The Google results for both Director Kathryn Bigelow and her current project, The Hurt Locker, are surprisingly on-topic. The first several pages link pretty much exclusively to recentinterviews, reviews, etc. So I won't feel too guilty about skipping the link-clusters I usually post. So many of the articles seemed a bit, well... and then I found a blog post that described what I was seeing:
When I was finishing my BFA in the Film Department at the San Francisco Art Institute in the early 00s, Kathryn Bigelow was the school’s most famous filmmaker alum, despite the fact that she matriculated at SFAI as a painter (she studied filmmaking as a graduate student at Columbia after a stint in the Independent Study program at the Whitney Museum). The work of the woman who made Point Break and Strange Days wasn’t exactly part of the curriculum of the then fine art-focused (sometimes to a fault) Film program at SFAI, where Hollywood film was rarely considered worthy of scrutiny; those who did readily embrace her success as part of the school’s pedigree often named glass ceiling smashing as Bigelow’s greatest achievement — as if to say, "Yes, she makes mainly action and genre blockbusters with big name stars, but she’s a woman, so that makes her subversive." The argument that Bigelow’s work is somehow subversive just because she has a vagina is not only ludicrous, but unnecessary, being that her films are actually subversive. Marked by moral ambiguity, insistently complicating easy distinctions between good and evil, using Bigelow’s patented point-of-view camera to implicate the viewer in the dark worlds and questionable choices of her subjects, her films literally subvert the viewer’s expectations dictated by genre.
And yet the "good for a girl" backhanded praise continues to dog her. At the Q & A after a screening of The Hurt Locker at AFI Dallas, moderator Gary Cogill commented that his favorite book about the Iraq war was written by a woman (The Long Road Home by Martha Raddatz) and then asked Bigelow a question that essentially amounted to, "Isn’t weird that The Hurt Locker is so good, since you’re a girl?" Bigelow deflected the question, but the issue came up again when an audience member who introduced herself as a member of Women in Film gushed that it’s "almost miraculous" that Bigelow has "embedded" herself in the making of "big boys movies." This is when I decided it was time to leave; as I made my way out, I heard Bigelow respond that he choice of material is chiefly "instinctual" and not motivated by a desire to step where she supposedly doesn’t belong by virtue of chromosomal difference.
That the conversation surrounding Bigelow’s work seems to consistently get stuck in the mud of gender politics is all the more tragic in the case of The Hurt Locker, a film of such complex construction and complicated values that it should be able to sustain much deeper inquiry than what it feels like for a girl...
The Hurt Locker is, by all accounts, amazing. Its score at RottenTomatoes is 98% Fresh, with 121 reviews counted; MetaFilter with its more refined 33 reviews gives it a 93. It's also accumulated an assortment of awards and nominations at a variety of film festivals. Here's the beginning of the synopsis posted at RT:
The Hurt Locker is a riveting, suspenseful portrait of the courage under fire of the military’s most unrecognized heroes: the technicians of the bomb squad, who volunteer to challenge the odds and save lives in one of the world’s most dangerous places. Three members of the Army’s elite Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) squad battle insurgents and each other as they seek out and disarm a wave of roadside bombs on the streets of Baghdad -- in order to try and make the city a safer place for Iraqis and Americans alike. Their mission is clear - protect and save - but it’s anything but easy, for the margin of error on a war-zone bomb is zero. A thrilling and heart-thumping look at the effects of combat and danger on the human psyche, The Hurt Lockeris based on the first-hand observations of journalist and screenwriter Mark Boal, who was embedded with a special bomb unit in Iraq. ...
Their consensus:
A well-acted, intensely shot, action filled war epic, Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker is thus far the best of the recent dramatizations of the Iraq War.
The official site uses flash (and some dizzying/eye-watering action-movie-ish 'transitions' between pages -- there's this 'skip' button, but you gotta look at the speeding rocks in order to find it), so no direct link, but apparently it's playing in a bunch of cities.
She filmed in Lebanon, so I bet we'll hear stories about that.
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