Posts Tagged ‘Hurt Locker’

No Concessions: Summer Hits and Misses

It’s Labor Day Weekend, and if you’re like me, you’re off to the movies. What to see: The unstoppable Sandra Bullock in another romantic comedy? Gamer? Hmmm…maybe a double feature, the unstoppable Sandra Bullock in another romantic comedy and Gamer? (What the heck is Gamer? Doesn’t a sequel to The Crow usually fly into this spot?)

No, you’re not like me. But I’ve got news for you: I’m not like me, either. Drag me to hell: I’m not gonna sit on my ass in some multiplex when the best weather of the season has arrived at the 11.5th hour. I’m going to sit outside and taunt the kids who have to go back to school on Tuesday—man, I hated Labor Day Weekend when I was a kid, knowing that the school bus was going to pull up like Charon the ferryman to escort me back to Hades.

Summer. It was good, now it’s dead. And it’s time to reflect on the corpse.

Boxoffice-wise, the top five films of the season were the Transformers and Harry Potter sequels, Up, The Hangover, and Star Trek. I saw the last three. (In a simpler time in my life, say any day before Aug. 25, 2008, I would have seen them all. The franchises got the boot.) And they were good. Well, The Hangover and Star Trek were good; I can’t say I got down with Up, which struck me as minor Pixar, not out-of-gas Pixar like Cars but a little thin. Still, I’ll buy the DVD—except for Cars, I have them all, even Monsters Inc. and Finding Nemo—and give it another spin. (more…)

No Concessions: Finally, an Iraq Movie Worth a Damn

The Hurt Locker does the impossible: It single-handedly redeems the mostly misbegotten run of “sand” films, those war-on-terror features connected to Iraq and Afghanistan, a genre about as useless and debased as those feel-good romantic comedies where Kate Hudson sings into a hairbrush, makes goo-goo eyes at Gerard Butler, and throws a hunk of wedding cake at Anne Hathaway. Note I said “features”; there have been excellent documentaries about our ongoing engagements, and the filmmakers wisely take their cues from those.

Hollywood was slow to react to Vietnam. The first major films about the war, The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now, were mirages, with abstract themes, that came after the fighting had ended; it wasn’t until the ’80s when more concrete movies, like Platoon, appeared. The apparatus may have been too fast to react to our post-9/11 reality, flooding a trickle of audiences with well-intentioned but suffocating liberal hand-wringing — earlier this year Cinemax must have had its lowest ratings ever when it programmed, back-to-back, the flops In the Valley of Elah (forget the subject; who the hell would see a movie called In the Valley of Elah?) and Rendition. The few attempts to actually engage an audience, like The Kingdom, swapped the lectures for action movie clichés, an unsatisfying trade.

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