Zero Dark Thirty - The Bin Laden film

[Happy Face 29]

Getting rave reviews....

 

Telling a nearly three-hour story with an ending everyone knows, Bigelow and Boal have managed to craft one of the most intense and intellectually challenging films of the year.

http://www.guardian....kathryn-bigelow

 

 

 

Once in a long while, a fresh-from-the-headlines movie - like "All the President's Men" or "United 93" - fuses journalism, procedural high drama, and the oxygenated atmosphere of a thriller into a new version of history written with lightning. Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow's meticulous and electrifying re-creation of the hunt for Osama bin Laden, is that kind of movie.

 

EW's GRADE - A

http://www.ew.com/ew...0618533,00.html

 

Current aggregate score at Metacritic is 99/100...

 

A score that matches the likes of Seven Samurai and Shoah, and leaves classics like Metropilis (98) in it's wake.

 

However.....

 

[A] torture sequence immediately follows a bone-chilling, audio-only prologue of the voices of terrified Americans trapped in the towering inferno of the World Trade Center. It’s set up as payback.

 

And by the movie’s account, it produces information vital to the pursuit of the world’s most wanted man. No waterboarding, no Bin Laden: that’s what “Zero Dark Thirty” appears to suggest.

http://www.nytimes.c...gewanted=2&_r=0

 

 

Which is a lie. Propaganda...supporting war crime.

 

Leading to...

 

reactions [from jopurnalists] who haven't yet seen the film offered yesterday by NYU Journalism Professor Jay Rosen ("WTF is Kathryn Bigelow doing inserting torture into her film, Zero Dark Thirty, if it wasn't used to get Bin Laden?"); Mother Jones' Adam Serwer ("The critical acclaim Zero Dark Thirty is already receiving suggests that it may do what Karl Rove could not have done with all the money in the world: embed in the popular imagination the efficacy, even the necessity, of torture"); The Daily Beast's Andrew Sullivan ("Bigelow constructs a movie upon a grotesque lie")

 

I thought Hurt Locker was shite too

[Park Life 71]

Look forward to it. Is it fiction?

[Happy Face 29]

Look forward to it. Is it fiction?

 

Government-embedded filmmaking.

 

the new and odd rub in the case of Zero Dark Thirty is that the product of this privileged access is not just-the-facts journalism but a feature film that merges fact and fiction. An already problematic practice—giving special access to vetted journalists—is now deployed for the larger goal of creating cinematic myths that are favorable to the sponsoring entity (in the case of Zero Dark Thirty, the CIA). If the access that Boal and Bigelow received was in addition to access that nonfiction writers and documentarians received, I would be a bit less troubled, because at least the quotes in history's first draft would be reliable, and that means a lot. But as it stands, we're getting the myth of history before getting the actual history.

 

http://m.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/12/dont-trust-zero-dark-thirty/266253/

 

Recommend the whole article.

[Happy Face 29]

Followig comparisons to Lincoln....

 

If [bigelow] were making a film about slavery in antebellum America, it seems, the story would focus on whether the cotton crops were successful.

 

http://m.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/12/torture-in-kathryn-bigelows-zero-dark-thirty.html