Oscar season is upon us. I’m trying to give a shit, but it’s a little harder than in past years. I’m trying to gradually see as many of the nominated pictures as I can, but I’m usually either too broke or busy to make it out to the theater. My younger selves would have been shocked to hear that, as long as it’s been that I’ve been on my “hiatus,” there has only really been one movie that it really drove me nuts I couldn’t see: The Hurt Locker.
There were multiple reasons, some of them kind of obvious—the deliriously good press it got, the fact that someone apparently finally made a good Iraq movie, the prospect of seeing stuff blow up—but the main reason is this: ever since the middle of my adolescence I’ve been half in love with Kathryn Bigelow.
In many ways, she’s absolutely perfect (and not just for the reasons clearly on display in the photo to the left). A woman who directs action movies (including the legendary Point Break)? Command me, mistress. As an action director who is a woman, it’s tempting, and almost reflexive, to say that she’s a woman in a man’s game, only the fact of her bringing a woman’s perspective to typically male material makes her unique. Even though I love action movies dearly, I will admit under duress that most action directors are kind of interchangeable—anyone who claims they can tell the difference between, say, Simon West and Stephen Sommers without looking at the credits is probably full of shit. But no one else out there right now could make a Kathryn Bigelow picture. Even Mimi Leder, making pictures like The Peacemaker and Deep Impact, comes off a little “girlier,” to use the first word that comes to mind and that kind of misses the point. Kathryn Bigelow pictures, with only two exceptions I can think of, have male protagonists and deal with “male” issues in a very adrenalized, terse way.
An overview of her career, with more spoilers than a motherfucker because it’s a holiday and I ain’t got time to euphemize:
The Set-Up (1978)
Getting the ol’ career off to a flying start: 20 minutes of Gary Busey and some other dude beating the shit out of each other while two semioticians comment on the action. Did I mention I’m in love with this woman?
The Loveless (1982? 1984?)
Haven’t seen this one, but it’s a biker picture with Willem Dafoe, about incest, apparently. I nominate that last line for worst pun of the year.
Near Dark (1987)
A beautifully shot, original take on vampire movies. Adrian Pasdar meets a cute, pale girl who bites him on the neck both physically and emotionally. Cute pale girl introduces him to Bill Paxton and Lance Henriksen. Adrian Pasdar, poor bastard, is a bit too genteel for their company, or for Jenette Goldstein or that creepy kid vampire either, but shit doesn’t really get raw until the vampires decide they want to kill Adrian Pasdar’s paw and sis.
So stylish, so brilliantly paced, so few extraneous touches that’s almost a shame that the ultimate resolution is so dishonest. Vampirism isn’t supposed to have a cure. Oh, well. You go see a subversive genre picture, you shouldn’t complain when conventions get subverted. That’s the only one that lands badly, though.
Blue Steel (1990)
Slightly better than the average “cop vs. psycho” picture, mainly due to the signature visual style. Jamie Lee Curtis (?) plays an NYPD rookie who puts a few well-placed holes in a convenience store robber, only to have psycho yuppie Ron Silver—a convenience store patron—make off with the robber’s gun, landing Jamie Lee in all kinds of trouble way beyond being miscast. Ron Silver starts shooting women, attempting to romance Jamie Lee, and eventually drawing the ire of Clancy Brown (another cop, in one terrific wig), who also romances Jamie Lee. It feels a bit dated now, since formula pictures don’t tend to age well, but the almost sexual fascination with guns is interesting, making this less than torturous for anyone looking to do the whole Bigelow oeuvre, at least if you’re not squeamish about violence and the instruments thereof.
Point Break (1991)
I have never been able to maintain a straight face while talking about this movie, and I don’t intend to start now. The story of blue flamer quarterback punk Johnny Utah (Keanu) of the Federal Bureau of Inarticulation and his quest to win the heart of . . . ahem, arrest, right, arrest . . . bank-robbing surf guru Bodhi (Swayze). He attempts to win the heart of lesbian surfer Lori Petty . . . wait, she’s supposed to be straight in this? What the fuck . . .?
Anyway. There’s enough quotably retarded dialogue in Point Break to fill several happy lifetimes:
There were multiple reasons, some of them kind of obvious—the deliriously good press it got, the fact that someone apparently finally made a good Iraq movie, the prospect of seeing stuff blow up—but the main reason is this: ever since the middle of my adolescence I’ve been half in love with Kathryn Bigelow.
In many ways, she’s absolutely perfect (and not just for the reasons clearly on display in the photo to the left). A woman who directs action movies (including the legendary Point Break)? Command me, mistress. As an action director who is a woman, it’s tempting, and almost reflexive, to say that she’s a woman in a man’s game, only the fact of her bringing a woman’s perspective to typically male material makes her unique. Even though I love action movies dearly, I will admit under duress that most action directors are kind of interchangeable—anyone who claims they can tell the difference between, say, Simon West and Stephen Sommers without looking at the credits is probably full of shit. But no one else out there right now could make a Kathryn Bigelow picture. Even Mimi Leder, making pictures like The Peacemaker and Deep Impact, comes off a little “girlier,” to use the first word that comes to mind and that kind of misses the point. Kathryn Bigelow pictures, with only two exceptions I can think of, have male protagonists and deal with “male” issues in a very adrenalized, terse way.An overview of her career, with more spoilers than a motherfucker because it’s a holiday and I ain’t got time to euphemize:
The Set-Up (1978)
Getting the ol’ career off to a flying start: 20 minutes of Gary Busey and some other dude beating the shit out of each other while two semioticians comment on the action. Did I mention I’m in love with this woman?
The Loveless (1982? 1984?)
Haven’t seen this one, but it’s a biker picture with Willem Dafoe, about incest, apparently. I nominate that last line for worst pun of the year.
Near Dark (1987)
A beautifully shot, original take on vampire movies. Adrian Pasdar meets a cute, pale girl who bites him on the neck both physically and emotionally. Cute pale girl introduces him to Bill Paxton and Lance Henriksen. Adrian Pasdar, poor bastard, is a bit too genteel for their company, or for Jenette Goldstein or that creepy kid vampire either, but shit doesn’t really get raw until the vampires decide they want to kill Adrian Pasdar’s paw and sis.
So stylish, so brilliantly paced, so few extraneous touches that’s almost a shame that the ultimate resolution is so dishonest. Vampirism isn’t supposed to have a cure. Oh, well. You go see a subversive genre picture, you shouldn’t complain when conventions get subverted. That’s the only one that lands badly, though.
Blue Steel (1990)
Slightly better than the average “cop vs. psycho” picture, mainly due to the signature visual style. Jamie Lee Curtis (?) plays an NYPD rookie who puts a few well-placed holes in a convenience store robber, only to have psycho yuppie Ron Silver—a convenience store patron—make off with the robber’s gun, landing Jamie Lee in all kinds of trouble way beyond being miscast. Ron Silver starts shooting women, attempting to romance Jamie Lee, and eventually drawing the ire of Clancy Brown (another cop, in one terrific wig), who also romances Jamie Lee. It feels a bit dated now, since formula pictures don’t tend to age well, but the almost sexual fascination with guns is interesting, making this less than torturous for anyone looking to do the whole Bigelow oeuvre, at least if you’re not squeamish about violence and the instruments thereof.
Point Break (1991)
I have never been able to maintain a straight face while talking about this movie, and I don’t intend to start now. The story of blue flamer quarterback punk Johnny Utah (Keanu) of the Federal Bureau of Inarticulation and his quest to win the heart of . . . ahem, arrest, right, arrest . . . bank-robbing surf guru Bodhi (Swayze). He attempts to win the heart of lesbian surfer Lori Petty . . . wait, she’s supposed to be straight in this? What the fuck . . .?
Anyway. There’s enough quotably retarded dialogue in Point Break to fill several happy lifetimes:
“That’s Bodhi, they call him Bodhisattva.”
“Bodhi, this is your fucking wake-up call, man . . . I . . . am an F . . . B . . . I . . . agent!”
“I know, isn’t it wild?”
“I caught my first tube today. Sir.”
“Listen you snot-nose little shit, I was takin' shrapnel in Khe Sanh
when you were crappin' in your hands and rubbin' it on your face!”
Later:
“Let me tell you something, Harp. I was in this bureau while you were still
popping zits on your funny face and jacking off to the lingerie section of the
Sears catalog.”
“Utah . . . get me two.”
Then: “I’m so hungry I could eat the ass end out of a dead rhino, I shoulda had you get me three of these things.”
“Back off, Warchild, seriously.”
Et cetera. Ad infinitum.
Also notable for being one of the earlier signs that Gary Busey was duckfucking out of his mind rather than just one of those guys who gets typecast.
Prefigures The Hurt Locker in a few weird ways: a) a character study about adrenaline junkies, b) a slightly detached, amused, and pretty accurate look at male friendships, c) cool handheld camerawork in an alley chase scene.
Very few movies consistently make me as purely happy as Point Break does, even if I’m two parts laughing at it to eight parts laughing with it. Most of the stupid shit is the writers’ fault and the fact that the two leads aren’t exactly De Niro and Pacino, although I’ll stop short of saying that Keanu and Swayze are shitty actors. The many weird choices they respectively make in this are part of its warped charm. The director has to take a lot of credit here for realizing she wasn’t making a serious Method-actor movie and just letting the goofballs run with it. (Speaking of goofballs, the amount of coffee John C. McGinley must have drunk in this rivals the amount of coke they did making Scarface).
Strange Days (1995)
Written by her (already) ex-husband James Cameron—who has apparently directed a couple of pictures, according to my sources—this is kind of a cultural artifact, part of the mid-90s post-cyberpunk hiccup in SF. Taking place in the buildup to New Year’s Eve 1999, the story’s about a black market dealer in virtual reality clips (Ralph Fiennes), who gets caught up in an LAPD cover-up of the murder of an influential rapper, which a prostitute recorded. As with most cyberpunk proper, there’s a heavy noir influence, down to the twisty plot, treacherous friends, and femme(s) fatale.
At the time it came out, Strange Days got a lot of really good reviews but tanked at the box office. Sometimes when that happens it’s because either the critics or the public fucked up, sometimes it’s both, which is the case here. The critics were a little too quick to praise Cameron’s script (when he, as was his wont, covered a lot of the same territory William Gibson and Neal Stephenson already had not too long before, but with shittier dialogue and more reductive morality; JC’s considerable strengths lay elsewhere).
One of the most interesting things about Strange Days to me has always been the fact that one of the first things guys want to do with the virtual reality is experience what it’s like to be a woman, kind of a mirror image of what Kathryn Bigelow does so often as a director: put herself inside the male mind. Also, Angela Bassett’s character in a movie by a guy director would have been a lot more likely to be eye candy and implausible at ass-kicking time (though, to J. Cameron’s credit, he does write strong women).
This still doesn’t explain Juliette Lewis being a shrill retard and it being impossible to figure out why Ralph Fiennes is so tragically in love with her. Or, now that you mention it, what the fuck Ralph Fiennes, of all people, is doing in this movie. It’s not fair that the guy should have to play upright Brits all the time just because he is one, but he doesn’t play a convincing sleazeball (and anyway, he gets to play Voldemort, he isn't allowed to complain anymore). This was a part crying out for Gary Oldman, if you needed a Brit in the lead.
Minor quibbles aside: this movie was the start of my crush on Kathryn Bigelow. The 16 year old me was quite taken with the fact that a woman directed this movie. Then I saw a picture of her, and all bets were off. What the hell, let’s have another.
The Weight of Water (2000)
Didn’t see. Didn’t even realize my girl directed this until I was looking at her imdb page while writing this post. Due to having worked in bookstores, and my resultant problem with Oprah Book Club books, I’ll probably give this one a miss.
K-19: The Widowmaker (2002)
Meh.
The Hurt Locker (2009)
The first good non-documentary about the Iraq war, precisely because it’s not trying to be political, it’s about characters, specifically, the guys who try to keep bombs from blowing up. Oddly, it’s fairly suspenseful. It’s suspenseful to the point that I chewed through one of my bedsheets, watching it on DVD. I kept mumbling shit to the characters, i.e. “watch it!” “What the fuck are you doing?” “Oh no . . . oh no . . . oh man, that’s not good . . .” (the situation they were in, not the movie, the movie is very good).
I say, what the hell, let’s nominate this for a shitload of Oscars. Let’s give Jeremy Renner the Richard Jenkins Memorial “none of the fuckers who vote for the Oscars knows who the guy is, but he was awesome and probably better than all four of the other guys put together” nomination (even though Richard Jenkins isn’t dead, the point is, none of the shitheads who didn’t vote for him in The Visitor because they didn’t see it knows that). Lets give Kathryn a nomination because then I’ll get to see her on TV a whole lot and that’ll make me happy. Let’s give that English guy a nomination for cinematography. Let’s throw Anthony Mackie a Best Supporting Actor nom, cuz he was fuckin’ great too. And hell, while we’re at it, let’s give Guy Pearce a Lifetime Achievement Award for finally being presentably butch.
The one thing The Hurt Locker has against it, as far as actually winning all these Oscars I want it nominated for, is that it’s pretty fuckin’ dark. The main character is kind of an asshole. The explosions aren’t fun, they’re really disturbing. When Guy Pearce dies in the beginning, you see him jumping out of the way of the explosion like guys always do in action movies, and they get up a second later, dust themselves off, say something wry, and continue in pursuit of the bad guy. Only Guy Pearce doesn’t get up. That’s the first sign: you’re on your own, moviegoer. More than any theatrical feature I’ve seen in fuck knows how long, The Hurt Locker makes you feel like you’re there. And Iraq is not one of the most fun theres to be.
The thing The Hurt Locker has going for it is that it’s fucking incredible. I’ll admit, as an imperfectly progressive guy, that a large part of my long-standing crush on Kathryn Bigelow has always been due to her being hot. But when she comes through like this—“Hi, guys, I’m back . . . oh, by the way, have fun trying to make a better movie about war ever again, motherfuckers”—it lends a certain moral credibility. Talent is sexy. By that standard alone we should all bow down. And give her the fucking Oscar.
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