01.17.13 |
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Film critic Scott Mendelson on Zero Dark Thirty:
All because [director and writer] Bigelow and Boal didn’t spoon-feed their opinions to the audience in a way that made for easy digestion. They didn’t have a fictionalized scene where a character explicitly explains to the audience how they got each piece of vital information over the eight years during which the film takes place. They trusted the audience to make the connections… One must remember that the film initially began back when Bin Laden was still alive and it was presumed that he’d never actually be caught. It was initially a Moby Dick-esque story of futile obsession, and I’d argue the film still stays on that path even with the new ending.
Moral ambiguity. Presenting complex issues without trying to fall on one political side or another. Forcing you, as the audience, to engage, debate, ponder what we’ve been doing with our foreign policy for the last twelve years. That’s what Zero Dark Thirty is all about (and at least partially what makes it great) and I agree with Mendelson regarding the Bigelow snub. Ridiculous.
01.16.13 |
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This Slate feature always crops up this time of year and never disappoints. At the time of this writing they have already had six entries and the writing team is really solid: Dana Stevens from Slate, Wesley Morris from Grantland, and freelancers Keith Phipps (formerly a senior writer at The A.V. Club) and Stephanie Zacharek (most notable for her writing at Salon and The New York Times).
01.11.13 |
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Leave it to Reddit for someone to mashup the Swedish original with director David Fincher’s English remake. Nice side by side via animated gifs.
01.10.13 |
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As a YouTube commenter points out, it’s pretty rare to get interviewers that can keep up with Tarantino’s rapidfire thoughts, but Furguson does a good job. Watch to get Tarantino’s thoughts on Prometheus, Hatfields & McCoys, kids movies and more.
01.09.13 |
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Mark Bowden writing for The Atlantic (warning, Zero Dark Thirty spoilers ahead):
The charge that the film is pro-torture is easy to debunk. I have already noted the dramatic failure depicted in the opening scenes with Ammar. The futility of the approach is part of the more general organizational failure depicted in the movie’s first half, culminating in a dramatization of the tragic 2009 bombing of Camp Chapman, in Khost, Afghanistan, where an al-Qaeda infiltrator wiped out an entire CIA field office. The agency is shown to be not only failing to find bin Laden and dismantle al-Qaeda, but on the losing end of the fight.
There’s been a huge flap in recent weeks over Zero Dark Thirty and its ‘pro-torture stance’. After viewing (and being blown away by) the movie last week, I just don’t buy it. Adding onto what Bowden writes above, the early torture heavy scenes made me feel queasy and very uncomfortable, and I think that’s exactly what director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal intended. It happened, and to skip over it or portray it anything else than what it was would be a whitewash.
01.08.13 |
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Rembrant Browne, writing for Grantland:
Being uncomfortable. False ownership of terms. False ownership of cultures. Troubled histories. Finger-pointing. Segregation in an integrated world (or is it integration in a segregated world?). All of these things contributed to the myriad emotions I felt in that theater. But these were just my emotions. There were hundreds of people in that theater alone, and hundreds of thousands more have already viewed the movie. Everyone‘s seeing Django. That’s what makes it an important work, beyond the quality, because we’re all having to deal with it, together.
01.04.13 |
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Major credit to the video editors here; all references are in strictly chronological order. The rarity of almost any references from the 90s or later I think subtly keeps Tarantino’s early filmography from feeling too dated.
12.24.12 |
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Tarantino speaking to the NYT‘s A.O. Scott on his work with actors:
I think it’s a three-way thing. I write good characters for actors to play. I cast actors with integrity, as opposed to trying to just match whoever’s hot with something going on. It’s like my character is more important than any given actor, if that makes sense…And then I do know how to direct actors, how to modulate them, get the best out of them. And I understand my material.
Tarantino, more than almost any other director working today, lives and breathes his material. Regardless of what you feel about his films, his casting choices are pretty unimpeachable.
11.26.12 |
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New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis:
Once upon a movie time you went to a film, and after it played on the circuit, it disappeared, perhaps showing up later on television. Home video changed our relationship with movies — suddenly we could watch a title when we wanted as many times as we wanted — a relationship that shifted further with the introduction of DVD, which gave viewers even more and possibly deeper ways into a film with special features, directors’ cuts and hidden jokes and clues called Easter eggs. This new film-audience relationship may help account for the emergence of these new, complex narratives.
The article highlights a pretty fascinating trend in “A list”, mainstream movies that implement more unorthodox plotting and screenplays. I doubt as little as a year ago I’d see a film like The Master playing wide in a blockbuster theater chain.
11.14.12 |
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Brian Phillips writing for Grantland:
The real story of Star Wars is the redemption of Darth Vader, while Captain Renault’s redemption in Casablanca is just a by-the-way bonus. But the resemblances are intriguing. Why do they exist? I don’t think the answer is that George Lucas deliberately copied Casablanca; I think it’s that Star Wars and Casablanca are both made out of a million spare parts from other and older stories, and some of the action-romance archetypes that George Lucas drew upon in Star Wars had also been drawn upon 35 years earlier by the committee of accidental geniuses that made Casablanca.
I normally wouldn’t have seen a connection between these two films in a million years, but Brian’s piece makes a compelling, albeit indirect, arguement.