Posts tagged The Hurt Locker
“Zero Dark Thirty” Deserves All the Awards It Receives
Jan 19th
“All the Awards It Receives”
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
Zero Dark Thirty is the fascinating story of the hunt for Osama bin Laden by the C.I.A. and the attack by SEAL Team 6 on his compound in Pakistan which ended with his death.
It was directed by Kathryn Bigelow, who previously directed the 2009 The Hurt Locker, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture and for which Bigelow won the Academy Award for Best Director, the first time a woman had ever won that award.
That feat could easily be duplicated with this outstanding film.
The title refers to 30 minutes after midnight, and Jessica Chastain stars as Maya, based on the real C.I.A. agent who was most responsible for the work it took to track down and locate where bin Laden was hiding almost 10 years after the attack and destruction of the World Trade Center in New York City.
Chastain has already won an award for this role and most likely will win many more awards for her outstanding acting in this film.
We see Maya at a so-called “black site,” where she is observing the “enhanced interrogation” of a detainee, which is being conducted by Dan, a fellow agent.
Dan tells the detainee, “When you lie to me, I hurt you.”
And Dan does, which is a bit ingenuous, because how can you tell that a person is lying when such interrogation tactics are being used on him?
Maya is based in Pakistan, and we learn that she didn’t volunteer for this assignment to track down bin Laden, but she was appointed to it because Washington believes she is a “killer” at her job.
While we watch Maya and her colleagues gather the evidence they need in order to uncover the whereabouts of their target, we also see the terrorist attacks around the world that occurred during those years, which were attributed to al Qaida, if not to bin Laden himself.
Maya concentrates her search on one man, Abu Ahmed, whom she believes to be the courier for bin Laden, and time is lost over a confusion brought about by his name.
In fact, Arab names are confusing and hard to understand by westerners, including those in the audience.
Familiar actors also appear in the film, but Chastain stands out.
Zero Dark Thirty deserves all the awards it receives.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
Zero Dark Thirty – Movie Trailer
Jan 15th
For a decade, an elite team of intelligence and military operatives, working in secret across the globe, devoted themselves to a single goal: to find and eliminate Osama bin Laden. Zero Dark Thirty reunites the Oscar winning team of director-producer Kathryn Bigelow and writer-producer Mark Boal (The Hurt Locker) for the story of history’s greatest manhunt for the world’s most dangerous man.
“The Hurt Locker” A Film of Ultimate Reward
Jul 30th
A Film of Ultimate Reward
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
THE HURT LOCKER is perhaps the best film on the war in Iraq you will ever see, if not the best film on war itself.
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow, the story is about the day-to-day experiences of an Army three-man detonation team whose job is to defuse any improvised explosive devices that are found before they can be detonated.
This is more than tricky, because an IED can be exploded on contact, exploded by a timer, or exploded by someone watching from safety who can set it off by using a cell phone.
So, a team consists of two men with rifles who scan the area on the lookout for anything suspicious while the team leader dons a heavy bomb suit and walks up to the bomb, which is usually hidden or covered, and tries to defuse it.
The story begins in 2004 in Baghdad, and one such team has just lost their leader in an explosion, when their company has only 38 days left in their rotation before they can be shipped back to the United States.
Staff Sergeant James, played superbly by Jeremy Renner, joins the team, and he is a “cowboy,” a “wild man” as one colonel calls him out of admiration, and he doesn’t always work by the rules. When he comes across a trunkfull of bombs in a car, he takes off his bomb suit, telling his team, “There’s enough bang in there to blow us all to Jesus. If I’m going to die, I want to die comfortable.”
You have heard of “black humor”? Sgt. James has a sense of humor that could be called “black-hole humor.”
When asked by an officer what the best way is to defuse a bomb, Sgt. James tells him “the way you won’t die.”
As the days and the defused bombs go by, we get a countdown to the number of days left in rotation, and a sense of foreboding envelopes the team and the audience.
The action is not just bombs and defusings and explosions, however, We see the team at work and at play, plus their interaction with other soldiers and civilians, and the music is haunting.
The title of the film is a phrase that refers to “a place of ultimate pain.”
THE HURT LOCKER is a film of ultimate pleasure and reward.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
