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Dec. 29th, 2015 01:25 amFinally saw Zero Dark Thirty. Hmm.
I think the thinking behind the film was probably anti-torture, anti-assassination etc. but that was brought across very subtly. You can see why the filmmakers got in trouble, even apart from neglecting the chauffeur stuff (wasn't it?) that was reconfirmed later.
They put a lot of it on Kyle Chandler, whose casting was as careful as that of Pratt - who makes the murderthon borderline bearable for audiences in more or less the way Ted Danson's appearance in Saving Private Ryan is designed to give those who made it past the opening sequence a breather. But Chandler is crazy trustworthy-looking, something they were I guess trying to subvert in Bloodline but in too boring a way to remember how or why. Here his key lines are that he doesn't care about o.o.c. bin Laden but about actual terrorist plots, and when Chastain screams her case at him - and in effect blackmails him with the threat of getting him fired - he tells her, "You're out of your fucking mind." The film's gone to great lengths to explain her obsession, and in context we're supposed to be on her side - we want him steamrolled so her story can continue and so what we know happened can happen. But unlike various other nasty bureaucratic obstructive figures who get presented, his case is coherent enough, and consonant enough with the "now what" ending, to get remembered, and that memory brings with it his honest face. The other obstructers were lazy or uninformed or ideological. He's just trying to protect people, and in a distant way gets connected to Obama, whose "guy" that shows up late in the film comes across as aloof from the operation until it seems too good to be true politically and otherwise to pass up. For both the real struggle seems to be elsewhere, and assessment of "risks" (admittedly of two different sorts) is paramount. Chastain's 100-percentness is that of the true believer, is "we
(Just lost a cubic fuckload of text to typical livejournalism. May reconstruct it sometime. It's in the mode of Hurt Locker (which becomes subtly anti-America's standing army in its final scene), it's an even more daring version of The Pledge, it's about a sort of addiction to traumatic/narrative catharsis and plays off of movie cliches to suck us into (and explain) that of Chastain et al., the torturer mentor guy is brilliantly cast due to his both twisted and trustworthy smooshed face and he's the site of a bunch of unobtrusive but key ambiguities, there's buried statements about risk that get set against each other and interesting stuff done with percentages along that same line, the compound scene is like an anti-action movie scene whose engine and surface (riskily) stay action but where all else goes ugly and awry, and takes place in that same ethical blank space of the "crickets" scene after she confirms it's over, the whole things designed around making a Fox Newsish mindset happy but then a bit troubled the next day by using "reality" as a sort of Trojan horse. But fuck it. Fuck.)
I think the thinking behind the film was probably anti-torture, anti-assassination etc. but that was brought across very subtly. You can see why the filmmakers got in trouble, even apart from neglecting the chauffeur stuff (wasn't it?) that was reconfirmed later.
They put a lot of it on Kyle Chandler, whose casting was as careful as that of Pratt - who makes the murderthon borderline bearable for audiences in more or less the way Ted Danson's appearance in Saving Private Ryan is designed to give those who made it past the opening sequence a breather. But Chandler is crazy trustworthy-looking, something they were I guess trying to subvert in Bloodline but in too boring a way to remember how or why. Here his key lines are that he doesn't care about o.o.c. bin Laden but about actual terrorist plots, and when Chastain screams her case at him - and in effect blackmails him with the threat of getting him fired - he tells her, "You're out of your fucking mind." The film's gone to great lengths to explain her obsession, and in context we're supposed to be on her side - we want him steamrolled so her story can continue and so what we know happened can happen. But unlike various other nasty bureaucratic obstructive figures who get presented, his case is coherent enough, and consonant enough with the "now what" ending, to get remembered, and that memory brings with it his honest face. The other obstructers were lazy or uninformed or ideological. He's just trying to protect people, and in a distant way gets connected to Obama, whose "guy" that shows up late in the film comes across as aloof from the operation until it seems too good to be true politically and otherwise to pass up. For both the real struggle seems to be elsewhere, and assessment of "risks" (admittedly of two different sorts) is paramount. Chastain's 100-percentness is that of the true believer, is "we
(Just lost a cubic fuckload of text to typical livejournalism. May reconstruct it sometime. It's in the mode of Hurt Locker (which becomes subtly anti-America's standing army in its final scene), it's an even more daring version of The Pledge, it's about a sort of addiction to traumatic/narrative catharsis and plays off of movie cliches to suck us into (and explain) that of Chastain et al., the torturer mentor guy is brilliantly cast due to his both twisted and trustworthy smooshed face and he's the site of a bunch of unobtrusive but key ambiguities, there's buried statements about risk that get set against each other and interesting stuff done with percentages along that same line, the compound scene is like an anti-action movie scene whose engine and surface (riskily) stay action but where all else goes ugly and awry, and takes place in that same ethical blank space of the "crickets" scene after she confirms it's over, the whole things designed around making a Fox Newsish mindset happy but then a bit troubled the next day by using "reality" as a sort of Trojan horse. But fuck it. Fuck.)
