Category: Kathryn Bigelow

THE HURT LOCKER

By Marc S. Sanders

Often the most effective war movies hardly focus on the enemy.  It’s the environment that keeps us on our toes.  Like Oliver Stone’s Platoon, Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker is a widely acclaimed depiction of the Iraq War, centrally located in Baghdad in 2004. Her film follows a frighteningly tense perspective of three members of Bravo company – a bomb disposal team.  

After their leader perishes in a surprise attack, Sergeant J. T. Sanborn and Specialist Owen Eldridge (Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty) welcome Sergeant First Class William James (Jeremy Renner) to the squad for the remaining thirty-eight days of their rotation. Beyond evading suicide bombers and questionable Iraqi civilians who observe from the sidelines, Sanborn and Eldridge fear they’ll have to survive James’ maverick approach to deactivating sophisticated bombs that hide in the scorching hot desert area. William James claims to be responsible for shutting down eight hundred and seventy-three explosives in his young career.  He’s good at what he does but he disregards the best interests and care for others within his vicinity.

The art direction for The Hurt Locker is most impressive.  The expected sand rubble and distressed tenement buildings are convincing as Jordan stands in place for the film’s Baghdad. Bigelow’s team goes to great lengths with sophisticated explosives.  An early moment has James gently tugging on a red cord that eventually leads to other cords and then what comes out of the desert sand is six identical underground bombs surrounding him from all sides.  With her camera positioned overhead, pointing down, this feels like a monster movie with tentacles springing out in a circumference around the hero.

Another early scene has James recklessly undressing from his bulky, anti-bomb suit, and disassembling an abandoned car to look for the suspected device that’s hidden inside.  With Eldridge and Sanborn remotely demanding updates, the wild man chooses to toss his headset away to focus on his dire circumstance, solo.  

Ahead of the film’s thrilling opening, a quote from someone named Chris Hedges appears: “The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug.”  A more appropriate phrase would not describe Jeremy Renner’s character any better.  There’s no denying this guy is an expert and the best of the absolute best.  However, he’s positively the worst at accounting for his team or the environment around him.

Kathryn Bigelow is an outstanding director who gets better with each passing film.  The Hurt Locker elevates her finished products that began with cops and robbers fare like Blue Steel and Point Break.  Bigelow is not aiming for laughs or Hollywood shootouts.  With Mark Boal’s Oscar winning script, the filmmaker zeroes in on how someone so proficient with dangerous work pushes beyond limits of caution.  The three characters covered within this tiny sliver of a larger war find themselves tested with each passing day.  

There’s a routine to these guys as they respond to other desert platoons as the sun rises. They are summoned to come upon bombs and mines and people strapped to bombs and mines.  They load up in their Humvee, drive to the next site and do what is expected of themselves like firefighters would in any neighborhood. The conflict is these guys just do not work in sync with each other.  At night, they return to base following a full day’s work to play shoot ’em up video games, drink, and roughhouse with each other as a means to grasp who is the dominant one of the trio.  

Psychologically, James, Sanborn and Eldridge are not on similar planes.  Eldridge is the frightened one who confides in a Colonel with an empathetic, bedside manner.  Sanborn is the sensible levelheaded one.  James seems to lack priority for anyone including his on again/off again girlfriend back home (Evangeline Lilly) and the child they share together.  He’s bent on conquering the next sophisticated, wired device.  It only gets personal for him when one of the few kids in the area meets a gruesome demise and James goes lone wolf at night, within the towns, even though he’s not covert ops. His risks are too great for this war, his squad, and maybe himself.

Kathryn Bigelow effectively sets up environments that’ll rattle your nervous system.  Using handheld cameras, this film often works like documentary footage with quick cuts to citizens of Baghdad who may be staring at what this squad is doing, or maybe they are waiting for their cue to detonate something nearby and trap them.  A local butcher with a cell phone in his hand feels like the worst kind of threat.  A kid with a soccer ball seems untrustworthy.  A guy in a suit pleading for desperate help at the other end of the street is a person I wouldn’t want to stand next to.  There’s an abundance of desert citizen extras to look for and hypothesize about.  Is it that guy with the trigger or maybe it’s that kid or that woman?  Most of these people do not even speak.  Their glazed, war torn and dusty expressions say so little while the powerful machine guns held by the Americans will not do much to prevent a horrifying possibility.

The extensive footage of explosions is very impressive.  I read that Bigelow wanted to display what a real detonation would look like, and not with Hollywood fireball extravagance.  Accompanied with Oscar winning sound editing and mixing, the bombs in this movie lift the dirt and dust particles off the ground, building and automobile surfaces and then plume into mushroom clouds that expand beyond the limits of city blocks. The Bravo Company men even predict how the blasts will take off and where exactly the shrapnel and debris will reach and descend. They think they have this down to a science. This material is entirely different than what other action or war pictures typically show.  

Sniper fire comes at unexpected moments.  An open desert plain actually has an enemy concealed somewhere and quick pierces of sound drops a someone who you might think controls the scene. Then the next someone. The shock of how quickly it’s edited together plays with your senses. Bob Murawski and Chris Innis are the award-winning film editors of this piece. They complete their job to the fullest. This all looks so real and not a product of art.

The Hurt Locker is term to describe where a militant solder will go to when living with internal pain and conflict.  The soldier goes to his hurt locker. This war puts each of these three guys in their own kind of hurt locker, but perhaps they force their situations upon themselves and each other. Mark Boal and Kathryn Bigelow’s film do not just devote time to the three characters who are most at play, but also to devices of war and destruction that drastically change these men.

The Hurt Locker is one of Kathryn Bigelow’s best films.

POINT BREAK (1991)

By Marc S. Sanders

Stop me if you heard this one before.  Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan walk into a bank…

Yeah.  That’s right.  I’m talking about Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break.  There’s a line in the movie where the rookie FBI hero, Johnny Utah (Keanu Reeves), is described by his new supervisor as being young, dumb and full of cumb.  Pretty fair assessment.

Much of this crime caper works despite the silly summary.  Agent Utah’s seasoned partner Pappas, played by Gary Busey, believes that a series of coastal California bank robberies are being committed by surfers who roll into town each year when the waves are at their most tubular.  They don silly looking rubber masks in the appearance of the Ex-Presidents of the United States to commit their ninety second smash and grab.  Fortunately, Johnny Utah looks and talks like Keanu Reeves who was raised in Hawaii and has experience playing a gomer like this in two other movies that were headlined by some dudes named Bill & Ted.  As well, don’t forget what he hilariously did in Ron Howard’s Parenthood.  Yes, Johnny Utah should fit right in with the California surf.

Point Break does not take itself seriously in its first half.  Johnny has to learn how to look the part of a surfer with a neon pink board amid the colony of saltwater dwellers.  Standard stuff pops up like the angry supervisor (John C McGinley) who screams about no progress being made.  Unfortunately, a romantic love interest named Tyler has to enter the fold played by an actor I’ve never been fond of, Lori Petty.  I’m supposed to believe that she is going to teach Johnny how to ride the waves and chastise him when he’s doing it wrong, and then he’s going to fall hard for her when she delivers one arbitrary piece of dialogue after another.  “What’s this pig board piece of shit?”  “Too much testosterone around here. Later!” Also, for those intimate scenes in the dark calm waters with the moon and stars gleaming in her eyes, Tyler has to ask Johnny something along the lines of “What’s that strange look you got?”  and “There it is again.”  Maybe it’s not all Petty’s fault.  The script doesn’t give her much to work with honestly.  Nothing Tyler says is relevant.  How it is delivered by Petty is not the least bit intriguing and honestly with only few nip/tucks, this character storyline could have been saved for special edition DVD featured deleted scenes that you’ll only watch once and never share on You Tube. 

On to the good stuff. 

You can see how amazingly talented a director like Kathryn Bigelow really is and it is no surprise that a couple of decades of experience led her to a well-deserved Oscar for directing The Hurt Locker.  Going all the way back to films like Blue Steel and Point Break demonstrated that Kathryn Bigelow made a name for herself based on stellar filmmaking skills.  Just look at the sky diving footage alone.  You see all the tricks as the camera follows the daredevils out of the plane and into the sunny blue sky with genuine close ups and acrobatic flips to relish in.  Sensational work.  Gorgeous photography and smooth, unshaking camera operations. Nothing artificial in these sequences.

Moreover, there is the surfing of course.  The checkered bag guy of this action picture is another variation of a dashingly handsome Patrick Swayze with shaggy dirty blond hair, dirty blond facial whiskers and his distinctive voice that if it could be described as dirty blond it would be dirty blond. Plus, a chiseled chest to show off during a karate fight scene.  He plays a guy named Bodhi.  I guess Walter, Melvin, Murray and Jack would not be cool enough.  (My dad, uncle, and grandfathers by the way.)  While Johnny maintains his undercover investigation with Pappas watching from the outside, he becomes enamored with Bodhi and his crew.  They like him in return.  Yet are these those Ex-Presidents who are robbing the banks?

Point Break is a smarter thriller than I think the filmmakers even realized because other than Lori Petty it is cast very well with Reeves and Swayze in the lead roles and a fun cooky Gary Busey on the side.  These actors are game for the quick moving adventures that Bigelow strives for.  There’s a fantastic foot chase through the back streets of Santa Monica following one such bank robbery.  This scene alone is eligible for a Best Editing Oscar with handheld Steadicams following the running players in and out of houses, around flaming gas stations and backyards with barking dogs and dense red light running traffic getting in the way.  Amazing film work.

The surfing would have to be stellar if the antagonists are in fact surfers. The photography is magnificent with narrow waves curving over the cameras directly pointing at Swayze, Reeves and cast coming right towards the screen while balanced on their boards with golden suns hovering overhead.

While Point Break does not seem to know when to end because the credits could have rolled up on three or four different occasions, at least the film insists on having fun with itself. 

I recall in The Predator Olivia Munn’s character went to MIT with a science major that somehow also included military trained special ops in its elite curriculum. I’m expected to believe that nonsense.  On the other hand, when I see Bill’s friend Ted has graduated in the top two percent of his FBI class at Quantico, Viginia, I can buy it.  I don’t have to dwell on it. Now I can enjoy the ride from a sky diving standpoint or a choppy mariner’s perspective.  My suspension of disbelief is bought, sold and paid for. 

Point Break is a smart thriller with a dangerously fun, zippy edge to it.