Zero Dark Thirty - Anticipation/Discussion Thread

I never thought I'd be interested in watching a film on the hunt for Bin Laden. But the trailer was cool, and the reviews starting to trickle out for this movie are pretty universal in their praise. Metacritic currently lists this movie with a 98 score based off nine reviews.

Anyone else highly anticipating this film?

Also, Jessica Chastain's in it!

Yeah, definitely want to see this.

watched the recent charlie rose on this w/ boal & bigelow & lots of clips - it looks kindof annoying but ill prob go see it

I'm interested to see how they frame the story. Without having read a whole lot about this film, I did read that it spans the ten years from 09/11 to Bin Laden's death. Is the screenplay based off of a specific book?

it is 'original'

as I said in the Bigelow thread, it's a vengeance movie for ObamaNation, and subtly offensive in that regard.

at the end does jessica chastain pick up osama and say "let's go home"

As a colleague said last night, the message of the waterboarding scenes is "Torture is hard on everybody."

it's true

poor fuckin' CIA

I'm always a little suspicious of anything that receives near-universal praise...

Although it usually ends in disappointment, it's near-universal praise has got me jazzed despite not even pretending to care about a month ago.

Film isn't released for another 10 days. Critics who are not de facto studio flacks are not going to publish their deviations yet.

Normally I'd agree, but I haven't actually read/seen any reviews yet. Just going by tweets and comments from certain critics I like + awards.

Did notice some pushback from the Zodiac comparisons, but if this is a process movie, I'm there.

obv anticipating this

I have a weakness for process movies as well xpost

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/09/opinion/sunday/bruni-bin-laden-torture-and-hollywood.html?hp&_r=0

**spoilers**

Greenwald stepping into the world of film nerds: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/10/zero-dark-thirty-torture-awards

He hasn't seen it yet.

Yes. This caused consternation on Twitter.

Among people who also, largely, haven't seen it yet either.

Most of them have.

Frank Bruni has.

People who are predisposed accept the "depoliticized" aura of torture in this film made their peace with fabrication long ago, especially War Democrats.

otm

Bigelow and Boal are speaking out of both sides of their mouths here. As noted, she is going around praising herself for taking "almost a journalistic approach to film". But when confronted by factual falsehoods she propagates on critical questions, her screenwriting partner resorts to the excuse that "it's a movie, not a documentary."

hard not to agree w. this from greenwald, even if he hasn't seen the flick

When a movie like this comes so soon after the events it depicts, and when the filmmakers are utilizing non-public inside information directly given to them by the White House and the CIA, it's really hard not to look at this film in a propagandistic light.

Hints from local filmcrits suggest they're going to ignore the "politics"

Yeah, it's the "inside info" bit that really chafes for me (not having seen this yet).

Shoot.

well, discussion of American war crimes will have an interesting venue in "Oscar season." I'm confident Clooney will say something revolting.

I do wish GG had waited to see the film bcz I have a feeling he isn't gonna get in without a ticket now.

Would rather he went to Holy Motors instead.

Shoot.

Is that an expression of disappointment that the crazed wimpass lefties are spoiling the last Obama victory party of the season, Eric?

Nope.

http://www.thesniper.us/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/obama-navy-seal-doll.jpg

A woman exiting the ZDT screening I attended said in the elevator "I feel so educated." *Danger*

Best thing about this movie is that it's opened up a whole new thread for Morbs' axe-grinding

alert John Kerry!

Was the *Danger* the sound of her robot companion warning her that you were about to come over and give her a stern dressing down?

sorry Guk, creeping fascism and extralegal assassinations piss me off. But I've got nuthin more to say til the rest of you see this (feel free not to, tho).

Tell me how you felt about the 9/11 opening.

No, it's fine. I appreciate you're youthful vim and vigour. Like being a college freshman again. xpost

I can't stand KB's insistence on 'journalism' and, by extension, 'authenticity'. Best aspects of Hurt Locker were not its (false and exaggerated) depictions of the life of a bomb disposal unit.

It'd be hilarious for Morbs if O comes out and says "it is as it was" though

lol

morbs (and greenwald) OTM, this looks vile.

seeing a trailer for this in front of 'lincoln,' it was hard not to be extra-struck and kinda saddened by the scene where lincoln tells grant to just let jeff davis and the rest of the gang flee the country because he doesn't want any more suffering.

at first I thought that quote was Woodrow Wilson on The Birth of a Nation.

Eric: I suppose a mix of "legitimate depending on what follows" and "America -- get over it, you've killed many times over 3000 innocents since."

I'm genuinely intrigued by the plaudits. As I said, if it's a process movie, I'm up for that. If it's flag-waving bunk, less so.

And as I may have mentioned, I'm ambling through that Hoberman book so this seems relevant to that.

so...am i a terrorist if I want to see this y/n

Filmcrits starved for prodigious action sequences, that's what

you've declared a jihad on taste xpost

xpost Action sequences that aren't connected with Dredd, yes.

(Armond excepted, of course.)

aw man Dredd was pretty sweet

Also, I genuinely unsure whether mentioning the truth about the raids violates a daily.paper 's guidelines about keeping "politics" out of content

Like being a college freshman again.

congrats, condescending O-bots with Aspergers usually say "child."

Everyone remember: respect for international law and expectations of due process are unseemly in anyone out of their teens; that's what Hope and Change were all about.

I figure it's best to fight condescension with condescension

To clarify: It's not your position that is childish, it's your expression of that position.

"with Aspergers"

Classy.

It's being downgraded in DSM-V so that remark isn't as offensive as it used to be

Summation of ZDTGREENWALDGATE: http://www.vulture.com/2012/12/does-zero-dark-thirty-endorse-torture.html

hopefully armond white will wait this time to find out if ZDT is loved or reviled before reviewing it, that early 'hurt locker' rave was awkwaaaard in hindsight whenever everyone else started liking it. i think it was rough on him.

When a movie like this comes so soon after the events it depicts, and when the filmmakers are utilizing non-public inside information directly given to them by the White House and the CIA, it's really hard not to look at this film in a propagandistic light.

otm

haha

xp

"the now-overrated Zero Dark Thirty"

As I said, if it's a process movie, I'm up for that. If it's flag-waving bunk, less so.

i really don't see this as a binary - a process movie from the government is flag-waving bunk

Yep

Not necessarily. I hate to fall back on the old "not what it's about but how it's about it" routine but there's ways in which this can be problematic from a political standpoint but brilliant from a filmmaking one. The same goes for badly made films with politics that I generally agree with (anyone else want to puke at the last scene in In the Valley of Elah?).

This is all silly to talk about considering a number of people (including on this board) have seen it so I'm theorizing about what it *could* be, but I generally don't like to dismiss films out of hand.

yeah it could be brilliant filmmaking, but if it's well-crafted, gripping, thoughtful, full of the grim, determined faces of our favorite characters, it's all in the service of telling the story the government wants told. This isn't a dismissal, but an acknowledgement of its origins.

ha i meant to write "favorite character actors"

As that vulture article I linked to indicated, there seems to be room for interpretation on some of these issues, but just because it depicts the US Government killing Bin Laden doesn't necessarily mean "propaganda". A lot will come down to depictions of characters as heroes or morally good or what have you. I know a number of pro-military people who loved the depiction of soldiers in The Hurt Locker, while I think they came off very, very poorly.

"propaganda" that allows for nuance, consideration, grudging acceptance, disagreement, etc is still propaganda if the mission is to provide the narrative

I can't speak for others but I have grown less...patient with movies that elide or obscure the deaths of real people for the same of suspense and A Good Time. To put it another way, why would Bigelow change the truth -- already gripping enough -- if she wasn't interested in giving the audience a.doseof electrical shockers? It's porn.

I think there's some room between Born on the Fourth of July and Triumph of the Will. xpost

Alfred sounding like Haneke, which is not an unworthy position.

The propaganda angle is the main reason I even want to watch this movie tbh

no one's saying there isn't room, and obviously one could say "well if Zero Dark Thirty is in poor taste for providing a streamlined, cinematic This Is What Had To Be Done narrative in support of the government, then so is Lincoln." It's a matter of degree, and when those in power are still in power, and letting us know they've given their tacit approval to the movie, one has to assume it doesn't include anything they're not comfortable with.

the administration benefits from this movie being as gripping, issue-acknowledging intelligence-respecting as possible - it suggests they were aware of the issues and a bunch of Friday Night Lights coaches when they made the choices shown in the film. if it was just USA! USA! they wouldn't get as many people to accept their pov

I thought Haneke relished porn

I guess the trick here is to not be a dumb viewer.

I know a number of pro-military people who loved the depiction of soldiers in The Hurt Locker, while I think they came off very, very poorly.

Thought THL unambiguously portrayed Jeremy R's character as an adrenaline addict, not someone who is glad for war but someone who nonetheless finds a reason for being because of it.

Haneke talked about depicting real life people and situations in an extended interview with the Hollywood Reporter alongside the guys who wrote ZDT and Argo (as well John Krasinski and Judd Apatow). Haneke was disgusted by Downfall and in particular Schindler's List (using the mystery over what would come out of the shower for suspense was beyond the pale). xposts

to be clear, i'm not saying this is evil, or that people who enjoy the movie are sheep. you can like mulholland dr but if you tell me it's a masterpiece of dream logic i'm going to point out that it was a TV pilot with an "all a dream" ending attached by request of the producers for cinematic release. but if you think this isn't inherently a propaganda film meant to instill a respect for american foreign policy, you're kidding yourself.

The fact that Boal and Bigelow acknowledge that torture was *not* instrumental in catching bin Laden, but they put it in the movie anyway, is troubling.

I did too, Eric, but my sister among many others saw it as a beautiful ode to bravery and sacrifice. xposts

I guess the trick here is to not be a dumb viewer.

Always a tricky balance when dumb action is thrown into the mix, but then again, some don't know how to trust anything in movies other than tedium.

Honestly I'm interested to figure out what the hell the story is, and how there's action in it.

I did too, Eric, but my sister among many others saw it as a beautiful ode to bravery and sacrifice. xposts

I don't think that showing how soldiers can be suckered/seduced/hypnotized/brainwashed into suckling from their own mythos = them coming off very, very poorly

They're not portrayed as victims, just victims of circumstance. Win-win.

amidst all of this, i'm kind of bummed that Generation Kill seems largely forgotten.

Hoberman may also have said the same about Schindler

i was bothered by that scene too, though i think SL is (mostly) a great film.

Haneke talked about depicting real life people and situations in an extended interview with the Hollywood Reporter alongside the guys who wrote ZDT and Argo

yeah i really enjoyed that

Mr Haneke engineers some dubious moral puppeteering in his films too, in the name of spanking the audience.

yeah but they look at the audience and tell them so that makes it better (no it doesn't)

Audiences should be on their guard when they feel flattered. Audiences should be on their guard when they're getting spanked.

What a minefield.

“It’s always rape. Manipulation is rape, no?” he says. “The question is, to what end, for what purpose? Especially when you come from a German-language background. That is why in my films I try to rape the audience into independence, autonomy.”

Thinking back, Gerry might be the easiest watch the audience has ever had.

Mr Haneke engineers some dubious moral puppeteering in his films too, in the name of spanking the audience.

I agree with this in general, but I was glad that I didn't really detect this in Amour.

"Especially when you come from a German-language background."

I vas born in Dusseldorf und dat is vhy dey call me ROLFE

Don't be stupid, be a smarty, impeach Obama for war crimes.

well we'd have to impeach everybody til we get to ELIZABETH WARREN amirite?

http://arthazelwood.com/prints/posters/images/complicit=flag.gif

Don't be stupid, be a smarty, impeach Obama for war crimes.

― Zero Dark 33⅓: The Final Insult (Eric H.), Monday, December 10, 2012 4:38 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark

nice.

well we'd have to impeach everybody til we get to ELIZABETH WARREN amirite?

― saltwater incursion (Dr Morbius), Monday, 10 December 2012 21:40 (5 minutes ago) Permalink

says Feingold superfan

I don't have anything much against E.W., just those who have exalted her to future savior of the Republic.

it's gonna be amazing when you come racing down the mountain on christmas morning, your heart three times bigger, throwing our illusions back to us

Why don't you have a catchy nickname for Warren fans yet? xpost

"Dr Morbius's Facebook friends"

"I don't believe that this film is being so well-received despite its glorification of American torture. It's more accurate to say it's so admired because of this."

I haven't seen this movie but surely all the people who say it is great in spite of the torture apologetics are lying and really just love torture

7m Andrew O'Hehir ‏@andohehir
I respect the hell out of @ggreenwald, e.g., but his piece on ZDT makes a number of unwarranted analytical leaps http://goo.gl/KNFFD
View summary

10m Andrew O'Hehir ‏@andohehir
Split between film critics and lefty pundits on merits of torture in ZERO DARK THIRTY is intriguing -- but the latter haven't seen it yet!
Expand

it's weird in that context that he brings up Riefenstahl. Are all her defenders who admit their problems with the Nazi glorification in them actually hiding their secret Nazi admiration?

xp

glorification in her movies*

He and Zoller Seitz had a back and forth earlier about running straight to Leni for comparison.

<I>1) those reviewers who state that the film glorifies torture with falsehoods yet nonetheless praise the film as great; I'm arguing that this should not be possible since their view that it contains falsehood-ridden torture glorification should preclude that sort of praise; and,</I>

This is embarrassing even for Greenwald.

Glenn Kenny ‏@Glenn__Kenny
That movie doesn't say "torture works." It says "The Real doesn't care what you think of torture." Unpleasant notion but NOT THE SAME THING

when did Obama start using The Real as his Twitter name

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/12/zero-dark-thirty/all/1?ww

isn't this somewhat like what Kubrick said re: the violence in A Clockwork Orange. something to the effect of being against the torture of an innocent isn't the point--you have to consider the torture of the guilty. he wanted to put the audience in the uncomfortable position of feeling sympathy for a monster.

the same point being the successful extraction of info from torture has to be shown/argued as still wrong. if the movie merely shows torture *working* i dont think that necessarily elides that debate--cf. Kenny's point.

apparently it doesn't show torture working?

well i guess i shouldn't speak about a movie i havent seen.

that wired writeup makes me want to see it

clearly I am a terrorist

1) The film shows UBL's courier being identified partly through the torture of a detainee
2) That courier is found and leads intel directly to the UBL safe house

The rest you'll have to interpret from the film directly.

You can't even use American initials, dammit.

that's what they call him in the film! our spooks were spelling it Usama back when Bill Clinton failed to take him seriously enough.

Usyrmama

sorry

Ubomber

hah

SPOILERS

Morbs: The closest the movie comes to presenting a case for the utility of torture is by presenting the name of a key bin Laden courier, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, as resulting from an interrogation not shown on screen. But — spoiler alert — the CIA ultimately comes to learn that it misunderstood the context of who that courier was and what he actually looked like. All that happens over five years after the torture program initiated. Meanwhile, the real intelligence work begins when a CIA agent bribes a Kuwaiti with a yellow Lamborghini for the phone number of the courier’s mother, and through extensive surveillance, like a police procedural, the manhunt rolls to its climax. If this is the case for the utility of torture, it’s a weak case — nested within a strong case for the inhumanity of it.

?

mixed messages? in a (likely) hit movie?

Scott Tobias ‏@scott_tobias
Enjoying @MarkHarrisNYC's schooling of @ggreenwald and @froomkin over ZERO DARK and torture. Big advantage to have, you know, seen the film.

And to not be Morbs.

from Harris' New York essay:

Judicial Watch and GOP noisemakers like Long Island congressman Peter King were hungry for evidence that the CIA was offering inappropriate cooperation—and possibly revealing classified material—so Hollywood could make a movie that would get President Obama reelected. But the two most scandalous reveals in the CIA memos are (1) that the agency is rather too agog about Hollywood (one Argo-esque e-mail discusses the importance of establishing “stronger relationships with CAA”) and (2) that the CIA uses emoticons. “I want you to note how good I’ve been about not mentioning the premiere tickets :-),” wrote George Little, at the time the agency’s director of public affairs, to Boal.

XD

Zero Dark Thirty does not present torture as a silver bullet that led to bin Laden; it presents torture as the ignorant alternative to that silver bullet.

Yeah, that's just as much an overstatement as saying the film "glorifies torture." (I wouldn't say it does.)

Eric, have you seen the film?

the CIA ultimately comes to learn that it misunderstood the context of who that courier was and what he actually looked like.

still presented as a breadcrumb on the trail.

No, Mpls. doesn't get screenings until January. At which point we're supposed to give it breathless reviews in conjunction with it's Oscar nominations, I'm sure.

Or just breathless reviews in conjunction with its release in Mpls. Our choice.

Interesting story:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/in-zero-dark-thirty-shes-the-hero-in-real-life-cia-agents-career-is-more-complicated/2012/12/10/cedc227e-42dd-11e2-9648-a2c323a991d6_story.html

ok i love the idea of cia agents being jealous that a co-worker is the anonymous subject of a movie

lol "musicfanatic"

A shame Alan Admin couldn't play the crusty but benign prlducer

Arkin either

I doubt an Obama cultist like Tony Kushner's Husband is 'schooling' anyone 'bout shit.

man so at least three nearly guaranteed best movie noms will be about how a government's gotta do what a government's gotta do

I love this place!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZWbpEKqWRE

Roy Edroso:

I hate to get on Glenn Greenwald's bad side but his claim that he isn't really reviewing-without-having-seen Zero Dark Thirty, when his hostile non-review contains phrases like this . . . is extremely disingenuous. Greenwald's points about some of the journalism surrounding the film are valid, but his characterizations of the film itself are ridiculous. Zero Dark Thirty isn't a shadowy political figure whose hidden movements you track by eyewitness reports. It's a fucking movie. Have your editor buy you a ticket.

This is still more proof -- as if more were needed -- that you shouldn't bring your political obsessions to the temple of art. It is both more personally edifying and more pleasing to the Muses to approach a work of art as a work of art, however obnoxious it may be to you on other grounds, than to approach it as a political phenomenon. Because when you do the latter, you get into company you really don't want to be keeping.

If the thing you've actually seen, heard, or read is a piece of shit, then fire away.

I would explain further, yet again, why this is so, but I'm busy and I assume adults already know this.

you shouldn't bring your political obsessions to the temple of art

adults stop reading there.

(obnoxious libs would really be lost these days without desperately sneering about how "adult" they are)

Roy Edroso and the Temple of Art

Haha, if Roy Edroso is "obnoxious" to you, especially vis a vis Glenn Greenwald of all people, I don't know what to say.

you shouldn't bring your political obsessions to the temple of art

adults stop reading there.

The key word there I'm sure is meant to be "obsessions," but basically yeah, OTM.

Ad on the side of my FB page for ZDT: "LIKE the brave heroes who hunted down the world's most dangerous man."

Very ambiguous!

But but but it's a tailored ad for you where you're the hero and you're hunting the President.

When I was watching this I thought the protagonist was going to be the mystery woman in the situation room photo :/

Greenwald may well be right about the movie he hasn't seen but his Twitter responses to anyone challenging him (all "dumb", "confused" or suffering from "reading comprehension issues," apparently) confirm what a tetchy, condescending asshole he is. And one who ignores or sneers at the many critics who have in fact already noted that the torture is problematic.

spencer ackerman saw the movie:

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/12/zero-dark-thirty/

These are not “enhanced interrogation techniques,” as apologists for the abuse have called it. There is little interrogation presented in Zero Dark Thirty. There is a shouted question, followed by brutality. At one point, “Maya,” a stand-in for the dedicated CIA agents who actually succeeded at hunting bin Laden, points out that one abused detainee couldn’t possibly have the information the agents are demanding of him. The closest the movie comes to presenting a case for the utility of torture is by presenting the name of a key bin Laden courier, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, as resulting from an interrogation not shown on screen. But — spoiler alert — the CIA ultimately comes to learn that it misunderstood the context of who that courier was and what he actually looked like. All that happens over five years after the torture program initiated. Meanwhile, the real intelligence work begins when a CIA agent bribes a Kuwaiti with a yellow Lamborghini for the phone number of the courier’s mother, and through extensive surveillance, like a police procedural, the manhunt rolls to its climax. If this is the case for the utility of torture, it’s a weak case — nested within a strong case for the inhumanity of it.

that was posted yesterday, and i still disagree w/ his interp of that plot strand.

ah ok. guess i'll have to see it myself to determine the degree to which you are wrong :)

The most important thing is that we keep our own conscience clear.

i think the "glorifies torture" is kind tangential to the general reason to find the movie kind of distasteful. It's not like the administration WANTS to glorify torture. Acknowledging its lack of success and making sadfaces - while leaving it on the table is pretty much the cw

interesting in that WaPo piece that some CIA folks are annoyed it was even brought up at all

Heard there is a sequence with a Mariachi band in this?

The movie treating this like a Great Event in History (and it does, however non-football-spikily) is what I found most distasteful.

I believe "capture" is only used once in the dialogue re UBL; B&B don't try to sell that bullshit.

GG finally saw it, and GUESS WHAT http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/14/zero-dark-thirty-cia-propaganda

Well that was unexpected.

Sullivan, on the other hand:

http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/12/the-torture-narrative.html

I wonder what Greenwald's monthly Excedrin bill looks like?

I'm guessing Sullivan has no problem w/ extrajudicial assassination.

just discovered that the film contains a scene depicting the bombing that killed 7 cia agents in afghanistan, one of whom was a friend of mine from high school. can anyone tell me how that scene was handled?

if it's the one I remember, one of the subsidiary characters is our surrogate in that sequence. If you don't remember the specific incident, the film leaves no doubt to how the scene will resolve. It's a key to why I think this is, in fact, a revenge movie.

thanks...just trying to figure out how hard to handle it would be.

It's played for suspense (I suppose it might provide a shock to the average filmgoer), which I did not feel good about.

O RLY

Sully is...torn

Peter Maass in the Atlantic:

Much of the pre-release debate about the movie has focused on whether it portrays torture as effective, in the sense of prying information out of al Qaeda suspects. Yes, the movie conveys that view, and I think it's inaccurate. Many experts, including key senators who oversaw an extensive congressional investigation, have concluded that torture did not play a significant role in finding bin Laden, and that torture in general is a counter-productive way to get information from prisoners. But the heated debate on torture misses what's far more important and troubling about a film that seems destined for blockbuster and Academy Award status. Zero Dark Thirty represents a new genre of embedded filmmaking that is the problematic offspring of the worrisome endeavor known as embedded journalism.....

The fundamental problem is that our government has again gotten away with offering privileged access to carefully selected individuals and getting a flattering story in return. Embeds, officially begun during the invasion of Iraq, are deeply troubling because not every journalist or filmmaker can get these coveted invitations (Seymour Hersh and Matt Taibbi are probably not on the CIA press office's speed dial), and once you get one, you face the quandary of keeping a critical distance from sympathetic people whom you get to know and who are probably quite convincing. That's the reason the embed or special invitation exists; the government does its best to keep journalists, even friendly ones, away from disgruntled officials who have unflattering stories to tell....

Is this the fault of Boal and Bigelow? Not really. I can't imagine any filmmaker or journalist saying "no" to the sort of access they apparently received (I say "apparently" because they haven't provided details; much of the information about their access comes from news stories). And I can't imagine many filmmakers or journalists, having gotten that access, writing a story or making a movie that would be less favorable to the CIA than Zero Dark Thirty. That is the nature of embedding: It primes its targets (I mean, journalists and filmmakers) to create stories that are skewed in the government's favor. That is one reason, I think, the film presents torture as effective—the CIA is ground zero of that unholy belief. If Boal and Bigelow had embedded at the FBI, whose agents have been critical of torture, their film would probably have a different message about waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and cramming a prisoner into a sealed box that's no bigger than an oven.

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

I CAN imagine some filmmakers turning down such access, though, but Ken Loach would not be offered it.

GG finally saw it, and GUESS WHAT

He's fucking right, is what -- and cites plenty of specialist/journos in the field who agree with him.

(tho as he says, spoilers aplenty)

The GG piece was pretty effective in a) not making me want to see ZDT and b) making me remember that there's no reason to expect anything different from the director of Blue Steel and Point Break

I like Bigelow's work on the whole, to be clear, but it's definitely not a shock for her to glamorize something ugly

ATR happens to be right about this scene; I'm with Kyle Chandler in it, p much.

http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/003645.html

http://www.thewrap.com/movies/article/kathryn-bigelow-denies-zero-dark-thirty-apologizes-torture-exclusive-69541?page=0,0

The point that they show torture working where it seems documented that it did not is the central objection for many.

“The film shows that the guy was waterboarded, he doesn’t say anything and there’s an attack. It shows that the same detainee gives them some information, which was new to them, over a civilized lunch."

^^^Really, the balls of this motherfucker Boal. I'm sure the past stress positions / waterboarding had nothing to do with any subsequent encounters. They fib to him at "lunch," "Oh, here's what you told us when you were in a tortured haze..." and feed him some info they want confirmed.

Stuart Klawans in The Nation, asking for it:

The main problem with Zero Dark Thirty isn’t that it revels in torture and endorses waterboarding as a surefire way to get information. Nor is the film’s utter neglect of all political issues its principal fault. The worst I can say about Zero Dark Thirty is that it pretends the best reason for hunting bin Laden down was that it meant so much personally to one smart, determined woman, whose superiors at the CIA just wouldn’t listen to her. Bin Laden might as well be one of the Tyrolean Alps, and the heroine Leni Riefenstahl.

Actually, she’s Jessica Chastain, playing a CIA agent named Maya. No matter how many tricks Bigelow plays, shooting Chastain through glass and putting her in and out of chadors, headscarves, wigs and balaclavas, there is no disguising that Maya is a bystander for much of the film—never more so than in the most effective and extended sequence by far, a brilliantly executed re-creation of the raid on bin Laden’s compound. The film keeps cutting away from the Navy SEALs to Maya sitting at her computer, as if she had something to do.

As it happens, though, looking on idly is what Chastain does best. She has posed her way prettily through an astonishing number of roles in the past two years and has managed to forget herself in none of them. In Zero Dark Thirty, she proves that it’s not enough for a filmmaker to pretend that you’re the lead character—even if you do have cheekbones out of a dream.

Huzzah, some actual film criticism.

Saw it this morning. Still processing, which is more than I thought I'd be able to say.

http://somecamerunning.typepad.com/some_came_running/2012/12/anti-torture-anti-art.html

I would be remiss though if I did not mention the notes of Stuart Klawans, film critic for The Nation, which Greenwald cites. Writing of the torture scenes Klawans says “the movie juices the audience on the adrenaline generated by these physical confrontations,” an assertion that’s arguable at best; then he goes on to state “and offers vicariously the sense of power enjoyed by the person holding the leash.” And I say that part is just plain wrong, and it’s here particularly that it would be useful to be able to do a shot-by-shot breakdown of the torture scenes. The first sequence begins with a shot from the back of the room, with the detainee hanging there by ropes. A door opens, three people, presumably men, enter noisily, and all wearing masks save the bearded one. The film grammar is such that the viewer flinches on entry; the sight of the detainee hanging there alone establishes his helplessness, the entry of the figures establishes threat. The torture scenes continue in this fashion and never ONCE do they invite the viewer to enjoy either holding or pulling the leash. I cannot speak to how Klawans, a seasoned and perceptive viewer, came to these conclusions, but I insist they are incorrect.

But wait. Greenwald continues: “The brave crusaders slay the Evil Villains, and everyone cheers.” (I’m surprised he didn’t capitalize the “c” in “Crusaders:” his complaint goes back a LONG way.) And that is the lie. Of course his rhetoric is such that some may argue that I stretch in calling it a lie, but a lie is what I call it. The movie moment that his slaying-evil-villain-and-audience-cheering assertion conjures up for the “standard” viewer would be something like Hans Gruber’s fall from the near-top of Nakatomi Plaza in Die Hard, or Aziz being blown up by his own missile at the climax of True Lies or Terry Molloy getting the shit kicked out of him at the end of On The Waterfront oh wait…scratch that last one. You get the idea. Now, those who have not seen the film may want to just stop reading around here if they’d like, but… I don’t believe that it represents a “spoiler” to reveal that the raid on the place where bin Laden is living, that is, the movie’s climax, represents anything even resembling a “evil villains slain” cinematic crescendo. Save for Alexander Desplat’s musical score, which is moody and ominous and very low-key rather than building-to-the-triumphalist moment, this is the scene in which the movie affects to purport its most “realistic” perspective. Much of it is depicted in forbiddingly lowlight, there’s a lot of stuff through night-vision goggles. The dominant sense is of organized activity that creates chaos that is then reigned in, so to speak, via slaughter. With the exception of one or two armed resisters, the “Evil Villains” who get shot down don’t even have a chance. Unless the viewer himself has a higher than average understanding of the details of how the raid unfolded, the viewer doesn’t even know which of the men shot down was bin Laden until the SEALS reconvene on the ground floor of the compound and put two and two together and fetch the body bag. In the meantime the viewer has been treated to depictions of fearful women and cowering children being herded about by shouting Americans. Where anyone can pull “everyone cheers” out of this mess is beyond me, but maybe if I see it with a paying audience I will find out. (I do not know what kind of audience Greenwald watched it with.)

Kenny is certainly correct that there is nothing triumphant about those closing minutes (save for the belated fuck-yeah motions from some of the SEALs, which still feel more compulsory than genuine).

I do share some of the misgivings others have expressed about Chastain's character/performance, though.

the movie is way cannier and subtler than red meat like Die Hard / Red Dawn. That's its niche.

Kenny and Greenwald are evaluating ZDT in different roles, and using different criteria. To wit, from GK:

Leaving aside for the moment the extent to which Zero Dark Thirty depicts events accurately (and even here it is arguable that the accounts of events from which Boal and Bigelow took off are entirely different from any number of official or unofficial constructions of the bin Laden pursuit narrative), when I’m watching a film in which actors are performing scripted actions in front of a very deliberately set-up camera, my takeaway from a title card such as the one Mayer cites is centered on “based on.” I am looking at a fiction, period. And it is from experiencing the work as a fiction that I draw my conclusions. (To tell you the truth, I personally never had much invested in the idea of bringing bin Laden to “justice” or not. Which is not to say that I did not take the 9/11 attacks somewhat personally, but I just never believed that bin Laden’s capture or death could do much to repair the damage of the attacks. Looked at another way, I didn’t believe that either bin Laden’s capture or death would have the effect of having made him “pay” for the 9/11 attacks.)

one of Sully's readers:

read Jane Mayer's article yesterday and frankly was disgusted. Her primary complaint seemed to be that the film didn't work to redeem the reputations of her sources. As if the fact that the FBI was against torture, and people in the CIA and military were "conflicted" about it, in any way mitigated the fact that it happened.

Her attacks on some of the characterizations in the movie, the "it's biology" bit and so forth, seem to be of a piece with Glenn Greenwald's critique, in that they seem to take all of the CIA characters at face value. This would be appropriate if Maya and Dan were heroes like Jack Bauer, but they're much more unreliable, like Humbert Humbert or Colonel Mathieu from "The Battle of Algiers". In "Lolita," if you want to see a pro-pedophilia message, you'll see it, but only by completely accepting Humbert's framing, and that requires a pretty closed mind and/or a lot of obtuseness. Similarly in "Zero Dark Thirty," you'll see a pro-torture message, or a "hagiography" of the CIA, but only by accepting the CIA characters on their face as the "Good Guys."

But, I think it's clear these people aren't good people.

Dan (Jason Clarke), the most vigorous torturer, feeds ice cream to monkeys at a CIA black site. = Good Guy

Good Cop surely

Dan (Jason Clarke), the most vigorous torturer, feeds ice cream to monkeys at a CIA black site. = Good Guy

― saltwater incursion (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, December 18, 2012 6:07 PM (30 minutes ago) Bookmark

This reads like a joke but I don't think it is a joke.

I'm going with joke

J. Hoberman weighs in:

http://blogs.artinfo.com/moviejournal/2012/12/18/2012%E2%80%99s-prize-endurance-tests-%E2%80%9Camour%E2%80%9D-and-%E2%80%9Czero-dark-thirty%E2%80%9D/

he doesn't say muc

h

http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/the-monitor-mentality-or-a-means-to-an-end-becomes-an-end-in-itself-kathryn-bigelows-zero-dark-thirty

but as the closing close-up lingers on her face, what registers is a profound purposelessness

Entirely subjective; I just chalked it up to being Jessica Chastain.

Her best work was that one episode of Veronica Mars.

http://fablog.ehrensteinland.com/2012/12/19/dancing-in-the-zero-dark/

http://insidemovies.ew.com/2012/12/19/is-zero-dark-thirty-pro-torture/

Not reading any of these links, obv.

this has long since been nothing more than a repository of links for future generations.

ZDT being "pro-torture" isn't even the crux for me.

careful you don't stray too far from st. greenwald there or you might get kicked out of the fan club

Richard Brody: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2012/12/richard-brody-on-the-deceptive-emptiness-of-zero-dark-thirty.html

my only question is "how was Chris Pratt?"

Brody generally otm

good read, thanks gubke

Senators weigh in: http://www.deadline.com/2012/12/zero-dark-thirty-grossly-inaccurate-senators-tell-sony/

The use of torture should be banished from serious public discourse for these reasons alone, but more importantly, because it is a violation of the Geneva Conventions, because it is an affront to America’s national honor, and because it is wrong. The use of torture in the fight against terrorism did severe damage to America’s values and standing that cannot be justified or expunged. It remains a stain on our national conscience.

this is sort of gratifying to read

more than sort of tbh

the capitulations Feinstein and McCain made that enabled the policies in question make it ring a little more hollow than I would like

Christopher Hayes ‏@chrislhayes
Saw Zero Dark 30. Good lord. Have lots of thoughts, which I'll save for our discussion w/ @ggreenwald @attackerman @hinashamsi on Sat.

oh man

Hot damn!

hot man!

zero dark mercy!

kind of odd that the New Yorker paired up the reviews for Zero Dark Thirty and This Is 40

next week's double feature, 50/50 and Gone in 60 Seconds

kind of odd that the New Yorker paired up the reviews for Zero Dark Thirty and This Is 40

Don't worry: David Denby and his pellucid insights were on display.

Chris Hayes: the film inspired "moral revulsion" in him and it "colludes with evil."

where was this discussion?

going on now on Chris Hayes' show.

it woulda helped if Hayes had invited a film critic though

our boy Greenwald is on there too

Oh ffs

Alex Gibney lays out ZD30's pro-torture slant as methodically as I've seen it:

http://www.salon.com/2012/12/22/zero_dark_thirty_is_indefensible/

i saw this!

and?

its too long

good talk lol

hour in, and this is kinda boring

(viewing a screener, fyi)

a pair of law & order detectives (one a spunky redhead, one a charming brutalist) team up with the hand-held camera from Friday Night Lights to catch Bin Laden. Since I know they do, the only thing keeping me going is the alleged eventuality of Chris Pratt.

The film's tech virtues need the big screen.

i didnt get bored till after abt 2 hours

pratt is good but you just want him to be andy dwyer. he has one classic line tho

gave up at 1h30 when committed+spunky's new boss did the "i learned from my predecessor not to disagree with you" thing zzzz

i've now seen two of the three Government's Gotta Do What A Government's Gotta Do Oscar movies. Preferred Lincoln, but I bet I'll be on Team Argo in the end.

The film's tech virtues need the big screen.

Yeach co-sign on this, not surprised it was a patience-tester on a TV.

I don't know from a fucking C Pratt sitcom, he was a hot Scott Hatteberg.

Argo is a worse movie than this, and just about as evil.

morbs otm

aw, i was hoping it would be the "comedy = tragedy + time" entry in this year of US government retrospectives

More like comedy and tragedy fill time.

That's the puncture of funny.

http://blogs.indiewire.com/criticwire/from-the-wire-critics-and-morally-engaged-viewers

I liked this a lot, and was honestly strongly emotionally effected by it. It's a deeply mournful film--almost a funeral dirge. We start in blackness and bare panic and suffering and open in a literal torture chamber. Tellingly, there is a shot where the audience is shut inside a box. We end in billowing black clouds and non-cathartic grief. "Do you know what you just did?"

Also, a very suggestive idea of "risk" seems to be at play. UBL hunt compared to Iraq WMD, both at 60% certainly. Interesting question raised as to what makes the calculation of risk on either side more ethical. A very troubling movie, intentionally so I think.

have you read the thread?

Yes. Did I miss something I should read again?

only that the movie troubles us

Indeed! Only pointlessly throwing in my belated two cents. Maybe more than "troubling" I mean it seems like a profoundly troubled movie. It's an open wound, UBL seems to stand more for a lost chance at restitution than eye for eye justice. As in the Obama clip which is so pointedly ignored, it's about "moral standing" and the lack thereof.

not belated, most people still haven't seen it

I was going to link to the Reverse Shot review by Reichert that is commented on in Eric's link; he gets at what I find morally troubling and irresponsible.

from that Reichert piece:

What’s perhaps worse and more damning is a later scene where, for little apparent narrative reason, the small group working the bin Laden case sits around a conference room table while an NBC interview with a recently elected Barack Obama plays in the background. In that interview, Obama definitively states his opposition to torture; in the foreground of the frame, Maya’s hardened colleague Jessica (Jennifer Ehle) shakes her head as if to suggest the president’s ignorance—she’s been in the field, he hasn’t. If Bigelow and Boal want to insist they haven’t made a movie that validates torture morally, that’s fine. But to label it apolitical, as they have repeatedly done, either suggests willful mendacity or ignorance. Their film quite clearly stakes out a position on one of the more controversial political questions of the last decade in American politics, and soon it will be making its case several times a day on thousands of screens around the country. Greenwald’s writings on the film may hyperventilate, but when one considers the scale of the historical rewrite we’re about to witness, his pitched tenor is more forgivable. Maybe “propaganda” isn’t so far off the mark after all.

it's funny the "this is journalism" tag is really (for me) an aesthetically defensive gesture to protect themselves against just this kind of reading that insists the movie must have some position on torture's efficacy or morality--it's a movie about dehumanization and trauma, and only in that respect doest it really relate to the (very important, of course) legal and ethical arguments about torture.

i mean, if anything, the movie i saw goes to great lengths to repudiate the bush administration and its handling of torture and the iraq war. but even more it sees that period not as some regrettable lapse that obama set right but something far darker and irreversible. i think the movie sees its "journalism" claim (falsely) as its best means of making that case without being slotted into predictable "political" discourse. it would be better if it said "this is art and therefore worth taking seriously" but that's just not the discourse we have sadly.

to put a finer point on what i am clumsily trying to say: i'd argue that the "based on first hand accounts" and "this is journalism" stuff works, in this movie at least, as an invitation for the audience to make actual judgments (moral and otherwise) about what they are seeing--it's marking an (fully artificial) non-political space in which to better critique political judgments.

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/01/zero-dark-thirty-is-not-pro-torture/266759/

I don't disagree with all your points, ryan.

We end in billowing black clouds and non-cathartic grief. "Do you know what you just did?"

... but that line I read as "You killed Darth Vader, dude!"

it's funny that this movie's meditative, non-cathartic dirge qualities can be seen as cultural commentary, but also as evidence that the director of point break and blue steel is still interested in meditative, non-cathartic dirges

i think part of what i resent about this movie is that, for all the people demanding this movie be separated from the torture/political element, take out the politics and you've got an especially gloomy episode of CSI: Pakistan

i was trying to work out exactly why i wasn't bothered with the hurt locker while i'm so bothered with this, but issues of "authenticity" aside, hurt locker had intense set piece after intense set piece, and some career-making performances.

also i didn't know how it ended

In that interview, Obama definitively states his opposition to torture; in the foreground of the frame, Maya’s hardened colleague Jessica (Jennifer Ehle) shakes her head as if to suggest the president’s ignorance—she’s been in the field, he hasn’t. If Bigelow and Boal want to insist they haven’t made a movie that validates torture morally, that’s fine.

maybe bigelow wanted to make a movie about a CIA that made very clear to its young new president that it wasn't going to be fucked with for what it did under the old one and got away with everything

Lots of critics-of-the-critics are getting the criticism confused: few people are arguing that Bigelow thinks torture is ok - just that this film misrepresents torture's (lack of) efficacy.

x-post: yeah that struck me as a major thread. that scene in particular (Obama as a distant voice from outside the CIA) seemed particularly important as a moment in which the bubble is, if not burst, as least shown as a bubble. the repeated sheepish remarks about iraq WMDs seemed to perform a similar function.

Would like a count of how many times Jason Clarke says "bro" in the first 10 minutes...

is ZDT better than Hurt Locker? worse? same?

only seen the latter and liked it.

LOL why did no one tell me that John Barrowman was in this? Kudos to Bigelow for casting the real life Troy McClure.

As a typically ignorant American, feel gutted that it took this film to realize the hotel I stay in more often than not while in London is adjacent to an infamous 7/7 bombing location (Tavistock).

I was like "hmmm this looks familiar, there's that Starbuc..." [bomb goes off] "oh man..." then when I get out of theater I immediately wiki and learn of my stupidity.

basically an overly long, remarkably boring ep of Homeland IMO. lead was annoying and I would have broken her hand off the 57th day she came and marked on my office window with a red marker.

(and while i missed all the 'utility of "enhanced interrogation" and the message it sends' debate that apparently was going on on the internet a month ago, i thought it was p clear that the actionable intelligence came from bribery)

and is Mark Duplass the hardest working dude in the biz right now?

not the ONLY actionable intelligence. In the most infamous quote associated w/ this movie, there was that "civilized lunch" (tell us or we'll string you up again).

xp

you guys are really most fascinated by the three dozen underwhelming bit roles in this huh

I purposely avoided watching it yesterday afternoon, balking at its length.

otoh will be #1 this weekend

ah you're right, Morbs.

on both points!

basically an overly long, remarkably boring ep of Homeland IMO. lead was annoying and I would have broken her hand off the 57th day she came and marked on my office window with a red marker.

― Still S.M.D.H. ft. (will), Sunday, January 13, 2013 8:36 AM (44 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haha yes the marker schtick was so dumb, and it was just a really weird choice to stick an ahistorical torture power hour at the beginning of the movie, and the final shot what a fn cliche, i did not really like this that much it was p gross

u guyz just don't like STRONG WOMEN

its weird she was the star of the movie but her character seemed really underdeveloped, maybe that was the point she had kinda an empty life just sort of ambitious and obsessive, but even that seemed underdeveloped

seal bros are way cooler than the cia is what i learned from this movie

im not sure it's underdeveloped--it's made pretty clear imo that this is literally all she's ever done. she's pretty much a black hole of grief and empty revenge.

i feel like the procedural is such a staple of television shows (did anyone compare Zodiac to tv?) that it's hard for a film procedural to separate itself, but the relative patience and moral swamp of this one certainly did that for me.

people even if theyre black holes of grief and empty revenge tend to have observable characteristics, i didnt get much sense of personhood out of her, i got what the filmmakers were trying to say about her, but not much past that

ryan have you seen blue steel

I did hear a critic compare this character to Jamie Lee in Blue Steel, wd have to rewatch to evaluate.

i have not. would like to though.

def recommended if you want patience in a moral swamp

Bigelow is an interesting director for this material. She is interested in the ways her characters live dangerously for philosophical reasons. They aren't men of action, but men of thought who choose action as a way of expressing their beliefs. That adds an intriguing element to their characters, and makes the final confrontation in this movie as meaningful as it can be, given the admittedly preposterous nature of the material.

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19910712/REVIEWS/107120303/1023

"final confrontation" implies some Big Boss fight like on NES games at the end of a level

interesting interested intriguing

not on netflix sadly but I'll track it down. Sounds great!

did anyone actually click through to see what movie that was referring to

Blue Steel was great but Ron Silver had me convinced as a kid that everybody with a beard was evil

Ralph Fiennes with long hair?

xpost

xxpost HAHAHAHAAHAHAHAAHA

everybody with a beard was evil

sry we're too busy pressing our bodies against naked men to notice how cold it is WINTER THREAD gay homo queer &c 2013

303 posts and no one's mentioned the Rorshach song in this?

Not sure what I thought of this.

Even with all the controversy, I didn't realize going in that virtually THE ENTIRE FIRST ACT was about torture.

There were some really good tense moments in this but over all it just felt kind of empty.

And kind of yucky, too. People in the theater were cheering and clapping during the raid scene, especially after the "for god and country" line. Ick.

Whatever the film's boosters want to say about it, it's not a movie that challenges the audience in any real way.

I agree about the emptiness but found that a profound virtue. disagree about it not being challenging. people are gonna bring their jingoism to the theater with them but the movie doesn't congratulate them for it. You can fault it for not explicitly challenging those notions but I don't think that would improve the movie or what it's really trying to do.

OTM

I don't really see that flat empty docudrama style to be compelling. I find it to be a dishonest affectation that filmmakers use to stand in for seriousness.

Actually most of my gripes about the movie's aesthetics are really just symptomatic of how movies treat this subject matter in general. This film is only the biggest most recent example.

That's really the irksome thing about it, too: it's getting all these raves but it really isn't even that formally interesting. There's some really well-executed moments of tension but not much else.

critics are really impressed when filmmakers aren't afraid to tackle the big stories and make streamlined narratives out of them

I agree about the emptiness but found that a profound virtue.

― ryan, Sunday, January 13, 2013 3:38 PM (47 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

dear god

"emptiness" perhaps not the best word, but there's a sense in which it's dehumanizing and vacant. Systems of control swallowing up people. I found the movie quite harrowing for that. Of course, that's after only one viewing. But it seems to me an awful lot of critics see fit to critique this movie for its genre and not what's actually put on screen, or at least the (to me) complicated relationship it has to genre. This is a western, essentially, but more like those 70s anti-westerns.

you know, "Geronimo" and all that. Final shot with same pathos as the searchers. (Tho of course not as a great a movie.)

i guess it's hard to find a portentous pseudo-authentic procedural profound when you know bigelow can get portentous about surfing bank robbers

i mean really, getting heavy with keanu is more impressive than getting heavy with bin laden

well sure!

there's some incredible, potent images in this. still crystallizing my thoughts... i might need to see it again tbh. i like ryan's take though.

303 posts and no one's mentioned the Rorshach song in this?

― lol cassidy fan club (Whiney G. Weingarten), Sunday, January 13, 2013 10:50 AM (12 hours ago) Bookmark

nobody cares...mate

same DP as killing them softly, which also looked great

i haven't seen this yet. i'm really excited to, tho. i can't wait for the scene at the end, when the soldiers penetrate the compound and find a beleaguered osama bin ladin surrounded by his fat stacks of pornography. a firefight blazes and he is filled w/ bullets. as he dies and begins to fall to the ground, everything goes into slow motion. pages of his hustler magazines scatter into the air and then slowly drift down around his body like snowflakes. a giant vag pic slowly settles down onto bin ladin's face. credits roll.

People in the theater were cheering and clapping during the raid scene, especially after the "for god and country" line. Ick.

Saw it with critics, but obv knew this wd happen cuz it's America.

You can fault it for not explicitly challenging those notions but I don't think that would improve the movie or what it's really trying to do.

Balls.

One guy shouted out "YEAH" when Osama was killed. Everyone else in the theatre was dead silent.

it must be pretty sweet to be the guy who killed ubl, are you allowed to tell, i would tell everyone

One guy shouted out "YEAH" when Osama was killed. Everyone else in the theatre was dead silent.

― Gukbe, Monday, January 14, 2013 3:33 PM (2 hours ago)

When you walked out of the theater you realized it was John Brennan.

Might have been! Saw it in the 3rd highest grossing ZDT theatre in the US.

the White House?

Close! Alexandria, Virginia. Highest was near Langley. Second highest in Fairfax County, VA.

it must be pretty sweet to be the guy who killed ubl, are you allowed to tell, i would tell everyone

― lag∞n, Monday, January 14, 2013 3:04 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol srs but I recall from some writeup of events (think the journo had some access to the SEAL team) that they totally know who but are definitely not going to disclose.

was Obama, who flew in disguise w/ sunglasses and a Chicago Bears hat iirc

really...undecided on this. it was never boring and i can't really imagine any decent human being watching the raid sequence, much less the torture sequences, and not feeling troubled and nauseated. even bin laden's killing isn't played like a 'way to go!' movie moment -- it's messy and confused and the aftermath is ugly and unpleasant, not triumphant. i saw it in a near-empty theater, but it's hard for me to imagine anyone cheering at that scene.

otoh the movie doesn't really give you much reason not to think 'they tortured some ppl, and that eventually somehow helped them get bin laden.'

this was so, so good

the only reaction in my showing was a round of cackling when the soldier was beckoning bin laden: "osama?"

the torture aspect of this is so ridiculously overblown that i'm even more embarrassed for political media than normal

I dunno, it's hard to walk away from the movie with any message but "torture brought together all the pieces that landed Osama."

I think it would have been better if we never saw DEVGRU and the actual attack, just follow her as she watches it in real-time. Something about 3/4 procedural 1/4 action movie was off-putting.

there was this one scene where they they just fucking laid his nuts on a fucking dresser, just his nuts laying on a fucking dresser, and bang them shits with a spiked fucking bat, blaow

I dunno, it's hard to walk away from the movie with any message but "torture brought together all the pieces that landed Osama."

the movie definitely sees her as heroic but this isn't like old "24"-style typical torture depiction in films or movies where a bad guy finally spurts out an answer after having his nipples shocked. the movie shows one name popping up routinely during "interrogations" and from there a little morsel of information is used to find something bigger. to me there was a subtext of both inefficiency and luck involved with the torture aspect. i also thought the scenes were brutal to watch and not forgiving in any way. imo you have to be very narrow-minded to come away from that thinking "hey, torture works!" of course i'm sure people did but that's not bigelow's or boal's responsibility imo.

I think it would have been better if we never saw DEVGRU and the actual attack, just follow her as she watches it in real-time. Something about 3/4 procedural 1/4 action movie was off-putting.

i could see that but i also thought the raid of the house was shot strikingly well

Not the torture scenes themselves but the dialogue - talking about how all the info they're working on until the last guy who tips them to the courier came directly from detainees who'd been tortured, and even the last guy IIRC says he doesn't want to be tortured again.

It doesn't glorify torture, but the case being made was, to me, that torture works in getting good information.

The torture scenes themselves were not particularly brutal, IMO - there was little visceral feel for the horrors of waterboarding or, um, hot-boxing.

idk I kind of wanted to die, what movies have you been watching

i thought they were pretty hard to watch, but i can't sit through most horror movies. maya's clearly the stand-in for the viewer -- standing off to the side and wincing, not seeing the worst details but hearing everything.

Not the torture scenes themselves but the dialogue - talking about how all the info they're working on until the last guy who tips them to the courier came directly from detainees who'd been tortured, and even the last guy IIRC says he doesn't want to be tortured again.

yeah this is definitely noticeable -- she makes it explicit in her briefing of the seal team -- but if anything that's to me a reflection of the beliefs of people inside the CIA. i believe that a lot of people inside the CIA especially ones that worked under bush think torture works!

well why wouldnt they believe it, they used it and it worked

hey man it only got them a lil info, thats not like working, its not like they were after info

it would be a really weird conclusion to think that torture worked just based on the fact that guys didnt want to tell them stuff and then after being tortured they told them stuff

and not once was the stuff untrue

well that doesn't really happen in the movie but okay

yes it absolutely does

multiple times

torture torture torture, stare at walls, write on windows, go to meetings, yell at boss, for a movie about an investigation it was kind of an odd depiction of one, half an hour of in depth torture then a lot of office politics

tbh that's kind of how i already pictured life in the cia

lag∞n right, J0rdan wrong, millennium approacheth

morbs recognizes righteousness, millennium was like ten years ago

had the chance to watch it last weekend, but I'm squeamish these days about even killing roaches.

Liz Cheney ‏@Liz_Cheney
Just saw Zero Dark Thirty. Excellent film about years of heroism, including in the enhanced interrogation program, that led to bin Laden.

heh

it's a biblical thing, j0e

xxp

maybe Liz saw it w/ J0rdan?

ya i know i was just making a lil joke

I would borrow all the money I can for a movie date with Liz Cheney and J0rdan

Michael Sicinski:

One of the things ZDT takes as a given, just as Maya does, is that "getting bin Laden" was always worth it, no matter the cost. In practical terms, bin Laden had long since been sidelined in the daily activities of al Qaeda, so his assassination was a function of closure. Yet while pundits and politicians get wrapped up in whether the film "defends" torture as the means to taking him out, by and large they are failing to examine Bigelow's filmmaking as a rhetorical method and as a symbolic form.

Many film critics and intellectuals love Kathryn Bigelow because she used to be a painter and has avant-garde credentials, and as action filmmakers go she certainly has a better-than-average command of cinematic space. The fact that she has recently turned to military subjects is not all that surprising. High-tech reconnaissance devices are the endpoint of Renaissance perspective and its abstraction of lived space into mappable patterns and fields.

Nevertheless, her storytelling tends to exhibit a fascination with power, particularly male power, from an objective distance. On the one hand, ZDT is a kind of blank slate, much like Maya: content to show certain things that happened, without ever asking about their meaning or providing much of a contextual framework. But the forms of action filmmaking inevitably provide their own inherent explanation.

http://www.nashvillescene.com/nashville/zero-dark-thirty-tortures-not-the-most-troubling-thing-about-kathryn-bigelows-hollywood-death-strike/Content?oid=3220637

One of the things ZDT takes as a given, just as Maya does, is that "getting bin Laden" was always worth it, no matter the cost.

i dont know that this is true!

High-tech reconnaissance devices are the endpoint of Renaissance perspective and its abstraction of lived space into mappable patterns and fields.

though this is a cool idea

film critics love Bigelow because she made Near Dark and Point Break, not because she was a painter. How daft.

also she was a fighter pilot

and a woman

"and intellectuals," Alfred

i need to see this again before making any strong claims because so much of what i think about what it's trying to do are because of how it made me feel. i walked out in a gloomy funk and stayed that way.

in any case. i agree with Sicinski that certain action movie logics override and control the movie to an extent. but short of getting avant garde not sure KB could have tried to push back against them any more than she did. but that tension is what's fascinating! the machine pulls on but there's a dark fatalism to it.

as i said above, i think this movie is engaging some pretty broad and mythical american archetypes (a la Richard Slotkin) about becoming "other" and the like. and i think it does so in a really compelling way.

max, I recall that soon after the bin Laden hit, B & B announced that their film project, previously slated to be about the 'near miss' at Tora Bora, would be about the successful end to the manhunt. Some objections were raised (by whom I don't recall) that they'd be 'glorifying' this as some great event, and one or the other of them replied, to paraphrase, that it was of course a significant and important event. So that seemed to indicate that they think it was "worth it," no matter what.

i dunno. i need to see it again -- i just cant really shake the ending, which was so gloomy and dark and anticlimactic that it made me think that youre supposed to walk away with "was this really worth it?" in the back of your mind

Yeah me too. It's like "let's make an action movie that rather than be exhilarating haunts you with a nameless dread and moral complicity."

How is killing Bin Laden not an important or significant event? Xpost

Sean Hannity loved it!

Gukbe, per the Sicinski line that reflects what I've read in innumerable places: "In practical terms, bin Laden had long since been sidelined in the daily activities of al Qaeda, so his assassination was a function of closure."

Justice required a trial.

i dunno. i need to see it again -- i just cant really shake the ending, which was so gloomy and dark and anticlimactic that it made me think that youre supposed to walk away with "was this really worth it?" in the back of your mind

― max, Wednesday, January 16, 2013 12:17 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

its definitely suposed to be ambiguous, as to whether it accomplishes that idk, kinda feel like the movie is an incoherent mess and really not very good as a movie which is then compound by the weird ahistorical torture featurette prequel

the feelings of dissatisfaction and bewilderment a lot of zdt boosters are crediting to the artistry of the film can really be more easily explained by the fact that its comprised of a bunch of gross stuff poorly stitched together

"let's make an action movie that rather than be exhilarating haunts you with a nameless dread and moral complicity."

seriously have you guys ever seen a kathryn bigelow movie before this

I still really want to see this

One of the things ZDT takes as a given, just as Maya does, is that "getting bin Laden" was always worth it, no matter the cost.

again i think the subtext of the film goads you into calling this idea into question. one of the crucial scenes in the movie the part where her boss refuses to give her some money or men or w/e and she goes "you're gonna be the first CIA bureau chief called before congress to testify as to why you let osama bin laden get away" or whatever, and to me the take away from that is pity for her boss who falls for a ploy so obvious and stupid. i also think the tension in the scenes where they're outside searching for the courier is "a lot of people inside the CIA think this is a worthless mission, so we better find this dude quickly before we get shut down"

Gukbe, per the Sicinski line that reflects what I've read in innumerable places: "In practical terms, bin Laden had long since been sidelined in the daily activities of al Qaeda, so his assassination was a function of closure."

Justice required a trial.

Absolutely none of this in any way has anything to do with the killing of UBL as being an important event.

If it didn't prevent future attacks, and served no purpose than revenge, how so?

(unless it was important bcz it filled a weeklong news cycle)

Because we basically started a war to kill him? Because he was the face of 9/11?

wrong reasons, i would argue. (that war isn't over btw and several of our freedoms are likely gone forever)

sort of like Javier Bardem in Skyfall.... bin Laden won.

being mad a movie for being squarely within mainstream american opinion about its subject seems both right on and totally pointless

i agree with you, but that doesn't mean that it wasn't an important or significant event. xpost

the message i got from the end of the film was that it wasn't really worth it, or that the cost was horrendous even if it was worth it -- that spending a decade of your life entirely focused on killing somebody fucks you up. maya spends a decade of her life on this, loses her (apparently only) friend, abandons having any kind of personal life, and all so they could break into a house and shoot an old man in the face. plus kill some innocent people and terrorize some children.

eh... hard to call the people who were living with and sheltering Osama "innocent people."

I think you're reading a shit-ton of your views into the ending. You could just as easily say that Maya cries with relief after accomplishing the mission she believes she was allowed to live to do. (she says this explicitly, it stops just short of God's Will)

Maya's idea, of course, was to just bomb the shit out of the complex, killing those 'innocent people' AND children together. I don't think she was crying at the courier or Osama's son getting shot.

I read the ending as much closer to milo's tho w/ Chastain's limits who can tell.

i don't think the ending of the film said much about whether it was "worth it". to me the ending wants you to ask how you would feel if you were obsessed with something for 10 years and then one night it was just suddenly done. she's alone in this massive plane, the pilot asks her where she wants to go and instead of answering him she just sits down and cries. i think it asks a human question instead of a political one.

the human is suposed to function as a metaphor for the political in this case tho, was it worth it to us as a nation how to we feel about our murderous obsession and so forth

If the question is that small, J0rdan, then I don't fucking care.

was it worth it to us as a nation how to we feel about our murderous obsession and so forth

The answer to this seems pretty simple on the macro scale. (Note: still haven't watched this one.)

If the question is that small, J0rdan, then I don't fucking care.

― saltwater incursion (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, January 16, 2013 2:22 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah i mean if this is just suposed to be a story abt this lady she is sad and not that interesting

in a way it reminds me of the social network in that a creative team took on a TRUE STORY and turned into the most in-character docudrama, to the point of ignoring any elements of the story that don't hook the the creative team's traditional subject matter - but everyone gives it zeitgeist points for being the TRUE STORY. Ironically, I like your average Bigelow movie way more than your average Fincher/Sorkin movie, but if Sorkin putting big speeches into actors mouths and saying it's the story of facebook was more entertaining for me than bigelow doing another glum quest and calling it the story of how we caught ubl - esp since the TRUE STORY element is used to excuse a relative lack of character detail

murderous obsession is what made America great

otm xp

are there any zdt ravers coming from the perspective of "hot damn i love me some kathryn bigelow movies?" for all the "judge it as a movie" defenses out there, i don't really see people dealing with it from any kind of auteurist perspective

You could just as easily say that Maya cries with relief after accomplishing the mission she believes she was allowed to live to do.

i agree -- i don't think she's crying because she feels bad about what she's done and i don't think the film is saying 'getting UBL was bad,' but i definitely don't get any sense of triumph out of that scene, or really out of the entire last half-hour of the movie. the underlying theme of the film seems to be that the hunt for the ultimate bad guy kinda turned us into bad guys ourselves -- i mean, this is a film that begins with the 'heroes' brutally torturing someone.

she just had a lot of stuff bottled up

Brutally torturing someone who was presented, unequivocally, as an important al-Qaeda link.
None of the tortured folks were presented as potentially uninvolved or innocent.

I don't see that as a problem.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/moviesnow/la-et-mn-0116-bigelow-zero-dark-thirty-20130116,0,5937785.story

as far as the verisimilitude of the whole torture scenario it completely ignored the prime practical issue w/torture which is people lie, like they dont hold back for days saying nothing until finally you beat it out of them like is portrayed in every movie ever including this one, when you start to hurt them they just say stuff that will hopefully make you stop whether its true or not

so all moral objections aside this was a v typical hollywood presentation

could do without the self-congratulatory Hollywood twaddle

This is the second time she says "depiction is not endorsement." No one has made this argument...?

Actually they have. Many many times.

i like how all the praised nuance and ambiguity of the film morphs into an italicized "sometimes" at the end of an op-ed

the smart critiques haven't. xp

even Greenwald hasn't said this

"sometimes lines were crossed but never forget the bravery," in theaters now.

None of the tortured folks were presented as potentially uninvolved or innocent.

― Kiarostami bag (milo z), Wednesday, January 16, 2013 2:52 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark

this is true. it probably could have been remedied but the scope of this movie is pretty narrow that i'm not sure from a filmmaking perspective that it would've made sense to create an innocent prisoner.

as far as the verisimilitude of the whole torture scenario it completely ignored the prime practical issue w/torture which is people lie, like they dont hold back for days saying nothing until finally you beat it out of them like is portrayed in every movie ever including this one, when you start to hurt them they just say stuff that will hopefully make you stop whether its true or not

they do get wrong intel at one point, though, when during one interrogation a guy says that he buried the courier. another crucial part of the film.

Guk, do you think ZDT critics would say Kubrick favored executing soldiers picked at random from a retreating battalion, because Paths of Glory depicted it?

Of course not. That doesn't mean others have made the criticism (not smartly, mind) that by showing torture and suggesting it might have worked is an endorsement.

But it's funny you bring up Kubrick, as I was just now watching Full Metal Jacket, a film that reeks of anti-war to me, and yet it's hugely popular amongst soldiers.

None of the tortured folks were presented as potentially uninvolved or innocent.

― Kiarostami bag (milo z), Wednesday, January 16, 2013 2:52 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark

then again, i think there's an ambiguity to the interrogations that clouds the air. with the first detainee that we see -- who is also the one that gets brutalized the worst -- the interrogators throw out a bunch of "facts" that also aren't proven to be true. they're shown lying to him (or bluffing him), and i don't get the sense that you're supposed to explicitly believe that the interrogators are telling the truth.

a film can be popular among soldiers and anti-war!

I get the decision from a story perspective, but if you want to be less than pro-torture, maybe show one of the dozens of people Maya and her boss tortured who didn't have any info? Or at least allude to it?
The party line of the movie is that torture always led to good intelligence.

"yes torture happened, but good americans got the bad guy" may not be "pro-torture" but it sure ain't anti

of course it can! But certain soldiers take away different things from it than might have been intended, or they can ignore the anti-war aspects and just think it's about badass marines being badass.

it doesn't need to be "anti-torture", does it? xpost

A lot of soldiers ARE anti-war.

the Jarhead guy wrote that no film is antiwar, cuz it will excite young men as long as it shows action.

don't really buy that but i get the point

there was also a montage bit that shows Maya callously waterboarding a dude and we don't know what came of that. xposts

Yes they are Eric, but not all of them. xpost

the Jarhead guy wrote that no film is antiwar, cuz it will excite young men as long as it shows action.

i've heard this argument from an ex-addict re: anti-drug movies too

it's silly to be "how can you think this is pro-torture" when a film shows people we're supposed to be grateful to committing torture and then killing the bad guy. Yes, it's more artful than a 24 episode, but why should anyone have to be grateful for a film that grudgingly accepts conventional wisdom on us foreign policy.

they do get wrong intel at one point, though, when during one interrogation a guy says that he buried the courier. another crucial part of the film.

― J0rdan S., Wednesday, January 16, 2013 3:03 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh come on that was a mistake not a lie

I don't think it expects us to be grateful for committing torture and killing the bad guy. xpost

read bigelow's op-ed again

By this measure, Spiritual Voices must count as the most anti-war "war movie" ever.

I read it. I linked it!

A lot of soldiers ARE anti-war.

I got on a bus a few months back which was idle for 10 minutes before it pulled out. A grizzled passenger chatted with the driver, who revealed he'd been in the Marines for 17 (?) years. The passenger got up and said "I hear all the time that no one says thank you -- THANK YOU," shakes the driver's hand, and the driver looks like he wants to disappear under his seat. Then the driver says, "Thanks, but when it comes to killing people ... you've got to have a good reason. And... OIL?"

War, obviously, isn't pretty, and we were not interested in portraying this military action as free of moral consequences.

In that vein, we should never discount and never forget the thousands of innocent lives lost on 9/11 and subsequent terrorist attacks. We should never forget the brave work of those professionals in the military and intelligence communities who paid the ultimate price in the effort to combat a grave threat to this nation's safety and security.

Bin Laden wasn't defeated by superheroes zooming down from the sky; he was defeated by ordinary Americans who fought bravely even as they sometimes crossed moral lines, who labored greatly and intently, who gave all of themselves in both victory and defeat, in life and in death, for the defense of this nation.

The party line of the movie is that torture always led to good intelligence.

― Kiarostami bag (milo z), Wednesday, January 16, 2013 3:06 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ya it fits neatly into the hard eyed realist party line that there are bad people out there and sometimes you need people on yr side willing to do the things you cant so that you can maintain yr illusion of safety and moral superiority, not saying thats what they were trying to say but its not hard to fit it into that box

I really think this is a movie where you take out what you bring into it.

sounds like a shitty movie then

zzzz

i mean a news article about the killing of ubl can pull that off

you should probably not see it

no, seriously, what's impressive about a movie that tells the story of how ubl was killed and everyone walks out feeling the same way about it they did coming in

it's an artful expression of conventional wisdom

I never said it was impressive.

if you want to see a kathryn bigelow movie about a woman's struggle to stop a murderous madman in the face of a patriarchal bureaucracy, i recommend this one where SHIT BE POPPING OFF and nobody pretends it's a true story

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJTOmShc9E0

I got on a bus a few months back which was idle for 10 minutes before it pulled out. A grizzled passenger chatted with the driver, who revealed he'd been in the Marines for 17 (?) years. The passenger got up and said "I hear all the time that no one says thank you -- THANK YOU," shakes the driver's hand, and the driver looks like he wants to disappear under his seat. Then the driver says, "Thanks, but when it comes to killing people ... you've got to have a good reason. And... OIL?"

Maybe if the driver hadn't let the bus idle for 10 minutes, he could've stopped the next war.

lol

oh good Taibbi is here: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/zero-dark-thirty-is-osama-bin-ladens-last-victory-over-america-20130116

haha

His take on the movie itself is pretty otm, IMO.

How in hell are people cheering at the raid sequence?

I know the last shot is ambiguous and maybe I'm over reading it but it really stuck me as a pretty classic "the searchers" type of ending (ie, the hero and civilized of the frontier is also banished from it, he's "gone indian," and all that stuff.) and that maya is a sort of (clumsy) stand in for the general madness of post 9-11 America. This is an end of empire kind of thing--becoming "other" as I said above. I dunno, I just think this movie is far more pessimistic about the good ole USA than it may seem to it's detractors.

That's what I meant when I said you take out what you bring in. As someone who is anti-torture, anti-the nebulous "War on Terror", anti-infinite detention, thought the killing of UBL was meaningless and was generally a bit queasy at the WOO-HOO WE KILLED A DUDE response to the news of the raid, I saw it as a tale of moral decay and tunnel-vision to the point of obsession. The raid sequence sort of confirmed that for me with it's cold, tactical "let's watch these men work" style that had no problem showing the stomach-churning but probably real practice of shooting bullets into a corpse "just to make sure", especially with the kids right there. The killing of UBL was such a quick blurry flash that for me it felt like "well that's that then" moment as opposed to a "HOORAY". I don't see how people got excited for it but that's because I went in with the mindset I have. If you think that the endgame was worth it, you're gonna see the torture and maybe cringe but deem it necessary or you're going to think "these are bad guys fuck yeah USA" and boy wasn't it all worth it that Maya was a loose cannon obsessed with completing the mission.

i agree completely ryan. otoh 'the searchers' kind of works that way too -- i doubt many ppl in the original audience left the theater thinking 'that was a really intense study of american racism!'

UBL's death is over with so fast and it's shot in such an anticlimactic way that i have a hard time imagining anyone actually going nuts at it, it doesn't exactly give any 'this is where you cheer' cues to the audience, but i think there was pretty much no way to film that scene without getting that response.

Would John Ford have written an op ed

i do think it's fair to say the movie is perhaps confused and takes certain things for granted, and perhaps even KB isn't in total control of it, but to me that's interesting and not really a flaw as such. but that's just for me personally and not really any objective statement on it's worth.

ever since i had to stop seeing revivals of older films because of people laughing at anything that made them uncomfortable i've done my best it tune out how the rest of the audience is reacting to things.

I don't think The Searchers is all that good

well, you think the same of Frank Ocean.

it's a bad religion

Steve Coll in the new NYROB:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/feb/07/disturbing-misleading-zero-dark-thirty/?pagination=false

http://halfaballoon.wordpress.com/2013/01/16/data-points/

don't feel like arguing the facts right now but as cinema I was disappointed in how conventional it was. centering the whole story on one character, the higher-ups who are skeptical and don't believe her, the guy screaming at them and slamming his hand on the table about doing their f***ing jobs, she becomes close to this other agent who you know is about to get killed because that's what happens in the movies. I don't know why they had to fit what must be a lot of complicated and fascinating material into this narrative that's been done so many times before.

did some review of this mention The Searchers? I just got a copy of it from Netflix a few days ago and was completely surprised, I couldn't remember why in the world it was at the top of the queue

As I told my friend as we left the theatre, "Kyle Chandler's face was basically screaming 'YOU'RE A LOOSE CANNON, MAYA!' at one point."

Don't know if reviews have mentioned The Searchers, but it was mentioned here because of its ambiguous ending in regards to "heroism" and what is morally right.

Weird. I hadn't read this thread until today. I've never watched Westerns (except Leone, Corbucci of course). I have no idea what I was thinking when I bumped it up to #1 on the next DVD list.

Zero Dark Thirty didn't seem to be aiming for morally ambiguous, I thought it was a very very familiar narrative in which our heroine is doubted by everyone and has to fight her bosses and loses a close friend which is extra inspiration or something and of course she is right and persistent enough to get the bad guy in the end. And you can make it look gritty and realistic with the way it's filmed, but it still came off to me as so Hollywood and not challenging in the least! There are moments that I suppose are meant to make you think more than that, but the overall (again, super super conventional) plot had the effect of overwhelming them. I'm not too interested in Homeland for the same reasons

Well you'll certainly find a number on this thread that will agree with you. It's certainly a genre film, but I think the salience of The Searchers comparison is that it hangs its narrative on something conventional but conveys (to some, including me) something else. What better way to explore notions of heroism than by putting forth a conventional heroic narrative?

I mean I guess she could have made an anti-genre film a la Haywire or Killing them Softly or Not Fade Away, but then people would probably dismiss it out of hand as they did those films.

Though I should add I don't think KB intended to make an anti-CIA film, but I think she intended to throw up ambiguity by presenting it as "objectively" as possible.

Though as we all know, artistic intention is irrelevant.

I don't think The Searchers is all that good

― the little prince of inane false binary hype (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, January 16, 2013 9:46 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's ok if you remove every scene that's indoors

http://i39.photobucket.com/albums/e189/RollTideTA/teo.gif

http://assets.sbnation.com/assets/2028103/teo_medium.gif

http://i.imgur.com/w2AC9.png

http://i.imgur.com/Gpuj2.png

ahhh shit... wrong thread

sorry every1... ha ha

lmao

centering the whole story on manti te'o, the higher-ups who are skeptical and don't believe him, the website screaming at them and slamming its hand on the table about doing their f***ing jobs, he becomes close to this other football player who you know is making up a fake woman for him to date because that's what happens in the movies.

I've never watched Westerns (except Leone, Corbucci of course).

OF COURSE grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

Zero Dark Thirty didn't seem to be aiming for morally ambiguous, I thought it was a very very familiar narrative in which our heroine is doubted by everyone and has to fight her bosses and loses a close friend which is extra inspiration or something and of course she is right and persistent enough to get the bad guy in the end. And you can make it look gritty and realistic with the way it's filmed, but it still came off to me as so Hollywood and not challenging in the least! There are moments that I suppose are meant to make you think more than that, but the overall (again, super super conventional) plot had the effect of overwhelming them. I'm not too interested in Homeland for the same reasons

― seriously, THIS GUY (daria-g), Thursday, January 17, 2013 3:34 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark

yeah i guess when you put it like that, it brings to mind Hurt Locker and the disparity between the sophistication of the filmmaking and the primitive screenplay. i think ZDT takes that to the next level, one thing i - I dont know if i admired, but i at least found notable was how consistent the aesthetic in ZDT is. the camera for the most part doesnt 'break character' to underline things clumsily. as JD noted, the film doesnt provide cues, which is why it's amazing to me that people were applauding it

people don't need cues to applaud the death of bin laden

imagining this movie just them going after some unexplained guy in central asia or where ever

people don't need cues to applaud the death of bin laden

― da croupier, Thursday, January 17, 2013 12:33 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

but which precise part do you applaud at? as soon as you realize its him? when you see a flash o' white beard? the film never creates a space for it, his killing is presented, cinematically, as a mundanity - no more important than any of the other guys getting plugged. there's no moment of triumph, so the audience i guess arbitrarily settled on one of their own

you clap when the seal says i killed the third floor guy

Chastain's Jon Stewart appearance makes someone nervous.

a simply extraordinary actress, by the way

http://www.buzzfeed.com/jwherrman/zero-dark-thirty-twitter-touts-our-specialized

http://s3-ec.buzzfed.com/static/enhanced/webdr01/2013/1/17/11/enhanced-buzz-315-1358441396-7.jpg

a simply extraordinary actress, by the way

lol hormones

That's a quote from Sullivan, whose hormones swing the other way.

well the gays have a whole other weird thing goin on with her, which i was apparently inoculated from.

ive been waiting to be blown away by her and it hasnt happened yet. i thought she was solid in this, though unconvincing in that scene where she's supposed to rage at kyle chandler and threaten to stuff congress in his butthole or whatever she said

She was fine in her trio of 2011 films but she looks like a blank lead.

i kinda like actors who are basically interesting faces-- i think she has one (if also a conventionally pretty one).

trio? wasn't it more like seven? xp

best so far in the Michael Shannon-crazy-or-not thriller for me.

yeah she was fantastic in that

Yeah, easily her best.

fyi the Milius Red Dawn is on TV now if you want to know what a movie that wants you to cheer on the violence looks like.

well we're starting from a higher baseline here, i thought

since Bigelow declared herself "a lifelong pacifist"?

I forgot about Coriolanus – forgettable in that one.

fyi the Milius Red Dawn is on TV now if you want to know what a movie that wants you to cheer on the violence looks like

that's the thing - just because ZDT isnt over-the-top bad propaganda doesn't mean it isn't propaganda

people aren't taking offense to ZDT because they think it's rambo

it's sort of like how some people don't think children of men is sci-fi even though it's about a dystopian future with a ridiculous scientific conceit. we're so used to corny sci-fi were people with a ton of make-up ask for futuredollars that some people can't even recognize it for what it is when it's done well.

propaganda isn't really a genre it's an identification of intent.

thanks, but the point remains - saying "oh no, delta force, now there's a movie that encourages you to support us foreign policy" ignores that jon stewart's never going to be swayed by delta force

KB's choices are constrained by the action movie/western/procedural templates that she chooses for this movie. and to the extent that she chose them the film is complicit in their logic---however that doesn't prevent the film from presenting those templates in ways that push back or invite interpretation or critique of those logics. it makes it a complex text, but it certainly doesn't make it propaganda (which nicely smoothes over any interpretive complexities anyone might bring to bear on the film).

zdt allows you to cheer for osama's death (even if you disagree, people ARE cheering), allows you to feel queasy about torture, allows you to love the player but hate the game, but it asks you to accept a narrative where something horrible happened, and US operatives entered a moral quagmire to get the guy who did the horrible thing and they did. it leaves out a lot of details and debate because however much kathryn bigelow wants to acknowledge the quagmire, she made clear in her op-ed that she wants audiences to Never Forget and Honor The Brave.

serious question: would it even be possible to film UBL's death without 'allowing you to cheer' for it? you could show an explicit closeup of his face getting shot and linger on it for two minutes and some of the audience would still be cheering.

Regardless of her op-ed, what's wrong about presenting the moral quagmire without staking a definitive opinion on it? xpost

Also I'll say it again: If this is CIA propaganda, it is terrible CIA propaganda.

serious question: would it even be possible to film UBL's death without 'allowing you to cheer' for it?

if the death were shot by Bela Tarr.

jd, that's true, but why are we filming it in the first place?

the problem with saying "definitive opinion" is that, yeah, this isn't necessarily rambo. i can say by using terrorist events as the impetus for flash-forwards, the film suggests that bad things are going to keep happening if The Job isn't Done, even if we have ish with how it got done. But you might say oh yes, the lead character says that, but through long shots I sense a certain anguished distance from the sentiment. People have political beef with the narrative the film presents because it simplifies a complicated issue. and while some say "judge it as a movie," honestly i don't see much argument for the value of the movie outside of its zeitgeist-tapping.

Gukbe, the problem with saying this is "terrible" CIA propaganda is that it depends what the goal is. If it's saying the CIA are a bunch of awesome guys that don't do gross things, yeah it's bad. but if the goal is grim acceptance of what we did in the '00s, it looks like it's working quite well.

But I think the film leaves that "grim acceptance" up in the air, which is pretty much the opposite effect propaganda is meant to have.

so this sounds like United 93 shot by Kathryn Bigelow? That film had no value outside vague propaganda.

Except that film was a clear construction of a moral good. This one is trickier.

gukbe they might not be "accepting" the excusability of the actions, but they're accepting the narrative

They're presenting a narrative.

if anything, when pundits get uptight about zdt, fans of the movie should be glad. they're doing it the favor of assuming it might actually sway someone to accept the film's logic and let it shade their perception of our foreign policy. if you're saying "bah, it couldn't do that" then i have to ask what the hell it could do other than be CSI: Pakistan.

croup i think perhaps the big sin of the film (on my interp of it) is that it's offering an aesthetically motivated, and quite mournful, depiction of self-alienation and ethical compromise and a sly critique of groupthink (i personally don't think it's even ambiguous on these points) at a moment when generating outrage is perhaps the more urgent task politically and ethically speaking. but for me it's all the more relevant for not placing itself in political or ethical terms (it doesn't have to take "sides") because by doing so frees itself to observe, yes, ethics and politics by not being part of those discourses.

it's trying, successfully or not, to offer a different perspective to better discuss and understand these things.

but it's not a different perspective, it's conventional wisdom found in just about every crime procedural. you can find that shit in batman. zdt just says it's based on a true story.

are you saying you wish the film had be more explicitly anti-torture and anti-extra judicial killings or less explicit and more, say, avant garde and open to interpretation. (imagining a Bela Tarr shot raid sequence now...)

personally i don't think it should have been made.

but then what would we have to argue about on ilx

peace would guide new answers
and love would steer the boards

i think god spared me to argue about this on a message board

wait are you mark wahlberg?

I have no problem with the action scene leading people to "cheer for the death of Osama" (if they do) - I thought the raid was done extremely well, as non-rah rah as you could make an action sequence with DEVGRU and super-copters and all
people are going to cheer the death of someone we all agree is evil, that's just a given

It's the link between that and "torture got us here" that's problematic.

J. Hoberman: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/jan/18/zero-dark-thirty-us-election

Chastain doesn't do much for me, but my wife thinks she's, like, stunningly beautiful.

Not sure where she falls on the girls girls hate when u think theyre hot / girls girls love when u think theyre hot spectrum.

Dem 'centrists' circling the wagons

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/20/movies/hollywood-makes-its-case-for-zero-dark-thirty.html

Christopher J. Dodd, the president of the Motion Picture Association of America, raised a warning on Friday for those who are calling for investigations into the film.

“There could, in my view, be a chilling effect if, in the end of all this, you have a screenwriter or a director called before an investigating committee,” Mr. Dodd said. He stressed that he was speaking for himself rather than for the association’s member studios, including Sony Pictures, which released “Zero Dark Thirty.”

Mr. Dodd, who served five terms in the Senate before retiring in 2010, said he could not recall another movie being so heavily scrutinized by the government. He expressed concern that the military or other government agencies that have routinely helped filmmakers might withhold future cooperation rather than risk similar pressure.

“ ‘JFK’ and ‘All the President’s Men’ were controversial,” Mr. Dodd said, noting that neither of those films seemed to draw the same level of attention from lawmakers.....

After the Golden Globes, Mr. Boal flew to Europe to promote “Zero Dark Thirty” as it opened in Britain and France.

In a series of e-mails, Mr. Boal said he found the reception to the movie there to be “much smoother” than in the United States.

European interviewers appeared to regard the torture controversy more as a reckoning among Americans than as something that directly involved them, he said.

saw this last night and it left not much impression on me honestly.

it's very much the CIA's view of itself presented in a grim, heavy way

i was supposed to watch it today but I'm content with Richard Blanco alluding to "silent drones" on rooftops.

Was distracted early on by the lead interrogator's 2011 hipster dtyle: beard, ironic "bro"s and all. First 30 mins least convincing, but otherwise into it.

The most obscene defence of the film is the claim that Bigelow rejects cheap moralism and soberly presents the reality of the anti-terrorist struggle, raising difficult questions and thus compelling us to think (plus, some critics add, she "deconstructs" feminine cliches – Maya displays no sentimentality, she is tough and dedicated to her task like men). But with torture, one should not "think". A parallel with rape imposes itself here: what if a film were to show a brutal rape in the same neutral way, claiming that one should avoid cheap moralism and start to think about rape in all its complexity? Our guts tell us that there is something terribly wrong here; I would like to live in a society where rape is simply considered unacceptable, so that anyone who argues for it appears an eccentric idiot, not in a society where one has to argue against it. The same goes for torture: a sign of ethical progress is the fact that torture is "dogmatically" rejected as repulsive, without any need for argument.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/25/zero-dark-thirty-normalises-torture-unjustifiable

Writer has never seen Straw Dogs.

i'm assuming that this will be as dull and self-impressed as hurt locker tbh, not much chance i'll bother

Irreversible, too. xp

It's not as if Straw Dogs or Irreversible were "neutral" on rape. Both showed horrific psychological damage inflicted and both had the rapists' brains splattered around the floor by the end of the film.

seriously

spoiler?

rapists' brains splattered on the floor

Not an Irreversible spoiler. Story told backwards, guy killed in first scene.

Look away now if you don't want to know what happens at the end of The Virgin Spring, I Spit On Your Grave or Last House On The Left.

The only film i can call to mind that could be interpreted as being relatively neutral on rape is Once Upon A Time In America but even that would be controversial.

Once Upon A Time in America is almost like the end-point of a certain...tendency...in Italian (exploitation) cinema to treat rape as a)sexy funtimes, b)a subject for humour, c)as a delusion on the part of the victim or d)as a rite of passage that will actually led to sexual liberation (eg the treatment of rape in Once Upon a Time in the West and A Fistful of Dynamite is equally problematic.) Some of these attitudes are also pretty common in 60s and 70s British and American exploitatio movies, too - I'm thinking of the work of auteurs like Lee Frost or the Findlays - but was not uncommon even in more mainstream fare, like Coogan's Bluff, where Clint Eastwood is allowed to raise a smirk at the idea that an unattractive older woman could be a rape victim.

rape could conceivably be used in a program of torture, which shows that the two aren't comparable categories. the whole point of the debate is about torture - of any type - being a means to an end and whether the end justifies those means.

after thinking about it and reading about it, i'm glad that the movie suggests that torture can sometimes yield actionable intelligence, yes even if it bends the facts of the hunt for osama bin laden. because even if it wasn't true in this case, surely it's occasionally true, which forces the moral question. it's all quite easy if nobody ever gave up anything valuable during one of the hundreds of torture sessions instigated by the CIA (yes after 9/11 but also for decades, in iran, in guatemala, etc). good drama doesn't avoid the difficulty of what to do if, in fact, some morsel IS gleaned from torture. then you've got a dilemma. then you've got drama. then you go through the difficulty.

i mean it's hackneyed, but it's a classic pulp situation: a madman has his finger on the button and tells you that if you agree to kill your own daughter he'll spare manhattan. what do you do??? the critics seem to suggest a better situation would involve the hero telling the villain that his daughter has been rigged so that killing her will instantly disable the bomb. problem solved!

ok maybe that analogy doesn't work. i knew my ignorance of comic books would come back to bite me someday.

That's what Zizek is objecting to. For him, and for the United Nations, torture isn't a debate, it's a clear moral and legal wrong in the same way as rape or genocide. Putting it on the table as a grey area encourages us to think outside of a box that the civilised nations of the world have already agreed (publicly at least) should not be opened. The analogy to rape isn't necessarily a false one.

wait, torture isn't a debate? then what are we talking about? zizek can pretend none of that is happening, that a huge number of americans don't apparently believe that torture is a-ok as long as it gets the bad guys, but then what? declare victory and go home, i guess?

He's despairing at the fact that it's apparently become a debate the government and media engages in publicly, rather than a shameful secret they are desperate to keep away from view. He might be swimming against the tide of US public opinion but he has the law all governments are bound to abide by on his side.

i read a novel a couple of years ago that i found on a friend's mother's bookshelf, some old sub-graham greene british thing from the 40s by someone i doubt anyone has thought about for decades, and the plot turned on the heroine's father, who was a military commander in some un-named dusty north african place, torturing someone. the fact that he had done this (well, not done it himself, but ordered it) was deemed so explosive that it was understood without explanation that if it were ever brought to light it would be his professional ruin and by association stain her as well. it seemed to come from some hopelessly irretrievable place.

well, it did: your friend's mom's bookshelf.

But the issue of whether torture is a moral right or wrong has absolutely nothing to do with whether it works or not. You could argue that it exaggerates the effectiveness of torture (though it does highlight the many intelligence failings of the US during the torture era), but I don't see how it endorses torture from a moral standpoint. I think that Guardian article is a huge stretch.

For example, my wife left the theater more opposed to torture than she entered it.

I agree, which is why I think most of the criticism levelled at the movie misses the mark

that's pretty consistent with reactions from everyone i've talked to irl abt the movie so far; they've left the theater with whatever they already believed reinforced

the criticism that hits the mark is that it's as close to a state-sponsored film as you'll see in your multiplex.

also it's one thing when a film like Moneyball ends up dramatizing recent events in a way that Just. Didn't. Happen, and another when it's this.

OTM. the plot isn't really too different from "Trouble With the Curve" or something

i liked the little echo of the torture scenes when the seals are asking the wives and kids to confirm that the dead guy is bin laden, and they won't answer - was half wondering if they were going to start torturing them

What's the problem with it being "state sponsored" considering the end result? And what does the multiplex have to do with anything?

the end result? what?

an oscar?

I'd rather ppl not waste money on a docudrama that gets its 'history' primarily from the CIA's mouth.

Why not given the film, which is hardly (for me) an endorsement of the CIA.

Read an interesting article, and this is as good a place to share it as any.

Worth noting that in historical experience, whether torture can yield intelligence is fairly irrelevant compared to its negative effects outside the torture chamber. This 2004 Salon artcle describes how torture helped the French win the Battle of Algiers, and also how it caused them to lose Algeria. In counter-terrorism, counter-insurgency, and police work, the most important resource is informants, who cease further collaboration once authority is seen as palpably evil. It forces people in the middle to choose extremes.

I think it would be possible to portray that sort of reality in a long ensemble film or miniseries (like Stephen Gaghan's screenplays), but one of Bigelow's protagonist following character dramas can't do the subject justice. Its just too narrow.

yeah. perhaps the ultimate example in this conversation being sayyid qutub, bin laden's idol and inspiration, who became radicalized only after... being tortured by CIA and CIA-trained goons in iran. whoops!

sorry, i mean egypt. god, you think you have a good point to make and then you get the whole country wrong.

i still don't get the logic where it's not CIA propaganda because everyone just walks away believing what they already believed, but it's somehow still a worthwhile movie even though it doesn't actually inform or shed light on anything

"you'll come away exactly as you came in! five stars!"

i mean i guess you could say it's simply a ripping yarn

I don't at all agree "walks away believing what they already believed" -- how do you know? That gushy woman in the screening elevator I described now thinks there was a heroine named Maya who made hotels and office buildings everywhere safe from Al Qaeda.

Also the words I most believed in the dialogue were put in the mouth of her asshole boss -- ie, UBL was largely irrelevant by 2008-11.

morbz, i'm saying i find fault with the logic, not espousing it

If we're going to judge movies now based on what stupid people walk away from them believing, ain't nobody's favorites gonna be safe.

last time I checked, stupid people are part of "everyone."

i still don't get the logic where it's not CIA propaganda because everyone just walksaway believing what they already believed, but it's somehow still a worthwhilemovieeven though it doesn't actually inform or shed light on anything

― da croupier, Tuesday, 29 January 2013 15:03 (7 minutes ago) Permalink

OTM

bcz it operates by the rules of a fictional "sophisticated" mersh thriller, which is all many ppl care about.

That woman in the elevator really affected you.

Michael Atkinson:

(Bigelow's) early films represented the sort of stylistic intensity that rises and falls in popularity quickly, and the new century saw her profile in decline – until embedded-journalist Mark Boal’s screenplay for The Hurt Locker and a low budget ($15 million) gave her the chance for a trimmer, steelier, less bullshitty sensibility makeover. Now, just two movies and a stack of awards later, she’s practically institutionalised as the era’s Hemingway or James Jones, the anointed chronicler of postmodern wartime.

But the queen of the Asymmetrical War Film has never been to war – a circumstance that enables her to make a claim that no one of Hemingway’s or Fuller’s experience would ever make: that Zero Dark Thirty is “apolitical”. It’s what a CoD player might say, if pressed to account for the endless replays of gory combat that fill his day. Let’s leave aside the issue of the ginned-up torture-means-finding-bin Laden thread; since when is narrowing down a global manhunt and assassination to its pure procedural facts not political?

http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/features/duty-calls-zero-dark-thirty

she’s practically institutionalised as the era’s Hemingway or James Jones, the anointed chronicler of postmodern wartime.

if internet chatter is anything to go by, people in the military think her movies are still pretty bullshitty

Zzzzzzzzz

dude yr keyboard is jammed

Had me until he started comparing it to a videogame. Shit like that is invariably written by people who've never played one.

http://filmmakermagazine.com/64175-zero-dark-thirty-and-the-new-history/

We've been waiting for Mr. Starbursts of Joy to step in..

Too taboo to win the Oscar http://m.theatlanticwire.com/entertainment/2013/01/how-zero-dark-thirty-crashed-just-outside-compound/61499/

great headline dipshits

I didn't have that strong a reaction to this: found the first 30-45 minutes a little dreary, thought it got better after that (starting with the suicide bomber who got to Chastain's team). The thing that's driving me up the wall is who one of the actors is. He's one of the CIA guys at the big meeting where Chastain's theory is presented--guy in his 30s, he sort of chairs the meeting. I think I've clicked on every actor on the IMDB page, and I can't find the right guy. Anyone know who I mean?

Mark Strong?

Stephen Dillaine and John Barrowman were also kicking about.

No, I'd checked those guys (just checked again). Wish I could quote a line...Anyway, I'll figure it out eventually--I don't want to sidetrack the thread going through the whole cast.

If you pause this at exactly 1:54, the actor I'm trying to identify is sitting to Chastain's left; he turns his head and looks right at her. I can't put a name to him...he's really well known, I think.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAtWcvCxPhc

Mark Duplass?

I think it's gotta be Jeff Mash, Mark Duplass, James Gandolfini, John Barrowman, Stephen Dillaine, or Jason Clarke.

Jeff Mash (CIA Deputy Director) is the closest visual match.
http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BMjE5MDM4MDE4M15BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNDA4OTUxMg@@._V1._SY314_CR19,0,214,314_.jpg

Once you mentally tilt his head forward 10 degrees and put less flattering side lighting on his malar bags.

Thanks--so it's Mark Duplass, and I know him from Safety Not Guaranteed.

dude gets a lot of work these days

Opinion piece in a LGBT paper, guns ablazin', by one Susie Day.

See the pale, strawberry-blonde woman help US agents starve Muslims, strip Muslims naked, drag Muslims around on dog leashes, water-board Muslims, kick and punch Muslims, scream in Muslim’s faces, hang Muslims from the ceiling, and cram Muslims into tiny wooden boxes — all without losing an ounce of her femininity.

These interrogations are hard to watch. Why are these interrogations hard to watch? Because they are hard on the Muslims? No, because they are hard on the CIA interrogators. See the cruel Muslims forcing the CIA interrogators to wring accurate information about bin Laden out of them.

Poor CIA interrogators. They must do their job, yet their interrogation work is both banal and evil. The interrogators are sad. Wait, sad interrogators! Here is something you can be cheerful about: Hannah Arendt is no longer alive to write about you!

http://gaycitynews.com/zero-dark-thirty-the-womans-guide-to-success-thru-torture/

Tired of people writing about films when they don't know how to read films.

Appreciate the link though.

John Barrowman cameo had many in the theatre guffawing. Most incongruous cameo ever. What is up with the casting?

Hard to really call it a "cameo" in the traditional sense since about 20 people in the US watch Torchwood.

I can't believe I didn't recognise Edgar Ramirez, and I've seen Carlos three times all the way through!

lol

oh, and henry francis doesn't have a line in this either

she reads it about like I do, Gukbe, you simply don't agree with her political framing.

who the fuck is John Barrowman?

nah, Henry Francis had a line. I think

It's not the political framing, it's the "this Is what happens from a narrative perspective so is is what the film means" mentality.

John Barrowman is everyone's favourite American-Glaswegian who played the pansexual Captain Jack Harkness on Doctor Who and the spin-off Torchwood. Also occasionally does panto.

Should add that you and I, Morbs, are probably pretty much exactly the same in regards to our political stances on this subject.

http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lxr8vzatJc1qca7yw.gif

Not to stereotype, though he is pretty hammy.

See the 3,000 human beings who tragically perished in the World Trade Center attacks on September 11. Do NOT see the hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of human beings who tragically perished in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan due to subsequent US invasions, bombings, and drone attacks. Do NOT see flashbacks of the United States creating and supporting dictatorial regimes to facilitate oil drilling in the region. Do NOT see Western sanctions imposed on Iraq years before September 11, 2001, which killed an estimated 500,000 Iraqi children. Also do NOT see people having qualms about the wisdom of killing bin Laden in the first place or the ethics of assassinating anyone based on a president’s secret “kill list.”

I feel like this is pretty much completely misreading the film as well as not understanding how to engage a film.

"engage" as a verb that way = gtfo

it's easy to play the "that's not what the film IS" game when the film is so little

yeah people with strong political beliefs about the movie are ranting about how all the film is is a glum progression through a "osama has got to be got" narrative that hops from one terrorist event to the next climaxing with ubl's death

i should say strong political beliefs about the real life events that the movie exploits to no end other than "I think we can all agree torture happened and this shit is heavy"

anybody who pulls some "oh, please leave it to the cineastes" crap needs to realize this isn't just playing in arthouses and isn't trying to

i mean i realize that some filmies get upset when people judge a movie for what it isn't rather than what it is, but when you make a reductive blockbuster out of one of the hottest topics in us foreign policy and call it journalism sometimes you just gotta deal with that

I can still bitch about it though. And seriously, where this film is playing is irrelevent.

not if you're going to complain that people who care more about politics than movies are daring to discuss the movie

part of WHY you have more links to pundits than critics here is that the movie is more interesting as op-ed fodder than crit fodder

I'm not sure that's true but the political links are the only ones that people respond to. Granted, I get most of the links to write-ups about the film from Glen Greenwald's twitter feed, so I'm a bit to blame on that front.

I'm not complaining that people are talking about the film that aren't cineastes, it's just that a lot of these pundits are projecting so much of their own shit onto it (which is possible because, as you point out, it doesn't explicitly say much itself) that they've outright refused to consider what's going on with the movie.

a large part of the problem is that editors tell newspaper critics not to do "politics" in their reviews

so the critics judge the film on formalist grounds that are by nature amoral.

we all project our own shit onto the things we consume, they prob wldn't be understandable without us doing that - y'know, viewer + object = meaning

is what's going on in the movie really that noteworthy? people with a professional stake in america's understanding of foreign policy are mad that america is being asked by hollywood to accept a simplistic CIA narrative - huffing that they don't acknowledge they're being asked to wearily accept a moody simplistic CIA narrative seems silly.

That's true, but a lot of the writing I've linked here from critics has been about the politics of it. J. Hoberman just released a book that deals with how Hollywood and cinema dealt with post 9/11 issues like the Iraq war and terrorism, so when he writes for the guardian about ZDT and it's politics and depiction of torture, he's not judging the film as amoral.

Xpost to Alfred

i would love to see a pundit acknowledge that the insidiousness of the film (as i see it) is that its portentousness allows for people to have conflicted feelings about torture etc while still accepting a dubious Love The Troops narrative of What Happened, For Better Or Worse. But if they just say "ZDT is propaganda bullshit" while ignoring that nuance, I don't feel high'n'mighty about it because they're not wrong.

I saw that aspect differently than you and Zizek.