'Zero Dark Thirty' is ambiguous about torture. It would have been a bad movie if it wasn't.

Just as Zero Dark Thirty is accruing awards, controversy is also accelerating over the movie's depiction of torture. New York Magazine's David Edelstein has voiced unease over the torture scenes, saying in his review "As a moral statement, Zero Dark Thirty is borderline fascistic. As a piece of cinema, it’s phenomenally gripping—an unholy masterwork." I'm with Edelstein on the "masterwork" part, but I disagree completely about the "fascistic" part. Zero Dark Thirty is carefully neutral about torture. I went into the screening against torture, and I came out against it. I think it's also possible to
go into the movie approving of torture, and come out also approving of torture. It's the movie's lack of evangelism for the anti-torture standpoint that has people getting nervous. When really, that's what makes director Kathryn Bigelow' and screenwriter Mark Boal's follow-up to The Hurt Locker so great.

Compare Zero Dark Thirty to the upcoming release of Promised Land, a love letter to liberal concerns over drilling for natural gas. The filmmakers are clearly against drilling, and though they try to present other opinions, those positions are only really used as more evidence to support their stance. It's baby food for liberals: bland, unchallenging, guaranteed to be safe going down. Imagine if Zero Dark Thirty had taken this approach, using the movie not to document the hunt for Bin Laden but as an indictment of torture. The entire feel of the movie would be different, and the audience would be guided into being a critic, not an observer.

I found plenty in Zero Dark Thirty to support my anti-torture position. The sequences themselves are brutal, both for the victims and those that are reduced to their basest levels by inflicting violence onto another person. The "big lead" does not come from torture but from its aftermath. CIA agent Maya (Jessica Chastain) and her colleague (Jason Clarke) trick someone into thinking he has already confessed information under duress. He confirms what they say while gorging himself on hummus. Sure, some may think that the kindness method would only work after cruelty, but I'm not one of them.

Besides torture, there are other things that are startling about the raid on Bin Laden. How they call someone's name and shoot him when he turns to respond. The way one of the wives is killed. The fact that I didn't like the way many of the characters acted makes Zero Dark Thirty feel less like a movie and more like the "docudrama" some are calling journalist-turned-screenwriter Mark Boal's take. These are unpleasant truths. America tortured. In a raid, there is no time for those movie-style hesitations, where a character looks the other in the eye for long moment before pulling the trigger, perhaps accompanied by a speech. The things that make us feel better about right and wrong, the good guys and the bad guys. Zero Dark Thirty shows us another reality, and challenges us in our reaction. Do the ends justify the means? People are coming away with the movie with different answers to that question, a sign that Bigelow and Boal have done their job.

NYFCC gives 'Zero Dark Thirty' its top honors

The New York Film Critics Circle gave three cheers for Zero Dark Thirty, awarding the film a trio of honors: Best Feature, Best Director, and Best Cinematography. Director Kathryn Bigelow's follow-up to her Oscar winner The Hurt Locker is even better than that movie, in my opinion. Zero Dark Thirty is broader in scope and more harrowing. Plus, it centers on the (successful!) hunt for Osama Bin Laden. The movie was already in pre-production when Bin Laden was killed, forcing writer Mark Boal to rewrite the script last-minute. I think the fact that the movie was originally
concieved as a story of failure makes the resulting film less hagiographic. It's just the straightforward tale of a CIA agent (Jessica Chastain) with a hunch that wherever Bin Laden's trusted courier is, Bin Laden must be there too.

This isn't the first time Bigelow has been honored by the New York Film Critics Circle. They previously gave her the Best Director honor for The Hurt Locker back in 2009. That movie, about bomb defusers in Iraq, also won Best Picture. Could this mean that Zero Dark Thirty could take top prize come Oscar time?

I still haven't seen another frontrunner, Les Miserables, but Zero Dark Thirty certainly has what it takes to win the Oscars. Gravitas tends to triumph when it comes to the staid Oscar stauettes, so that would raise the movie above another one set in the Middle East, Argo, which was more comic. However, Bigelow won just a few years ago, and under circumstances that can't be repeated. She was the first female recipient for Best Director, and the movie won Best Picture over the behemoth Avatar (which was directed by her ex, an intriguing piece of Hollywood history). However, Tom Hooper, who directed Les Miserables, won Best Director and Best Feature even more recently, for 2010's The King's Speech. There are so many potential stories of success, and deciding factors, like audience response, still in play. How will Zero Dark Thirty do at the box office, for example? Will the procedural story of a female CIA agent catch on with audiences who may have been expecting a male hero? For the moment, I'm with the NYFCC, and my money's on Bigelow.

2010 Best Director nominees--where are they now?

Usually, an Oscar nomination--and especially an Oscar win--launches the honorees into a career stratosphere. The actors are cast in the next big projects, and the directors can afford to be picky about their next films. Although I've seen most of the 2010 acting nominees in a couple of movies since, only one of the 2010 directing nominees has released a new film. However, most of them are working on new projects, and two of them have films coming out this year. Let's check in: Where are they now?

Kathryn Bigelow (winner, Best Directing Oscar for The Hurt Locker). Bigelow beat her ex, James Cameron, for the Oscar and became the first female to win the directing honor. The Academy just can't pass up on creating a good story, can it? Bigelow's actually the furthest along of the bunch. Her film, Zero Dark Thirty, has a release date, December 19, 2012, and a distributor, Columbia. The military actioner centers on the Navy SEALS who take down Osama Bin Laden.

James Cameron (nominee, Avatar). Cameron went deep-sea diving. He converted Titanic to 3D. However, what audiences want most--a sequel to Avatar--may not be coming anytime soon. He and producer Jon Landau also just pushed back the release date of Avatar 2 from December 2014 to sometime in the future after that. That means there will be at least a six-year lag between the first film and its sequel, a bummer for fans who want to explore more of Pandora. (Word is the second film will dive down to the planet's oceans).

Darren Aronofsky (nominee, Black Swan). Since the success of his dark ballerina thriller, Aronofsky has mulled over three different biopics. He's currently casting Noah, with Russell Crowe in the lead role, so it appears the Biblical epic will go first. He's also considered directing Get Happy, a Judy Garland biopic with Anne Hathaway attached to star. Now comes word that Paramount may acquire The General, an Unforgiven-style biopic of our nation's first president, George Washington. He's obviously trying to find the most perfect follow-up project, but I hope he gets moving. Whatever he does, it's guaranteed to be original.

Jason Reitman (nominee, Up in the Air). Reitman is the only one of the group who has directed an original feature since his nomination. Young Adult, which came courtesy of screenwriter Diablo Cody and star Charlize Theron, was fantastic (in my opinion), but it did so-so both at the box office and at the awards circuit. I applaud Reitman for churning out projects while maintaining his sensibility--he tends to mix dark comedy with poignant moments, and I like films like that. He just cast his child lead for his next project, Labor Day. The adaptation of a novel by Joyce Maynard centers on a single mom (Kate Winslet) who gives a convict (Josh Brolin) a ride, leading to a relationship. It's filming this summer, and it will probably be out before Aronofsky's film.

Lee Daniels (nominee, Precious). Daniels' next film is The Paperboy, which IMDB lists as having a November 21, 2012, release date, but no major distributor. However, the thriller may show up at the Cannes Film Festival, and everyone will find out if it packs the wallop of Precious. The story centers on a newspaper reporter who goes to Florida to try to free an inmate on death row. Things start getting complicated when his younger brother, who is also working on the case, develops a relationship with a woman who has been corresponding with the inmate. He also has The Butler in the works, the story of a black White House butler who served eight U.S. presidents.

Each of these directors has likely had their pick of projects. Will they all deliver?

 

Osama Bin Laden Movie picked up by Sony

By Sarah Sluis

American citizens may not ever see the real pictures of Osama Bin Laden after he was killed by American special forces, but they'll be able to see the movie next year. Director Kathryn Bigelow, who won an Oscar for her depiction of soldiers defusing IEDs in Iraq in The Hurt Locker, has been working on the picture for years. Without the ending, that is. The project, dubbed Kill Bin Laden, originally centered on the quest of Navy SEALs to hunt down Bin Laden, but now that the non-cave dwelling Bin Laden is dead, the script will be able to go out with a bang.

I'm bullish on the prospects of the Bin Laden movie. Unlike United 93, which revisited an incident in American history that many people couldn't bring themselves to watch (I don't want to cry in an action movie!), people actually want to see the end of the leader of Al Qaeda. Much of what went on was top-secret, and I for one want to know more about the stealth helicopter. So that's what our tax dollars are going towards.

Bigelow is directing the film and Mark Boal, who wrote and produced The Hurt Locker, is finalizing the script. Aussie Joel Edgerton has signed on to lead, and now that Sony has picked up the project, they've given it a release date: Q4 2012. Awards season.

The successful killing of Bin Laden adds another twist to Boal's script. The movie was supposed to be about the Navy SEALs' attempt to kill Bin Laden, not their success. The Hurt Locker ended on an ambivalent note, but Bin Laden's death tacks on a "happy" ending to Bigelow and Boal's story. Or will it? If their original concept was about failure, about the lack of closure, perhaps there will be a note of subversion or anti-war commentary thrown in. However, The Hurt Locker toed the line, never coming out for or against the war. In The New York Times review of The Hurt Locker, critic A. O. Scott notes "The filmmakers' insistence on zooming in on and staying close to the moment-to-moment experiences of soldiers in the field is admirable in its way but a little evasive as well...[the movie] depicts men...who are too stressed out, too busy, too preoccupied with the details of survival to reflect on larger questions about what they are doing there." Under the supervision of Bigelow and Boal, Kill Bin Laden will be anything but a broad, unnuanced recreation of events, and there might even be another Oscar or two for the duo.

Predicting the Oscars: Bigelow vs. Cameron

By Sarah Sluis

Right now, the race for the Best Director at the Oscars (this Sunday!) has narrowed down to two front runners: James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow. Formerly husband and wife, a relationship they refuse to turn into any kind of rivalry, the duo have both won their fair share of awards leading up to the event. Bigelow won the Directors Guild Award (the first woman to do so), an award that has correctly predicted the Oscar win all but six times since 1948. Cameron won the high-profile Golden Globe award for Best Director, but that has correlated only 60% of the time with the Oscar win. Based on that information alone, anyone but Bigelow winning will be an upset.

Even Cameron seems to want Bigelow to win--as long as Avatar gets Best Picture. On both "60 Minutes" (clipped here) and "Charlie Rose" (clipped here), Cameron has rooted for Bigelow in the hopes that the grand prize of Best Picture will go to Avatar and not The Hurt Locker. It's kind of a weird strategy, making him seem magnanimous while at the same time publicly giving up a less valuable award as a way to gun for the big one. While I loved Avatar, I think this commentator gets something right: the story is not original at all. It's well done, but not original. When your movie draws comparisons to Fern Gully: The Last Rainforest, and not just old legends like Pocahontas, that shows that you didn't transcend the age-old story but merely offered another iteration of it. Every movie has a flaw, and this is Avatar's biggest one.

Awards time also leads to lots of potential "firsts." Bigelow would be the first female director to win. Cameron would be the first person to win for back-to-back directing projects. Lee Daniels would be the first black person to win the Best Director award. However, his lack of other prominent "Best Director" awards puts him out of the running. So when it comes to Oscar pool time, here's my recommendation: pick Bigelow for Best Director, and Cameron if you want to go for the dark horse.

Surprise! Only 7% of mainstream movies directed by women

By Sarah Sluis

Put film directors in the category of dead presidents: most are white males, and their average age is 45, when most of them are mid-career. It's the kind of information that gets rehashed occasionally with an aura of outrage, as it was in a New York Times article yesterday. Some blogs, like Women & Hollywood, offer dedicated, consistent commentary on female filmmakers, and consistently point out their absence.

Certainly directors in this "dead president" demographic are capable of directing movies that appeal to audiences beyond themselves, just as directors like Kathryn Bigelow can direct war and action movies (though her gender turned some heads and became the focus of many of her publicity interviews and articles). Many female directors work in designated genres, like movies appealing to kids and teens, or romance and comedy. Not one has won an Oscar for "Best Director." When the female demographic is directing only 7% of the films, and working on less prestigious, non-award-seeking projects, the gap seems even worse.

It's easy to forget about the dearth of women in the film industry because women do work in virtually every area of the business, and most of the "firsts" in female filmmaking have already been taken (the Academy Award for Best Director notwithstanding). Some suspect that the lifestyle required by a director turns many women off to the position, but I don't buy that. There's also evidence that people react more negatively to certain types of female leadership, leaving women a narrow range in which to discipline and delegate without being called that B-word. Finally, with so few female directors out there, they simply don't look the part, and are more likely to be called into question or sent back to central casting.

By drawing their talent from such a narrow range of people, studios are selling themselves short. As the article puts it, "Directors who are overwhelmingly of the same sex and ethnicity can hardly be expected to tap all of the cinematic potential in a rich and roiling humanity."

Hollywood seems to be stuck in a feedback loop, where the young male, first-weekend audience is considered the ultimate prize, and in turn many movies (e.g., Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen) are created with them in mind. Female-oriented successes are still considered aberrations. Who do you think were the majority of people that saw Titanic again, and again, again? All the girls in my middle school. Twilight? Check. Sex and the City? Check. Today, Women & Hollywood posted the news that The Proposal (directed by a woman) had quietly surpassed the theatrical gross of Sex and the City, which many had touted as the movie that proved women existed at the box office. It's clear to me that conventional wisdom about female moviegoers contains some serious errors. Perhaps some female directors could help the studios get back on track.