View Poll Results: Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow)

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Thread: Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow)

  1. #76
    pushing too many pencils Rowland's Avatar
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    Michael Sicinski offers a detailed analysis of this debate over at his site.
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  2. #77
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    Clipped from elsewhere:

    "ZDT is fucking amazing for the choices Bigelow did not make and the way she turns a fairly boring, pedestrian analyst desk-jockey story into a compelling narrative. She cut this thing to the bone and it's really lean. The movie navigates some serious shit and heavy moments and never picks a side and doesn't editorialize at all. People took that to mean it "condoned" torture, but it really doesn't."

    "Great shots, great editing, amazing pacing, fantastic choices. Every move it makes is so sure footed, it's a bit startling. But it doesn't really have performances because there isn't much in the way of characters (color me puzzled over Jessica Chastain's nomination)."

    Addendum: This is an amazing piece of work, but it lacks a certain heft. As said elsewhere, I can't imagine this having much replay value, or even anyone wanting to see this more than once.

    Few contrarian opinions:

    Quote Quoting Spinal (view post)
    The important thing is not that you agree with my reaction. The important thing is that the shot is full of possibility. That's what makes it great.
    I'm not seeing this at all. Broadly speaking, it implies that you can interpret those final shots any way you'd like and you'd be "right" because they have so many "possibilities." I'm not sure that's what you meant to say.

    I also don't think this interpretation is well supported by the material. I took Maya -- the things she says and does -- to be largely representative of Americans, and the values Americans like to think they have. She's driven, relentless, and resolved. She's narrowly focused. She prioritizes her job above everything else. Her shit, as the vernacular goes, is wired tight. And there's more than one time in the film where Bigelow underlines that Maya has nothing else in her life aside from the hunt for UBL.

    At the end of the movie, she has reached her goal. In the final shot, her face is a mix of relief and regret, sweat mixed with tears. When the pilot says "Where do you want to go?", she has no answer. There can be no answer, because being on the inside she realizes UBL's assassination is the definition of a Pyrhhic victory. Americans aren't any better off, nobody's life has been improved, and the world isn't any safer because of what she's done over the last ten years. This was about revenge, and while there's some relief to be found in revenge, it's also always bitter.

    On a larger scale, that pilot, and that line, and that language is asking the viewer the same question, and generating the same empty response in minds of every theatergoer. As an American, I was stymied by this, and found it tough to take.

    Quote Quoting dreamdead (view post)
    Slavoj Zizek on the film in a Guardian post:
    This is a good essay, but I think the guy shoots himself in the foot by Godwinning the whole thing three paragraphs in. The big difference here is that "ZDT" isn't about torture, or even rendition. So that kind of parallel fails if you're talking about 'Holocaust' films.

    Quote Quoting number8 (view post)
    Seriously, what the shit are all these people talking about? The film is unambiguously anti-torture. I don't understand. Am I taking crazy pills?
    I dunno. Are you? I get the sense you're editorializing in your own head. The movie doesn't make overreaching or specific comments about torture. All it does is say "Yeah, this shit happened" (and cleverly draws associations to Abu Gharib at the same time), and leaves you to draw your own conclusions. At no time does any character even come close to implying that torture is "wrong," or the viewer should be against it. It's entirely neutral.

    Which, for my money, is part of this movie's brilliance. Unlike almost every other thing out there this year, it doesn't spoon feed the audience a set of conclusions.

    Quote Quoting Dead & Messed Up (view post)
    This was my favorite part of the movie. Eight years of sticking Arabs in boxes gets you a courier's fake name. One night of bribing a dude with cars gets you a phone number, a location, a compound, and Osama.
    You could also make the argument that torture provided her with just enough so that she was able to ask informed questions later. If you don't even know the fake-name, you can't follow up on that, ask about it, and end up bribing an informant.

    Quote Quoting Robby P (view post)
    This entire torture debate is so asinine. I wish people would stop using this movie to push their political agendas.
    I agree that using this film for political ends is distasteful. But I'm glad this conversation is happening again, and I'm glad that "ZDT" makes it more difficult for people to hide behind wormy euphemisms like 'enhanced interrogation', 'stress positions,' and even the word 'rendition.'

    Given the choice and the importance I place on the subject, yeah, I'll take another few rounds of conversation about it on the national level.

  3. #78
    Too much responsibility Kurosawa Fan's Avatar
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    Quote Quoting Irish (view post)
    You could also make the argument that torture provided her with just enough so that she was able to ask informed questions later. If you don't even know the fake-name, you can't follow up on that, ask about it, and end up bribing an informant.
    Not true, because before they bribe the Kuwaiti, there's an old man that sits down at a table with them and gives them the same fake name without being prompted (other than being shown the picture) and tells them he is a messenger for OBL. Again, without the torture, the results and timeline would have been the same (it can be argued, at least).

  4. #79
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    Quote Quoting Kurosawa Fan (view post)
    Not true, because before they bribe the Kuwaiti, there's an old man that sits down at a table with them and gives them the same fake name without being prompted (other than being shown the picture) and tells them he is a messenger for OBL. Again, without the torture, the results and timeline would have been the same (it can be argued, at least).
    She threatens that guy with rendition to Israel before she even asks a single question.

  5. #80
    Too much responsibility Kurosawa Fan's Avatar
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    Quote Quoting Irish (view post)
    She threatens that guy with rendition to Israel before she even asks a single question.
    Which is unequivocally not torture. It's a threat.

  6. #81
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    Quote Quoting Kurosawa Fan (view post)
    Which is unequivocally not torture. It's a threat.
    I kinda jumped in my chair when I read this. It's a mafia-like threat. "Gee, nice little corner store you have here. Shame if anything happened to it." If you were the shopkeeper, would you wait for the guy to smash up your shop or would you take him at his word, right there and then?

    Rendition is torture. It's just as nasty. It gives Americans a nice little ethical and legal loophole, but it's the same exact thing. (And my read on the scene is that the old man is already broken. Clarke's character is still in the country and that old man seems awfully docile and polite for a guy with so many ties to Al Queda).

    Maya has enough power at this point in the film that she doesn't have to explicitly waterboard the guy to mess with his head and strong arm him into getting what she wants.

    It's not a sleazy as what Clarke did earlier in the film, but it's still sleazy.

  7. #82
    Piss off, ghost! number8's Avatar
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    Quote Quoting Irish (view post)
    I dunno. Are you? I get the sense you're editorializing in your own head. The movie doesn't make overreaching or specific comments about torture. All it does is say "Yeah, this shit happened" (and cleverly draws associations to Abu Gharib at the same time), and leaves you to draw your own conclusions. At no time does any character even come close to implying that torture is "wrong," or the viewer should be against it. It's entirely neutral.

    Which, for my money, is part of this movie's brilliance. Unlike almost every other thing out there this year, it doesn't spoon feed the audience a set of conclusions.
    I think there are way more evidence of the film criticizing torture than supporting it, namely that horrific, almost contextless opening sequence with Ammar that laboriously shows how awful it is, plus the fact that those scenes led absolutely nowhere. The narrative of the film is almost entirely: We tortured people, things only got worse, we stopped torture and tried bribing, oh hai, Osama.

    A film can speak without having to put words in the characters' mouths.
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  8. #83
    Too much responsibility Kurosawa Fan's Avatar
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    Quote Quoting Irish (view post)
    I kinda jumped in my chair when I read this. It's a mafia-like threat. "Gee, nice little corner store you have here. Shame if anything happened to it." If you were the shopkeeper, would you wait for the guy to smash up your shop or would you take him at his word, right there and then?

    Rendition is torture. It's just as nasty. It gives Americans a nice little ethical and legal loophole, but it's the same exact thing. (And my read on the scene is that the old man is already broken. Clarke's character is still in the country and that old man seems awfully docile and polite for a guy with so many ties to Al Queda).

    Maya has enough power at this point in the film that she doesn't have to explicitly waterboard the guy to mess with his head and strong arm him into getting what she wants.

    It's not a sleazy as what Clarke did earlier in the film, but it's still sleazy.
    Not saying it's not sleazy, but it's most certainly not torture. I'm not naive enough to think (and I'm sure you aren't either) that if you ask people nicely in an interrogation, they're just going to offer up crucial information. A verbal threat is on the right side of interrogation tactics, not even in the same fucking ballpark as waterboarding or any other "advanced tactics." Strong-arming is necessary at times, and while rendition may be "nasty" (I'd still argue it isn't just as nasty as violent torture), threatening rendition is not rendition. Had she put the wheels in motion to get him to crack, perhaps I'd have a different opinion. As is, I'm fine with her actions.

  9. #84
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    Quote Quoting Kurosawa Fan (view post)
    Not saying it's not sleazy, but it's most certainly not torture. I'm not naive enough to think (and I'm sure you aren't either) that if you ask people nicely in an interrogation, they're just going to offer up crucial information. A verbal threat is on the right side of interrogation tactics, not even in the same fucking ballpark as waterboarding or any other "advanced tactics." Strong-arming is necessary at times, and while rendition may be "nasty" (I'd still argue it isn't just as nasty as violent torture), threatening rendition is not rendition. Had she put the wheels in motion to get him to crack, perhaps I'd have a different opinion. As is, I'm fine with her actions.
    What's the difference? You're merely outsourcing the labor. The problem with her making the threat, when Clarke's character is still in the country and the guy seems half-broken already, is that it's possible. Rendition is "legal" and real here. And then think about the implications about an Arab terrorist being shunted off to Israel. That's real, and that's a fate worse than death, and this guy knows it.

    We'll have to disagree here.

  10. #85
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    Quote Quoting number8 (view post)
    I think there are way more evidence of the film criticizing torture than supporting it, namely that horrific, almost contextless opening sequence with Ammar that laboriously shows how awful it is, plus the fact that those scenes led absolutely nowhere. The narrative of the film is almost entirely: We tortured people, things only got worse, we stopped torture and tried bribing, oh hai, Osama.
    Whether that scene is "horrific" depends on your point of view, and the amount of empathy you have for the brown guy in the chair. It's possible, I imagine, that there are some who watch that scene & privately cheer because an Arab connected to 9/11 is getting the shit kicked out of him.

    I'd argue against "things got worse." One of the things I liked about the film is that is presents protagonists that are working largely in ignorance, and until the third act, nothing they do seems to effect the outside world (the bombings in England and Islamabad still happen, for instance). In other words, a large part of the intelligence gathering, regardless of method, was futile. And they got to UBL mostly by luck.

    You've drawn your own conclusions about this, but I think it's tough to argue that the film does that for you.

    A film can speak without having to put words in the characters' mouths.
    This was what I was saying before.

    Edit PS: Not sure I buy into the "bribe > torture" argument, as presented here either. We bribed the entire government of Pakistan for years, if not decades, and they never gave him up.

  11. #86
    Screenwriter Fezzik's Avatar
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    I finally saw this tonight and have to add a loud, ringing endorsement to the praise being heaped on it. It's a brilliant piece of filmmaking. Tight, unapologetic and so matter of fact in its presentation that its sometimes uncomfortable (this is a GOOD thing).

    I haven't had such a visceral emotional reaction to a film since Saving Private Ryan in 1998, but this is a far superior film.

    Whereas SPR got its power by wringing emotions out of real-life happenings, ZDT get its power by NOT playing on emotions at all. Had it been presented with any agenda on its sleeve, it would have been robbed of its strength.

    Uncompromising, spectacularly crafted and amazingly constructed.

    I found myself disturbed, upon reflection, comparing the memories I remember from the night we found out Bin Laden was dead and the events of that night as portrayed in the movie. It actually made me a bit sick to my stomach.

    Bravo to Bigelow to making the best American film of the year...and now her exclusion from the Oscar short-list is even more baffling.

  12. #87
    Piss off, ghost! number8's Avatar
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    I've been dying to see this again. It just gets better and better in my mind the more I reflect on it.
    Quote Quoting Donald Glover
    I was actually just reading about Matt Damon and he’s like, ‘There’s a culture of outrage.’ I’m like, ‘Well, they have a reason to be outraged.’ I think it’s a lot of dudes just being scared. They’re like, ‘What if I did something and I didn’t realize it?’ I’m like, ‘Deal with it.’
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  13. #88
    Cinematographer Mal's Avatar
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    What an experience. Hell yeah I'll buy this on blu ray. I found most of the film tight, without popular influence and extremely well cast - it fucking pains me to think that this portrait of the CIA and international conflict is being cast aside during this present awards season for the likes of the convenient Argo. vomit.

  14. #89
    Administrator Ezee E's Avatar
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    Quote Quoting Zac Efron (view post)
    What an experience. Hell yeah I'll buy this on blu ray. I found most of the film tight, without popular influence and extremely well cast - it fucking pains me to think that this portrait of the CIA and international conflict is being cast aside during this present awards season for the likes of the convenient Argo. vomit.
    The buzz was there. And all of a sudden the CIA/torture conflict just shot out like a cannon, weeks after it came out. Quite bizarre.

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  15. #90
    Ubuesque Amphetamine Llopin's Avatar
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    Man, I pretty much respect Zizek and I'm a fan of many of his assertions elsewhere, but reading that article I get the impression he didn't get the film. At all. But since it's Zizek we're talking about and not some sorry-ass critic numbnut, maybe it's me I didn't get it. At all.

    Still, one cannot undergo in such strong moral masturbations about a film that is so blatantly a-moral. I for once thought the Jason Clarke character was quite a cold-blooded asshole (there's even a classic "I'm sad 'cause they killed my animals" scene) and that most of the other CIA personnel (Mark Strong in particular in his yelling entrance) were not that sympathetic.

    However I think it's good that a film presented in such ambiguity is able to stir up such debate. For that alone it's already a clearly above average picture. Wasn't exactly thrilled throughout - but it held my attention and treated my brain with respect.

    The opposite of Argo.

  16. #91
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    Long read on the guy who shot Osama:

    "For the first time, the Navy SEAL who killed Osama bin Laden tells his story -- speaking not just about the raid and the three shots that changed history, but about the personal aftermath for himself and his family. And the startling failure of the United States government to help its most experienced and skilled warriors carry on with their lives."

    http://www.esquire.com/features/man-...bin-laden-0313

  17. #92
    Evil mind, evil sword. Ivan Drago's Avatar
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    Maybe I'm continuing to lose interest in movies, but I came out of this film feeling very indifferent, and didn't get anything out of it, as much as I wanted to. I liked it, but came out of it thinking 'So what?'. Also didn't understand why there's such a controversy with the film's stance on torture. That seemed pretty straightforward, as did the storytelling.
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  18. #93
    Since 1929 Morris Schæffer's Avatar
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    Quote Quoting Ivan Drago (view post)
    Maybe I'm continuing to lose interest in movies, but I came out of this film feeling very indifferent, and didn't get anything out of it, as much as I wanted to. I liked it, but came out of it thinking 'So what?'. Also didn't understand why there's such a controversy with the film's stance on torture. That seemed pretty straightforward, as did the storytelling.
    Well, for what it's worth, I've seen Jack Bauer do worse things one a weekly basis back in the day, but that's fiction all the way so I suppose people don't get their panties up in a bunch over that. Or maybe they did and I forgot. The torture scenes didn't do much to me! I'm sure waterboarding is awful to be subjected to, and arguably an abysmal device to subject someone else to, but it doesn't look that bad does it? Anyway, I liked the movie a lot, appreciated that it didn't surrender to crass commerciality, but I still expected more. Filmmaking was respectfully sobre, but on other days I might feel that it veered close to dull. Definitely prefer the hurt locker in that regard although they're a little different. It's so hard for me to be blown away these days. I was sure this movie was going to do it.
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  19. #94
    The Pan Scar's Avatar
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    Excellent movie. The last thirty minutes were insanely tense.
    “What we are dealing with here is a perfect engine, er... an eating machine. It's really a miracle of evolution. All this machine does is swim and eat and make little sharks and that's all.”

  20. #95
    A Platypus Grouchy's Avatar
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    This is a conflicting film to write about, because, on one hand, it's excellent filmmaking. It's 100 times the movie Argo can only dream of being, for one thing. It's reasonable tense for a running time of over two hours while providing no human anchorage and zero sympathetic characters. While I groaned often at the script for The Hurt Locker, this time Boal seems to have polished his pencil and written some really excellent scenes.

    Now, on the other hand, people seem to get caught up in that filmmaking and they don't realize that they're still being fed US propaganda. I don't know if Bigelow is this pro-war or not (although my guess is yes), or if she really intended to make an apolitical film or she was aware that it was a piece of propaganda, but it is what it is. Some great - better - cinema has been that in the past too, like Powell/Pressburger and Hitchcock movies during WWII. I believe it'd be impossible to make a chronicle this ambitious and avoid political criticism, so I feel myself justified on dishing it out, specially since most film criticism seems to either overlook that or overplay the torture angle.

    - The Death of Osama Bin Laden: This is not so much a criticism of the script, because I knew Bigelow and Boal were gonna stick to the official version of when and how Bin Laden died or they'd have opened a completely different can of worms. Since I don't believe in that version I saw the last half hour of this film as pure fiction.

    - The Torture: I don't feel this film condones torture, but I do feel that in depicting those moments, it uses a helluva lot of double standards to take off some of the heat. This might be personal bias after all, but I don't think the people in charge of torturing others are like this, regular but committed folks who then feel bad about it and request re-location or go to a restaurant on their time off to escape the stress. I believe the CIA is clever enough about profiling their agents to give those assignments to someone who'll get a hard-on out of them instead of a moral conundrum. This depiction of normal people torturing others seems to reinforce the belief that you do what you have to do on the service of your country, you know, close your eyes and think of Lincoln or something.

    Besides, have you noticed how uniformly alike these torture scenes are? The prisoners always have something to say. They're never innocent or ignorant. Not once is a scenario depicted where a character genuinely doesn't know what the interrogators are asking. What's more, we're told once in a rapidly uttered phrase of dialogue that these guys don't have a chance to live, yet we're never shown when and by whom are they killed. When they take the guy out for lunch and they finally con the names out of him, I was thinking, ok, he's outlived his usefulness, isn't he gonna die now? Isn't that guy on the background about to shoot him on the head? Apparently not.

    Third and most important, have you noticed HOW THE MOVIE EXPECTS US TO CARE MORE ABOUT THE CIA AGENTS THAN THE PRISONERS? There are at least two dramatic sequences based around how the torture takes an emotional toll on the agents. Who the fuck cares? You're not living in a dark room with chains that dislocate your shoulders. Oh, right, I forgot, he's a terrorist. He's directly responsible for those deaths in 9/11.

    - The Lack of Balance in the Carnage - We only see the American army in action in one sequence, the actual murder of Bin Laden. But we never see the day-to-day actions in Pakistan. In fact, all we see are acts of terrorism - the Camp Chapman explosion, the one in the hotel... It's like these American guys went over there, they lived under constant fire, and they only tortured the shit out of a few select personalities who were murderers anyway. At the end of the movie we get a disclaimer reminding us of all those brave Yanks who gave their lives so that you can watch this. Those faraway brown people don't deserve a disclaimer. The movie is so blatant about this double standard that they show you a political demonstration at the gates of the US embassy and they don't show you the US soldiers and the Pakistan police beating the shit out of them like they surely did.

    - The Revenge Angle - For all its claims at overarching complexity, Zero Dark Thirty follows a pretty traditional "revenge movie" structure. In fact, the first act ends with Maya alone in her office after hearing about the deaths of her ladyfriend and a bunch of other agents. Someone comes in and asks what she's gonna do. She answers "hunt and kill Osama Bin Laden". I think a lot of intelligent people who watch this don't realize how cleverly that scene perpetuates the myth of the War on Terror being done as some form of retaliation against previous attacks.

    Like I said at the beginning, though, this is great cinema. A lot more mature than The Hurt Locker and it makes Argo (which, admittedly, is not that ambitious) look like Barney the Dinosaur. But I go into any film with my views on society, politics and else intact and, when it comes to such an inflamatory piece of film as this one, I'm going to react to it ideologically as well as with my appreciation for good movies. I'm happy that it at least raised some questions. That it provokes debate and controversy instead of burying them speaks highly of the quality of the film.

    But it's still US propaganda. It's too unbalanced to be otherwise.

  21. #96
    Avatar Thief Robby P's Avatar
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    I finally got around to watching this and I have to say that's an excellent review, Grouchy, and it really sums up my own ambivalence. The movie is detached and apolitical to a fault. I don't think the movie purposefully or even unintentionally advocates torture but I think it's representation of it is dangerously irresponsible. It's impossible to view the torture sequences in this movie and come to the conclusion that it is not, in fact, an effective means to an end. In spite of the fact that torture rarely elicits useful intelligence, in this movie it always seems to contribute to a useful piece of a larger puzzle including the eventual discovery of Osama Bin Laden, which we now know to be factually incorrect. While I do think it's obvious that the filmmakers want us to feel sympathy for the detainees and are in fact blatantly critical of the immorality of those running the black sites they do a great disservice to this cause by ultimately portraying all of the people who were tortured as active members of Al Qaeda. It almost feels like apologetic CIA propaganda. Yes, we did bad things but we only did it to bad people who had something to hide. It lessens the moral culpability of those responsible and it gives the false impression that nobody who was tortured was every truly 'innocent'. There are simply gradations of bad guys. I also thought it was disingenuous how the movie went to great lengths to recount all of the various large scale terrorist attacks that affected Us but spent no time whatsoever covering the various war crimes perpetrated against Them during the course of the invasion and occupation of two sovereign nations. Countless hundreds of thousands of innocent people died in our national quest for revenge but you wouldn't know it by watching this movie.

    The last thirty minute sequence is being hailed by many people as thrilling and captivating but I just thought it was uncritical revenge porn. Everything builds up to that oh so exciting moment we've all been told to be anxiously waiting for, the moment when Bin Laden finally gets what he deserves. The fact that it is preceded by the casual depiction of a cold blooded murder of an unarmed woman and the screams of orphaned children seems to barely register once the 'jackpot' is confirmed. At no point is the movie even remotely critical of the operation, or skeptical of its motives, it again just matter of factly depicts what happened and then refuses to take a stance politically. It does give us an ambiguous final shot that throws in some last second moral complexity to the picture but it comes across as a last ditch effort and contradicts the certitude of what preceded it. I generally don't like to politicize works of art but in this case the topic is so sensitive and the manner in which it is broached is so irresponsible that I can't merely appreciate the craft and disregard the content. Zero Dark Thirty is woefully unbalanced, untruthful and apolitical and it's impossible for me to ignore this no matter how expertly crafted it may be.

  22. #97
    I definitely appreciate Grouchy and Robby P.'s viewpoints. The problem with films like this and Argo is that moviegoers like us can try to look past these films' limitations, but regular moviegoers are simply a risk being run by these films, which at a point makes me lose all interest in defending what they do. E.g. I still don't think the climax is "revenge" tinted at all - I really don't by gut reaction - but arguing for it seems very unrewarding since it does walk so thin a tightrope.
    The Act of Killing (Oppenheimer 13) - A
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    American Hustle (Russell 13) - C+
    The Wolf of Wall Street (Scorsese 13) - C+
    Passion (De Palma 12) - B

  23. #98
    Producer Yxklyx's Avatar
    Join Date
    Nov 2007
    Location
    Chicago
    Posts
    3,156
    I found this to be mostly an uninspired dramatization of newspaper articles.

    ...the last 30 minutes were pretty good though.

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