what he actually looked like. All that happens over five years after the torture program initiated. Meanwhile, the real intelligence work begins when a CIA agent bribes a Kuwaiti with a yellow Lamborghini for the phone number of the courier’s mother, and through extensive surveillance, like a police procedural, the manhunt rolls to its climax. If this is the case for the utility of torture, it’s a weak case — nested within a strong case for the inhumanity of it."

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/12/zero-dark-thirty/

I watched Beasts of the Southern Wild last night on dvd. I honestly don't understand the Oscar love for this film, especially the little girl. Yes her performance is good, but IMO, not Oscar worthy. Is it because she is so young? If that is the case, if you ever saw Cujo,1983, Danny Pintero (sp) should have been nominated as the young boy. I always thought he had given one of the most realistic performances of a frightened child. Going back to Beasts, after watching for around thirty minutes, I stopped the dvd and turned on the subtitles. There was so much I couldn't hear or understand. I'm open to having my opinion changed.

"That's the remarkable thing about Zero Dark Thirty: there are no heroes and villains in it. There are no acts that are depicted as heroic or evil. Bigelow and Boal really do just present events without commentary."

But are these events accurate? Is torture inaccurately presented as effective? If so, isn't that seriously objectionable notwithstanding that the filmmakers don't take a moral position? And, in addition, sensationalistic and meretricious especially in a movie which presents itself as, as you seem to be saying, a journalistic narrative of events as they, at least to a large extent, occurred?

Alternatively, torture is not shown as effective and this objection to the script is facile.

Or perhaps the filmmakers have, at least according to many in Washington, been seriously misinformed. If so, the fault is not Bigelow and Boal's but their sources.

I saw Zero Dark Thirty for the second time this afternoon. I loved it the first time around, and upon a second look, I am convinced that it is a masterpiece. The only less than perfect note in the entire piece would be James Gandolfini's casting. Aside from that, the film should win Picture, Director, Actress, and Screenplay at the Academy Awards next month. But as of now, I see it's best chances for a win being in Actress, Screenplay, and Sound.

Still stunned that Bigelow was snubbed for Best Director.