Manohla Dargis offers up one of the best critical arguments for The Hurt Locker yet:

The Oscars – ‘Hurt Locker’ Offers the Work of War at a Fever Pitch – NYTimes.com.

Her critical assessment is top notch – far better than my own breakdown of the film.

Put another way, like Peckinpah, Ms. Bigelow is brilliant at both delivering and dissecting male violence, which is why “The Hurt Locker” is at once so pleasurable and disturbing.

I suppose my own, more coarse assessment that Ms. Bigelow has a very large member and she’s unafraid to use it gets the similar point across, but with far less eloquence. After a second viewing, I left The Hurt Locker in awe of its lean and muscular construction. Working on a relative shoestring on the edge of a war zone, I didn’t see another movie this year that worked more effectively. Even the false notes and missteps in The Hurt Locker are built with an intensity and a precision that few other films of 2009 can match.

The Hurt Locker.

One of the few movies of 2009 to deserve every ounce of the praise that’s piled on it, Kathyn Bigelow’s story of a EOD (explosive ordinance disposal) unit in Baghdad is relentless from the very first frames and barely rests until the final fade out. It scores the best picture of 2009 award because it does two things to perfection. First, it is wall-to-wall with old-school Hollywood suspense. There’s no digital armies of zombies, or ridiculous CGI acrobatics with military hardware and indestructible super-soldiers. The whole film is wired like a bomb that could explode at any second.

Second, all that suspense is wrapped around the first truly great cinematic rendering of the Iraq war. Every other Iraq war movie to date has been a ponderous melodrama. The Kingdom, Lions For Lambs, Redacted, Rendition, and Stop-Loss were all misfires. Errol Morris’ probing documentary of the Abu Ghraib scandal, Standard Operating Procedure, got lost in the fog of war. The worst of the bunch is Paul Haggis’ In The Valley Of Elah – a film so smugly awful that words barely can describe the levels of failure in operation.

The Hurt Locker succeeds where everything else to date has failed because it refuses to explain itself. It doesn’t scold, nag, or pontificate. The decorated grunts in the EOD don’t know who they’re fighting. They don’t know what they’re fighting for. All they know is that being alive at the end of the day is victory, and nothing else matters. It works because Bigelow and her production team have created a cinematic world where everything is mundane and hostile at the same time. Shot in Jordan under war-like conditions, the heat and the tension suffuse every frame of the film. You never find out if the bystanders are curious onlookers trying to upload videos to YouTube or insurgents ready to detonate a bomb.

This is the clearest narrative picture audiences have gotten of the Iraq war, and by the time the credits roll, The Hurt Locker should make you angry. Why are we involved in this mess? This isn’t a fight for ground or for principles. It’s a war without a finish line. If our soldiers survive the day, it’s a small victory and there’s no other metric to measure progress. The intense storytelling and the immersive detail transform the nihilistic core of the Iraq war into a palpable knot in your stomach. If the soldiers doing the dirty work don’t know why they’re there, does anybody?

Bigelow is the first filmmaker to not only grasp the futility of the Iraq war, she’s the first director to transform that unknowability into a truly gripping narrative. By embracing the chaos, she gives us the first authentic narrative voice to the Iraq war. The best Vietnam movies all revolved around that same grim knowledge, that fighting in an unknowable war is an absurd experience. Putting a shiny badge of “war is bad” on a simple melodrama is an insult to the nearly incomprehensible post-modern conflict our political leaders pointlessly rushed us into.

Unlike her ex-husband James Cameron’s current exercise in directorial dick-swinging (the bland Avatar), The Hurt Locker doesn’t waste a frame. The tech credits are superb – the documentary style camerwork, the immersive sound design, the flawless editing – every production department is firing on all cylinders. The whole film is one of cinema’s primal elements – suspense – stripped down to its purest form.

Perhaps the most telling thing about The Hurt Locker is that the most memorable image isn’t of the war, it’s the generic cereal aisle of a generic grocery store. After surviving the heat and the explosive madness of Baghdad, the leader of the EOD unit finds himself stumped by a wall of cartoon cereal boxes. It’s a simple image – one that Oliver Stone (among others) has tried and failed to convey several times – but here it resonates. For months after seeing it, every time I’m in a grocery store, deep in the heart of civilization, surrounded by climate controlled rows of plentiful food, I can’t help but think about all the soldiers and civilians fighting and dying for reasons that won’t be clear even a hundred years from now. We’re on the same planet, but it might as well be another world.

I’ve been chewing it over for the better part of a week (or at least attempting to chew it over – a movie this digitally amplified is so vaporous as to almost refuse mastication), and I’m tempted to upgrade my reflections to ‘fucking ridiculous’. I hold back on the profantiy-enhanced judgement largely because Avatar isn’t solid enough to bear the insult. To label this trifle ‘fucking ridiculous’ would be an insult to the films that are truly fucking ridiculous.

Normally a movie this slender wouldn’t even be worth mentioning, except that the specific gravity inherent in a $300 million USD price tag and the megalomaniacal boasts of its creator that it will change cinema forever warrant an appropriately slight response. So ridiculous it is.

First, hasn’t anybody else choked on the irony that hundreds of millions of dollars were spent to deploy state of the art computer technology to tell the story of a bunch of barefoot people running around in mud worshipping a tree?

I find this myth of the ‘noble savage’ to be odious. Count me in the Fox News camp on this point, but people who need to exalt the touchy-feely-one-with-mother-earth-equates-to-moral-superiority ethos have some deeply unresolved issues of personal guilt that need to be worked out, preferably in a therapists office lit with electric lights, heated by piped-in natural gas, on a comfortable sofa free of twigs, and roofed with a sturdy, rain-repellent, mass-produced shingles.

Mr. Cameron, if you find life enhanced by modern trappings such as metal alloys, supercomputers, and meals that don’t need to be chased for miles to be spiritually unfulfilling, perhaps you might eschew their conveniences in your next production.

You find me a village of tree-dwelling people living without shoes who would scorn grocery stores, the conveniences of mass production, and indoor plumbing and I’ll change my tune. My money, however, says that the majority of the developing world would be absolutely ecstatic to wake up tomorrow and find that everything around them resembles suburban New Jersey.

All things require balance, and if you can’t find spiritual satisfaction in the material world around you, the answer isn’t to take the stuff away. As the first Rabbi says in A Serious Man: “Look at the parking lot. Just look at that parking lot!” Sure, it’s goofy, but it is well-intentioned, and a much better answer than Avatar‘s position of “Damn you to hell, evil soulless gods of corporate technology, mother Pandora’s magic tree will take care of me!”

As a side-note for the nature-lovers out there, please note that nature is pretty much the exact opposite of the tender, nurturing earth mother myth. The wild is a cold, brutal place where life truly is kill-or-be-killed, where a sprained ankle means you’ve just become dinner for the next step of the food chain. Every religion has it’s dark side, but only the worst breeds of religious fundamentalism have downsides as brutal as mother nature’s. Please remember that the next time you sing fairy songs while airbrushing moons and wolves onto your formal t-shirt collection.

As for Avatar‘s raison d’etre is the 3D, and it’s lovely as 3D goes, but it’s just a gimmick. Take away the techno-fetishism and you have a leaden lump of a story left behind. It’s Dances With Wolves meets Giant Smurfs. Without Photoshop and a hundred million or so for ‘botanical design artists’, you have a story about as compelling as Disney’s Pocahontas, which is great if you’re a ten year old girl.The effects are groundbreaking, perhaps, but the term ‘groundbreaking’ for digital cinema has lost all perspective. The dinosaurs in Jurassic Park were groundbreaking. Bullet-time from The Matrix was truly eye-popping. But both of those effects were grounded in real, practical locations. Even the stellar effects work in The Lord Of The Rings trilogy was a staggering mix of practical camera tricks, oversized props, and carefully deployed digital work.

Avatar falls into the same trap that Lucas’ execrable modern Star Wars trilogy bungled into – when everything on-screen is created digitally, nothing is special anymore. Audiences can feel the work that goes into creating an image, and real imagery will always generate more emotional power than an army of typists inserting physically implausible waterfalls in places they don’t belong. A decade from now, the sweeping landscape panoramas of New Zealand in Lord Of The Rings will humiliate any of the epic vistas in Avatar. Projected on a big screen today, the epic landscapes from Lawrence Of Arabia or even Raiders Of The Lost Ark, will generate more awe than the meticulously rendered forests of Avatar.Simply put, most of the sweeping visuals in Avatar wouldn’t look out of place if they were airbrushed onto the side of a blue 1976 Ford van. The poster for Avatar should have a sticker that says “if this van is a-rocking, don’t come a-knocking” stuck on it. And by the time Avatar 2: Pasty-Faced Bureaucrat’s Revenge comes out, the Pandoran landscapes will look irredeemably dated.

Cameron’s Titanic was enhanced by the megalithic scale. A story about one of the biggest technological follies of the 20th century, that required even larger doses of hubris to produce worked hand-in-hand with each other. The story and the meta-story fused into a moebius strip of ambition, and the result worked spectacularly well, despite the embarrassing horrid dialogue that made everybody but ten year old girls cringe. It’s a film that needed to spend $200 million USD simply to be the film that spent $200 million USD. On a $50 million budget, Titanic simply wouldn’t have worked, even if you were a ten year old girl.

Two years from now, when you flip past Avatar on FX, it’ll be little more than a novelty. If you catch Terminator, T2, or even True Lies while channel surfing, they’re all worth at least a half-hour of your time. Stumble across Avatar, and at best you’ll look at the blue-tinted weightless digitalia, and shrug while you vaguely remember “oh yeah, that was OK.” Then you’ll surf on to something far more real and tangible, like season 7 of The Kardashians.

Earlier posts here have alluded to the underground re-make of Raiders Of The Lost Ark. Two Mississippi teenagers spent most of the 1980′s making a home-made shot-by-shot recreation of Raiders. An article from Lee Sandlin in the Chicago Reader provides a must-read take on the project.

Sandlin does an excellent job of excoriating the original Raiders

Raiders is a global adventure with no romance, a historical epic with no feeling for the past, a thriller with no trace of real danger. It means nothing, feels like nothing, and carries the implicit message that absolutely nothing matters.

His take on the world of film before Raiders and after it is worthy reading on it’s own. What’s more thrilling to read is his rave review of Raiders Of The Lost Ark – The Adaptation.

The video catches you up in a daze of metafictional suspense: you’re rooting not for Indiana Jones but for the kids themselves, to somehow keep this thing in the air, to make it all the way through to the opening of the ark and the Nazis getting fried by the supernatural microwave (a particularly good scene, as it turns out, and a worthy climax to the whole venture; the audience’s approval was deafening).

In other words, the making of the video was itself a kind of Indiana Jones adventure. That’s why Raiders was a particularly good choice—it probably would have been a lot tougher to sit through their version of Raging Bull. There are even times when the making-of excitement spills over into the action on-screen, and you find yourself thinking this Raiders is better than the original.

Read it here. Despite the retirement of Johnathan Rosenbaum, the Reader shows why it’s still a high water mark for film criticism. The piece punctures a popular myth, and at the same time, elevates a better one to take its place. (Plus, for the internet literate, there are some clues as to how you might be able to see the legally un-screenable Adaptation for yourself. Not that you heard it here.)

****

Apparently, “Nuke The Fridge” is the new “Jump The Shark”. The horrible opening scene where Indy survives the atomic bomb test by hiding in a lead-lined fridge is rapidly becoming the new internet meme for “once cool things that now suck irretrievably”.

There’s a webiste: Nuke The Fridge, which has more movie news and gossip, but the concept of replacing “jump the shark” with “nuke the fridge” really is its own standalone idea.

Early on in Fight Club, that’s what Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) says to Ed Norton after meeting the Gothically damaged Marla. You got some fucked up friends! He’s practically gloating or giddy, ecstatic that he’s met someone more damaged and deranged than he is. It’s lonely in the hinterlands of sanity and good taste, and Tyler Durden is revelling in the fact that he’s no longer alone.

That’s what Old Boy is like. Old Boy is your fucked up friend. The guy that takes you out drinking in a rental car, tells you to drive, and says “I’m going to pull the parking brake at random three times tonight. It’s your job to keep us alive.” And he means that. And he does it. And then he sues the rental car company when his Ford Contour skids sideways into a brick wall, claiming that the brakes failed. Sure it’s a hell of a ride, but do you necessarily want to go out with that guy?

After the film, Uncle Matt said “I don’t know how I feel about Koreans having an imagination and a filmmaking budget.” The Koreans are some crazy fuckers, that’s for sure. Uncle Matt told me about footage he’d seen of a new trend in young Korean protests. A bunch of youngsters line up in front of the building they’re protesting, and all chop off a finger.

Old Boy won the Grand Prize at this year’s Cannes film festival, and with the right kind of eyes you can see why. It’s the story of Oh-Dae Su, a perfectly anonymous Korean businessman who is abducted off the street on a rainy night and spends the next fifteen years imprisoned in a cramped hotel room with epilepsy inducing wallpaper. He is given no reason for his imprisonment; only a plate of fried dumplings to eat on a daily basis and a television to help pass the time. A year into his prison term, television shows him the murder of his wife and brands him a suspect. Then that dark news is evenutally buried in the blur of news programs and the march of time. A month away from an escape tunnel being completed, without warning, he is released. Dressed in a fine suit, given a wallet full of cash and a cell phone, Oh Dae-Su sets out to find out who imprisoned him and why.

What follows is a parade of brutality. South Korean filmmaker Chanwook Park has spent more time than I have studying the works of David Fincher, and it shows. The money shot in Old Boy is a videogame come to life. Oh-Dae Su fights his way down a hallway filled with thugs, the camera tracking laterally alongside the action. This isn’t the balletic wire-fu, Matrix style or martial arts fighting. This is a sloppy street brawl where nobody has any move fancier than a two by four to the head, a punch to the jaw, or a knife stabbed into a back. Without glossy special effects and over-amplified sound effects, this one shot is a quiet marvel.

That is the trick of Old Boy, the suffering feels all too tactile. For a film so filled with bloody encounters, the gore level is relatively low and the body count isn’t much higher. (If you have a fear of dentists, two of the torture scenes will be more excruciating then you can imagine.) Violent acts have repercussions, and leave wounds that linger well after the fighting stops. But depictions of pain aren’t what makes Old Boy your fucked up friend; that’s way too easy. A lot of films show pain and determination, and none of them are that fucked up at all. In fact, physical pain is one dimensional and boring. Your fucked up friend has an axis of crazy that goes far beyond the physical, and so does Old Boy.

The final explanation of Oh-Dae Su’s imprisonment comes with a gut-punch of a twist that leaves you sickened and stunned. As with all good twists, you don’t see it coming until it”s too late, and then the pieces fall together in a vertiginous manner. You see it coming together, and you hope to God that you’re wrong but in the pit of your stomach you know exactly where it’s going.

Houston, we have lift off.

It’s sickeningly effective in a film built around tactile pain and actions with consequences. After an hour and forty five minutes of trying to unravel the puzzle, and watching in frustrated horror as Oh-Dae Su is manipulated along by his tomentor, when the full picture is revealed you cringe. Your fucked up friend is good for sharing stories, but he’s fucking nuts. The best thing you can say for him is that you only see him once a year. That’s plenty. You don’t need a weekly reminder that underneath it all you’re not the crazy fucker he is.

Thus is the dilemma of Old Boy. Sure, it’s fucked up, but do you need to see it? Is there a value in watching this, other than to feel better about yourself because you’re not part of the freakshow? When you comprehend the grand design of the film, there is an admirable over-all logic to it. Underneath the horror, there is an interesting concept of the revenge film turned backwards, and ideas about how vengeance is served up. But do you need to see it?