Written by Craig Kennedy What do you do when you have, what I and many think, is the best American movie of the year and it also turns out to be the most controversial movie of the year? That’s Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal’s Zero Dark Thirty for those of you keeping score at home. In a vacuum, it probably doesn’t matter, but in the Oscar bubble, it...
It hasn’t been easy, these past few days, watching the war rage on about the torture depicted in Zero Dark Thirty. On the one hand, you have people like Chris Hayes, Boing Boing’s Xeni Jardin, US senators and the chief of the CIA all condemning Zero Dark Thirty for saying, basically, yeah, we tortured, and yeah, it worked. On the other hand, if you live in...
Possible spoilers but …I mean, come on. By now? The truth of the film #1: Zero Dark Thirty is a film about a CIA op whose job it is to find and kill Osama Bin Laden. To do that, she uses every available resource. Research, clues, surveillance, observation and torture. Torture is part of their program in the early part of the film. They torture several suspects....
The critics have come out in force protecting Kathryn Bigelow and the best reviewed film of the year and critics award winner, Zero Dark Thirty, from accusations that it apologizes for and/or condones torture as one of the methods in truth seeking. Glenn Kenny has written an eloquent defense of the film as art rather than history, (“I see it entirely as a fiction”), and...
Best Film: Zero Dark Thirty (last year: Tree of Life) Best Director: Kathryn Bigelow, Zero Dark Thirty (last year: Terrence Malick, Tree of Life) Best Actress: Jessica Chastain, Zero Dark Thirty (Michelle Williams, My Week with Marilyn) Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis, Lincoln (last year: Michael Shannon, Take Shelter) Supporting Actor: Philip Seymour Hoffman, The Master (last...
