Max Manus, Chloe

Busy times my friends! I have two units coming vacant in my building, a garden to whip into shape, taxes to prepare for, bathroom renovations to coordinate, and the minutiae of life to attend to. Thus, it was a blessed relief last night to turn my back on the world as I walked into the Park Lane cinemas.

Max Manus (2008, Joachim Rønning, Espen Sandberg) (Park Lane) It is April 9, 1940, and Max Manus, who has been fighting the Russians in Finland, has returned to Norway on the very day of the German invasion.

Though haunted by his front-line experiences in the Finnish campaign, Max throws himself into the work of the nascent Norwegian resistance movement, organizing dissenters and fighting the occupying forces in any way that they can. Arrested by the Gestapo in 1941, Max escapes in dramatic style, makes his way to England with his best friend Greggers, and joins the Norwegian Independent Company to be trained as a saboteur.

Upon returning to Norway, Max quickly makes a name for himself as a daring saboteur, a fearless partisan, and a passionate leader of men engaged in dangerous campaigns to disrupt enemy operations by sinking ships, burning office records, and disseminating propaganda.

Alongside the genesis of a war hero, we see glimpses into Max's personality through the complications of friendships and loves nourished amid the turmoil and uncertainty of war. This theme is especially poignant towards the close of the film, when Max sits - unemployed, uneducated, and unskilled - in the company of the ghosts of comrades fallen in battle.

Max Manus is a beautifully crafted film that concerns itself more with presenting the man and the times than with erecting a pedestal on which to enshrine a hero - the film is much more evenhanded than, for instance, Schindler's List. Indeed, Max Manus scrupulously avoids controversy, touching on important issues such as the efficacy of propaganda as resistance, the collateral casualties of sabotage missions, and collaboration with the occupying forces, as pedestrians events and issues that are dealt with daily instead of as deep philosophical questions to be debated.

The sets, costumes, and props are beyond reproach, and Aksel Hennie - a doppelganger for a young Steve Buscemi - does a fantastic job in the lead role, which he plays with admirable restraint. In fact, the whole film feels respectful without, as I alluded to above, ever straying into reverence - and is not bad in the nail biting espionage and heart pounding excitement departments either.

In my book Max Manus is winner. It is probably not in wide release, so be sure to watch it at home when you get a chance.

Chloe (2009, Atom Egoyan) (Park Lane) On my way out of the theater, a poster for Atom Egoyan's newest film caught my eyes and drew me in like a honey bee to a succulent blossom.

I left 2008's Adoration in absolute awe of Egoyan's craft as a story teller, as a creator of physical and moral realms, and Chloe left me virtually speechless. It is the tenderness and passion of Egoyan's films that is virtually physically painful to experience.

Catherine and David Stewart (perennial favorite Julianne Moore and always reliable Liam Neeson) are an established, well-educated, upper-class couple who have lost the instinctual intimacy that first brought them together. In a moment of desperation, Catherine hires Chloe (Amanda Seyfried), an ethereal beauty and high-class escort, to seduce her husband and prove his suspected philandering.

However, Involving Chloe in her problems is akin to opening Pandora's box, as the lady of the night proves a virus that nurtures the seeds of confusion, fear, and desperation that are born of the desire for love, comfort, compassion, and warmth. Egoyan, working against the backdrop of a Toronto somehow rendered exotic and romantic by masterful cinematography and artful lighting, plays Chloe's character like an instrument, teasing out a subtle web of sexual intrigue.

Moore is a wonder to behold in this film, playing a role reminiscent of her character in Todd Haynes' Safe (a terrifying film built around a sufferer of multiple chemical sensitivity), and Neeson is his usual blend of intensity and restraint. Meanwhile, Seyfried plays the nymph beautifully, seeming almost transparent in her role as angel of destruction - will we see her in more films of this caliber rather than the disposable roles that seem to have populated the majority of her career?

In my mind, Chloe firmly establishes Egoyan in the company of directors such as Ang Lee, the Martini Brothers, and Kim Kiduk, all of whom make wrenching films that feed raw emotion directly to the viewer's soul. Chloe, as a quick scan of the reviews reveals, is not for everyone - but is a must see in my book...

And speaking of books...
I enjoy trying to see what books are on the shelves in the background of movie scenes. In Chloe, I spied an interesting assortment in David Stewart's collection, including books by former Israeli Prime Minister Menachin Begin and American right-wing bull horn Rush Limbaugh. In addition, I spied a volume on German history and a tome entitled Titan, which is probably the biography of US philanthropist John D. Rockefeller. Are these books chosen at random to add atmosphere, or are they carefully placed in shot to suggest something about the characters?

Cracker Barrel: A Journey to the Heartland of American Cuisine

Walking into the Cracker Barrel at Rocky Mount, North Carolina after 12 hours on the road, the down-home flavour of the place struck me immediately - it was like it had been painted on! However, we all know that we should not judge a book by its cover, so I followed our hostess as she wound her way through the establishment's sprawling dining room and settled in to study the entrees on offer.

Carolyn, my step mother, and I opted for succulent southern cooking, ordering up hot plates of pan-fried catfish with hot biscuits and all the fixins, which included two of a long list of sides ranging from green beans and steak fries to the "special vegetable of the day." Now Carolyn was quick to select green beans and lightly breaded okra, while I was intrigued by the veggie special, which turned out, inexplicably, to be brown rice. OK. Green beans and okra it is. Dad, meanwhile, ordered up a wholesome ham steak with veggies.

As the food was being lovingly prepared, we occupied ourselves with small-talk and playing peg games that were laid out on the table. But not for long, as the food was in front of us before we knew it.

A Feast (of sorts) for the Senses..
Ye gods! How does one begin to describe such a meal! Let's begin with the catfish, cooked to the consistency of soggy leather and smothered in a sauce that can be best described as...um...yellowish-orange? Ugh. Now this sad excuse for an entree was accompanied by the South's finest canned beans, which proved inedible, breaded okra that was surely fresh from the bulk plastic bag and into the deep fryer, and a bed of rice as soggy as surely every serving of Uncle Ben's Quick Rice ever boiled up. Ugh.

Have you ever read a story that takes place in a nursing home? Remember the description of the grayish, over-boiled mush of veggies turned out by the kitchen? Well, i'm willing to bet Cracker Barrel caters for them!

Ahh, you ask, but what of the ham steak? Indeed, the ham steak. Well, it barely made it onto the table. This 4-5 millimeter thick slice of ham loaf, fried to the texture of tough leather (various leather textures being well represented in the meal) was sent back to the kitchen post haste and replaced with a chicken salad that soared above everything else on the table in its shining, inspiring mediocrity.

Bleagh
What else is there to say? I feel positively polluted. There should be health advisories on the front doors of every Cracker Barrel from coast to coast. Give this one a pass folks!

Green Zone

Green Zone (Paul Greengrass, 2010) (Park Lane) The buzz preceding Matt Damon's latest outing established the film as a continuation of the Bourne series set amid the political intrigue and heavy artillery combat of Iraq as Operation Desert Shield approaches George Bush's infamous "Mission Accomplished." Essentially an intelligent action movie that addresses relevant political and social issues alongside thrills and chills. This is a laudable goal, and one that Katherine Bigelow's The Hurt Locker made seem achievable, but is apparently much more difficult than one might think.

The film follows Miller (Matt Damon), a US Army officer leading a team charged with securing Saddam Hussein's purported store of WMDs in the days immediately following the advent of the second Iraq war. The opening of the film, a collage of news footage interspersed with scenes of Miller's team infiltrating a reported WMD site, evoked memories of where I was and what I was thinking as the second Iraq war began - establishing a sense of immediacy and relevance.

The purported WMD site, alas, is empty - and apparently is not the first empty site that Miller and his men have risked their lives to secure on the strength of woefully inadequate intelligence. Returning to base and able to find no answers regarding the source of the faulty intelligence, Miller has no choice but to go rogue, delving into dark corners of political intrigue to learn the dirty secret behind America's reasons for going to war. It is Matt Damon against a global intelligence conspiracy - Bourne 4.0 indeed!

The problem is that, much like Body of Lies before it, Green Zone is not what it claims to be/tries to be/pretends to be. The political intrigue - what shady deals were worked out behind closed doors and in torture rooms to ensure US involvement in Iraq - is paper thin and in no way illuminating. The action sequences - shot in the same annoyingly jerky Bourne style that made The Quantum of Solace so difficult to watch - are distracting and disjointed. And Matt Damon - the darling of the intellectual action film scene - is flat, lifeless, and very out of place shlepping an M16 in uniform and shouting orders (huwah!).

Green Zone is a mess! And, sadly, Matt Damon, whom I have always considered a sign of a film worth paying attention to, proves yet again how limited he is as an actor. Like many of the biggest stars in Hollywood, Damon essentially plays himself in every role - he has never hit one out of the park by playing brilliantly against type a la Adam Sandler in Punch-Drunk Love or Reign Over Me (both HIGHLY recommended). I found The Informant flat and lifeless despite a brilliant back story, and Green Zone essentially boring despite impressive explosions and - again - a compelling back story.

The Iraq wars have not fared well in the theater to date, producing one brilliant film, Bigelow's Hurt Locker, and a bevy of interesting and entertaining films that never really rise to the challenge of delving into what many claim to be the Vietnam of our age: an ill-conceived, mismanaged military folly in a place that the US little understands and has even less right to interfere. I understand that documentary film has done a somewhat better job of tackling the subject, but have not sampled any of these films.

Among the interesting and entertaining films that I can recommend are some that are very worth spending a few hours with. A few that come to mind are: Three Kings, Jarhead, the 2004 remake of The Manchurian Candidate, and Brothers, which, against all expectations, succeeded in engaging me and bringing tears to my eyes (by the end it even had me impressed by Tobey Maguire, something I am loathe to admit!).

Green Zone, on the other hand, is a solid, non-qualified PASS.

Not Crazy about Crazy Heart

With the Oscar buzz still echoing in our ears and the big winners enjoying renewed interest at the megaplex, I am truly at a loss as to how to write about how much I wanted to like Crazy Heart and how disappointed I was with Crazy Heart.

Let's start on a positive note: Jeff Bridges. The dude, as they say, abides. On the radar since the Coen brother's cult hit The Big Lebowski, Bridges deserved his best actor nod for his portrayal of Bad Blake, and continues a tradition of the academy rising above politics to recognize true dramatic brilliance by lauding artists such as Forest Whitaker, Helen Mirren, and Mickey Rourke, among others.

In fact, the casting of CH is entirely above reproach, which Colin Farrell fitting in the skin of a "new country" idol as if he had lived the part, and Maggie Gyllenhaal playing up her fleshy, sex-kitten, come hither look for all it is worth. This cast simply works together, giving flawless performances against a seamless backdrop that is a testament to the craft of legions of set designers, wardrobe experts, lighting crews, and sound men.

In fact, the whole film fits together as smoothly and elegantly as its cast, rendering it slick and shiny as a new dime that is worth about 2 cents.

The thing is that CH was a phony. It is a paper-thin, paint-by-numbers, stock Hollywood tale: man at rock bottom meets woman, woman inspires man, man makes mistake and breaks woman's heart, woman dumps man, man returns to rock bottom and finds new hope in: a) woman's forgiveness; or b) realization he can live a respectable life without her.

Wonderfully inspiring stuff!
I am really being a lot harder on CH than I should, considering that I was entertained by it. The thing is that there are some films that I go to with the mere expectation of entertainment - think Casino Royale or the Bourne series - rather than serious intellectual engagement. CH, on the other hand, sold itself as more than light entertainment: The Christian Science Monitor, along with virtually every other newspaper and website, gushes "Bridges draws us deeply inside Blake’s moment-to-moment heartbreaks. He makes us root for him as we would root for a dear friend. Ultimately, his triumphs become our own."

I saw the movie that the Monitor is talking about, and it is called The Wrestler. An edgy tale of redemption that takes risks, pushes boundaries, and takes us deep into the dark recesses of its protagonist's heart and soul. CH suffers in agony by the comparison, maintaining its slick patina by playing it safe all the way, never taking any risks. At one point Maggie Gyllenhaal's character asks Bad Blake if Colin Farrell's character is "real country" under his "new country" guise - maybe CH is real dramatic brilliance under its slick Hollywood guise, but I resent having to search for it.

To return to the critics by way of closing, it is impossible to miss the fact that few of the rave reviews really spend much time talking about the movie itself. In the end most seem to be reviewing Bridges' absolutely brilliant performance rather than the film: The New York Times proclaims CH "A small movie perfectly scaled to the big performance at its center."

I expected more than a one-man show...

Blogging, Olympics, and Avatar 3D

Five months
Has it really been five months since my last post? I can't imagine! And honestly, it could be five more months after this, I just don't know. I reached a point last year where I just didn't know why I was blogging anymore - a few core friends were reading my posts, but besides that I felt I was working hard to express my ideas and opinions, and they were just echoing in a void.

Well, be that as it may, I have been thinking of late of returning to this forum, but of doing so in a less specialized manner. I will keep commenting on movies, as they remain a passion, but will also try to include more ideas, opinions, and anecdotes on other topics. No promises, mind you, but let's see if I can get back in the groove.

Olympics
And, of course, given current events, the first topic has got to be the seemingly all-consuming Vancouver Olympics. Now in terms of "fete of the century" or "fiasco," I have nothing to add. However, watching Mike Robertson go from sure-fire gold to silver in the men's snowboard cross the other night got me thinking about our competitors to the south and their seemingly superhuman ability to dominate international sporting events.

Now I am not begrudging Seth Wescott his Gold medal - anyone who can come from that far behind, that low on the course, deserves to wear the laurels. However, watching Lindsay Vonn and Julia Mancuso beat the world's top alpine skiers by almost a full second (an eternity in these events), I got to wondering about the bigger picture. I have three theories:

1) Food Supply Doping: Think about the American food supply system as revealed in documentaries such as Food, Inc. and Fast Food Nation: a concoction of ground GM corn, meat raised on steroids and growth hormone, and a raft of other chemical additives. Is it possible that the amount of such additives consumed by Americans in a standard meat, potatoes, and apple pie diet "pumps them up" in such a way as to give them an advantage over athletes from nations with stricter food additive codes?

2) Funding: It's hard to argue the obviousness of the fact that American athletes benefit from significantly higher financial resources than those from most nations. This is not necessarily due to higher government spending (I would have to research this), but due to higher corporate sponsorship - think about the largest, richest companies in the world, and think about what nation they call home and which athletes they are more likely to support. That's what I am talking about.

3) The Cold War: Yes, Dr. Strangelove has a hand in this also. I was talking with some friends the other night, and it hit me: The USA's current sport training system and mentality is a direct offshoot of the intense rivalry that existed between the Americans and the Soviets during the second half of the twentieth century.

Think about it: in addition to stockpiling bombs and expanding "spheres of influence," the cold war was fought viciously on the ski slopes, skating ovals, velodromes, and sprinting tracks of the summer and winter Olympic games. Sport was one of the many proxies for armed combat used by the American and Soviet governments to prove their superiority over each other - and this mindset shaped the sporting mentalities of many of the coaches, in particular, and some of the athletes competing in Vancouver. Winning is everything.

Now I am not disparaging the American athletes - as I said, Wescott showed amazing skill and stamina and deserves his gold - I just want to illuminate some of the context of what we are seeing happen on the slopes and in the rinks. American athletes are the product of a system that has murky roots, but in the present enables them to truly be the very best that they can be.

Own the Podium
And I guess that this is where a lot of the concern about the Canadian "Own the Podium" campaign arises from. The Cold War tainted sports with politics (e.g. the 1980 and 1984 Olympic game boycotts), warping the spirit of the games by taking the emphasis away from performance and personal achievement, and some fear that the Own the Podium Campaign amounts to the same thing and could be a pretty murky foundation to build on in and of itself.

Overall, I hope that governments around the world continue to fund sports and the arts so that the skiers, bikers, swimmers, painters, singers, and poets of our nations can continue to inspire the dreams of young people and build the rich tapestry of our global culture (a round of Kumbaya anyone?).

Avatar (James Cameron, 2010) (Bayers Lake Imax) To switch gears a little bit, I just want to add my two cents about Avatar 3D, which I saw a few weeks ago in the local Imax. I will skip preliminaries and get right to the hyperbole: by about two-thirds of the way through I consciously thought "I am glad that I am alive to witness this achievement in technology."

The new form of 3D filming that Avatar relies on is achieved by filming two offset images that are simultaneously projected onto a specially coated screen. The viewer dons special glasses in which the two lenses are polarized at perpendicular angles to each other, meaning that each eye views one of the offset images independent of the other (with none of the image "cross talk" that typified the old red and blue glasses 3D). The brain is essentially "confused" by the two images, and resolves its confusion by interpolating the images in a clean, crisp, three-dimensional picture.

This is a stunningly powerful colour to add to the palette that filmmakers use to compose their masterpieces. It sucks the viewer deeply into the film, creating a world entirely separate from that outside the theater walls - and this is essentially what I feel that a great film should do.

But this is not to say that Avatar is a great film - a great moment in technological evolution certainly, a great experience without doubt, but a great film in no way. The proof of this pudding is under the crust: if you watched Avatar in 2D, I am sure that it would lose more than a little of its shine, revealing all the more baldly the predictability of the story, the sometimes painful dialog, and the cringe-inducing acting of some of its key characters - things that jarred me even in 3D, but were forgiven in the name of the overall experience.

And the Oscar Goes to...
Sure, Avatar will likely win best picture, but hopefully this will clear the way for the best director Oscar to go to a more deserving director like Kathryn Bigelow, who's Hurt Locker would have been stunning in 3D, but managed to suck me into the world she created on screen solely based on a compelling scenario, taut writing, subtle acting, and sublime cinematography.

Where the Wild Things Are, Zombieland

Wow, I just browsed the new cinema listings for the coming weeks, and am slightly overwhelmed! I haven't had much time for the movie theater of late, and wonder how I will ever fit in: Amelia, Cairo Time, The Nightmare Before Christmas 3D, Astro Boy, The Invention of Lying, and A Serious Man - alas, it appears that I have missed The Informant. I feel like I have to construct some kind of matrix to compare the virtues of the films and, in particular, how important it is to see them on the big vs the small screen.

Amelia is definitely a priority in terms of big-screen impact, Astro Boy may well lose any interest on the small screen, and Nightmare 3D, of course, can only be experienced at the multiplex. But there is another class of films to consider also: A Serious Man and Cairo Time sound marvelous, but am I likely to search them down to view at home if I miss them? Decisions, decisions, decisions...

On the other hand, if you are in Halifax and want to go to a movie, drop me a line! In the meantime, here's a taste of what I have been watching.

Where the Wild Things Are (Spike Jonze, 2009) (Park Lane) Over the past few days I have talked with a few people about the children's book Wild Things is based on, only to hear that the average individual seems to have read it "about a 100 million times." Was I deprived as a child? Am I somehow lacking for not having entered this imaginary land as a tyke?

In any case, this lack of childhood exposure did little to blunt the intensity of the pleasure I derived from the film. In the first 10-15 minutes, as Max (Max Records) is buffeted by the trials and tribulations of childhood - including stormy relations with a teen-aged older sister and a single mom trying to date - I was astounded by how powerfully the scenes evoked my parallel emotions of joy, disappointment, love, hate, fear, loneliness, jealousy, and determination. Max is awash in a maelstrom of feelings and ideas that seem to rule him and to resist any attempt at restraint.

After one confrontation too many, Max runs away, hops on a sailboat, and after a dark night of the soul spent pounded by wind and waves, finds himself on an island inhabited by large, furry, humanoid approximations of birds, goats, and a menagerie of other creatures. More interestingly, however, each of these creatures seems to personify one of the emotions that Max is subject to in his everyday life. For example, there is Carol (James Gandolfini - brilliantly "cast"), who represents impulsive, petty rage; Judith (Catherine O'Hara), who personifies petty jealousies and vindictiveness; and Douglas (Chris Cooper), who is loneliness and exclusion.

These ultimately symbolic but physically furry creatures are living in chaos and misery, and quickly install Max as their king, electing him with a mandate to bring them happiness. Period. At first all is well, with everyone laughing and playing and sleeping together in a big warm pile, but jealousy, loneliness, exclusion, and petty rage are, of course, just around the corner. And Max, of course, is no more able to reconcile the personifications of these emotions than he is able to rule his own.

As one may expect, Wild Things does not end with the protagonist vanquishing the antagonist. Max's final lesson - and the lesson so many of my peer's apparently learned decades ago - is that his emotional depths and heights cannot be overcome, but must be accepted. In this sense, the film's message reminded me very much of a 10-day Vipassana meditation retreat I attended in India, which taught the value of equanimity: recognize, acknowledge, and experience the conflicting storm of emotions and thoughts, but do not allow them to rule you.

In terms of film craft, Wild Things is beautifully made. Carol, Judith, Douglas and their peers are presented as slightly scruffy, life-sized teddy bears that evince an interesting melange of human and super-human characteristics, and are subject to wild emotional swings that are amplified by super strength that allows them to leap great distances and hoist (and hurl!) very heavy objects. The island itself is similarly a mixture of real and fantasy lands that allows fine-grained middle-eastern dessert to border rugged northern rocks and scrub trees.

I imagine that very early production meetings for Wild Things were alive with debate over whether the film should be animated, live action, or a blend of the two. I am glad that live action ruled the day, as it somehow made the film more immediate for me, grounding it - oddly - as something that could really happen - the wild things are strangely human for all their outlandish shapes and size.

I was moved to applaud by the end of Where the Wild Things Are, which touched me deeply and left me feeling warm and encompassed in a moment of comfort and goodness that somehow entirely eluded me during 10 days of 14-hours-per-day seated meditation...

Zombieland (Ruben Fleischer, 2009) (Park Lane) We never planned to see Zombieland, but upon arriving at the theater, it seems that Internet listings had misled us, and it was our only option. Decision made.

Despite my high regard for Danny Boyle's zombie horror masterpiece 28 Days Later, I can't say that I am a huge fan of the genre - to put it plainly, I was apathetic about Zombieland going in.

I have mentioned my thoughts on Woody Harrelson before - he's in a large number of great films, but they generally are not great because of him. I remain lukewarm on Harrelson and apathetic about Zombieland after having spent 90 minutes watching blood pour from zombie mouths, bullets, axes, and gardening shears dispatch the undead, and romance flourish for a loser and a "hot" survivor.

That being said, I did not dislike Zombieland and even enjoyed it for the most part, succumbing to some genuine belly laugh inducing moments, particularly when Bill Murray made an unexpected appearance. Overall, however, I have to conclude that I am not the target audience for this particular film - all power to you if you are!

Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky, Where Eagles Dare, Wall Street, New in Town

Well, it's been a while, n'est pas? Apologies, but I have been fairly busy of late, what with hectic days at work, consulting projects at home, the commencement of my French class, and lingering projects around the house that must be done before the full brunt of winter descends upon us. Primary among these projects - and the one you would think would not be subject to procrastination - is the need to reassemble my heating ducts to fend off increasingly cold morning temperatures. Brrrr...

This hasn't left much time for movies either. I think that I have set a new record for not visiting a movie theatre. The Halifax Film Festival has come and gone, and I, lamentably, made it to only one screening. I've watched the odd film at home, of course, and will take this opportunity to update you on a few of them.

Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky (Jan Kounan, 2009) (The Oxford) It is 1920, the dawn of one of the greatest eras of indulgence in modern western history, and a young Coco Chanel (Anna Mouglalis) is attending the Paris debut of Igor Stravinsky's (Mads Mikkelsen) opera The Rite of Spring.

Chanel and Stravinsky sit in the concert hall amid a high-society crowd that is increasingly shocked and outraged as the music swells and the performers begin to shake and sway, shrugging off centuries of tradition in orchestration and dance in favor of the cacophony of the already full-fledged modern age that the privileged class is not yet reconciled with. This is an epic moment that is emblematic of the clash the traditional and modern that had permeated art and public discourse since the Victorian Age - Chanel, whose fashion and fragrance would be emblematic of the modern age, and Stravinsky are immediately and inextricably linked by their eager acceptance of the new age.

From this moment of well-documented history, the film moves rapidly to well-documented rumour: "In 1920, she was introduced ... to world famous composer Igor Stravinsky (The Rite of Spring), to whom she extended an offer for him and his family to reside with her. During this temporary sojourn it was rumoured that they had an affair." (Wikipedia)

The two court each other slowly and deliberately, brushing and then moving apart in a dance of seduction played against the backdrop of Chanel's emerging aesthetic: black and white wallpaper prints in elegant but sharp geometric lines; simple, almost austere fashions that render the feminine form powerful yet breathtakingly elegant in a world of puffy, impractical couture; square, solid, yet somehow delicate furniture that foreshadows the emergence of art deco; and sculpture and even fixtures that recall Auguste Rodin or even Ayn Rand.

This beautiful but edgy backdrop and the intensity of our hero and heroine combine to build a delicious tension that is finally released in a sexual union that feels like the first torrent of rain in a thunderstorm - the intertwining of bodies, and specifically Mouglalis' beautiful, powerful, long legs and arms somehow echoing Chanel's distinctly modern aesthetic while in the throes of passion.

From that moment, unfortunately, the film just sort of falls apart. Carefully constructed and strictly defined characters that made virtues of personal power and self expression devolved into aimless individuals just looking for the next opportunity to rut. The film was no less beautiful to look at, but quickly became tiring to engage with: a case in point is a digression in which we travel to Paris to witness the creation of the scent that defines the era, Chanel No. 5, played out as a boring and mundane affair that strips the powerful symbol of any resonance.

I can't even begin to describe how aggrieved I am to write this: I was astounded by the beauty and power of the first hour of this film, but by the end of the second hour I was treating it like a catalog: "nice suit, I wonder where I can get one" or "exquisite lamp, maybe I should redecorate my place in art deco".

Where Eagles Dare (Brian G. Hutton, 1968) (Home) Speaking of taking moments of history and spinning flights of fancy that bear no relation to reality, Where Eagles Dare follows a crew of allied spies sent into Nazi-occupied Europe to rescue the pilot of a plane that has crash landed in the Alps. Eagles delivers in exactly the area where Coco and Igor falls flat: it establishes a fictional world, drawing its characters and setting the "rules" by which they will play, and then sticks to those rules so that everything makes sense within the world of the film - the backdrop is rife with inaccuracies, but the structure of the film is sound. Minute for minute, Eagles delivers a rollicking World War II action adventure film that makes the most of its cast of suave secret agents, menacing Nazi's, double agents, imposing mountain-top fortresses, rat-a-tat gunfire, and spectacular explosions.

Wall Street (Oliver Stone, 1987) (Home) I will paraphrase the CBC Radio Program The Current: Wall Street portrays the greedy, money-obsessed bankers of the mid-1980s who played with people's lives and livelihoods like toys, and shows us how much things have changed since then: the cell phones have gotten much smaller." In powerful, career-defining performances, Michael Douglas and Charlie and Martin Sheen give us a peek inside the sleazy side of high-finance that I firmly believe is essentially realistic - but hopefully the exception rather than the rule.

New in Town (Jonas Elmer, 2009) (Winnipeg) I have been sorely remiss with regard to New in Town and apologise sincerely if you have gone out and rented it before I had a chance to warn you: this is a dismal failure of a film with nary a redeeming quality. Renee Zellweger was a star for about 10 minutes due to Bridget Jones's Diary and co-stared in some pretty good films (think Cold Mountain and Cinderella Man), but really her star faded fairly quickly (think - and shudder - Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason).

Based on the film New in Town, I surmise that Zellweger's response to her waning moment in the sun has been: crash diets (frighteningly skinny), botox overdose (face like a death mask, that seems to sag at points, perhaps in between treatments), and a painfully pathetic "star vehicle." The movie New in Town is the film equivalent of TOXIC WASTE - avoid at any cost!

The Wrestler: A Masterpiece of Cinema

The Wrestler (David Aronofsky, 2008) (Home) The Wrestler is a quintessentially human film, and is heartbreaking in its simple honesty: Randy the Ram (Mickey Rourke) is a broken down old piece of meat that has only ever felt alive in the wrestling ring, invigorated by the adoration of the crowd.

Rourke plays Randy straight up: he's not a complicated or conflicted character. He likes to live hard and fast to a soundtrack of Gun-n-Roses and Skid Row, but a few too many fights and a heart attack under the belt and it seems like time to slow down. Time to take stock before he's wearing a catheter, wheel chair bound, or rendered a mental cripple.

As Randy looks around him and sees how empty his life outside of the limelight is - a crappy job, a ratty trailer to call home, an estranged daughter, a sort-of-maybe girlfriend - my heart ached. I felt his confusion and fear as he scrambled to build a few connections, to root himself in a real world where relationships are not choreographed and there is no roaring crowd to render even the most egregious sin forgiven.

This film brought tears to my eyes, and made my heart literally ache at the vast emptiness this simple but quintessentially good man lives in. I have always loved Scorcese's Raging Bull for its ability to make the audience understand even a little bit the way that Jake LaMotta sees the world - but in the end La Motta never boils down to anything but a wounded animal.

Randy the Ram is wounded, but it's his heart that is broken by more than cardiac arrest, and he understands instinctively that his redemption is not to be found in the ring - even though that may be all that is left.

I lament the fact that I missed The Wrestler in theatres, where I could have sat in the dark sharing the experience with the crowd and savoring that glorious last shot, and the abrupt climax, haunted as it is by the spectre of what could have been. It's not often that we have a chance to see such powerful performances as those given by Rourke and Marisa Tomei as they wound and soothe each other - their characters have both been used hard in this life, and they have so much to give each other.

The Wrestler is a compelling portrait of the human condition, and a true masterpiece of cinema. I saw Milk, and I respect Sean Penn - but Rourke deserved the Oscar.

Julie & Julia

I'm a bit slow out of the gate with this one, having seen it at least two weeks ago. However, one way or the other, here we go.

Julie & Julia (Nora Ephron, 2009) (The Oxford) I have recently received some feedback on my blog to the effect that my posts are too long and too detailed - it seems that many people don't make it to the end of the post, where my recommendation is usually served up as a grand finale. In a nod to the wishes of my long-suffering readers, I shall dispense with preliminaries and declare Julie & Julia a wonderful film that is very worth watching- actually, I think that delightful may just be le mot juste.

No Basterds Here
However, J&J is not delightfully indulgent as was the case with Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds. Far from it: J&J is delightful for bringing a luminous character to life on screen and making the audience feel that they are getting to know her via some kind of telephone line through time - no blood, gore, gunfights, or explosions folks.

The film actually intertwines the stories of two now famous cooks: Julia Child herself (Meryl Streep), as she discovers the wonders of French cooking while in Paris in 1948 and decides to share it with the average American housewife by writing Mastering the Art of French Cooking; and Julie Powell (Amy Adams), a young American who hated her job and in 2002 found a way out of it by writing a blog chronicling her determination to cook every recipe in Mastering the Art of French Cooking in the space of one year.

Two Stories Boil Down to One
Sure J&J is ostensibly the story of these two aspiring cooks, but to my mind it is really only about one person and one cooking journey: Meryl Streep steals the show so completely as Julia Child that when I think of the movie I barely think of the Julie part of it. This is no slight to Amy Adams, who does a very good job playing the pouty/perky/precocious/pouty New Yorker cooking away her frustrations in life and making her own lucky break in the process. Rather it is a tribute to an actress who hardly needs another tribute (As The Onion is happy to point out).Few actors or actresses reach the height of the dramatic arts with as much class as Ms. Streep. I don't even know where to begin: an angel on earth, appearing in a soft halo of ethereal beauty in The Deer Hunter, a poet dreamer in Out of Africa, an action hero in The River Wild, a bitch goddess to beware of in The Devil Wears Prada, a temptress of the innocent in The Simpsons, and a flinty incarnation of the cold, inhuman power of politics in the 2004 remake of The Manchurian Candidate.

And Meryl Streep is the essence of J&J, outshining the entire cast by reincarnating Julia Child right before our eyes. A cursory viewing of Julia Child clips on YouTube immediately shows how minutely Streep captured every detail ranging from the master chef's cadence of speech to her sweeping body language. The vivacity of this performance cannot be overstated, and the sheer joy with which she plays the sometimes overbearingly bubbly role is evident in every frame

Admittedly I don't know much about Julia Child, and the film may have (and, who are we kidding, probably did) present a biased imaged. One way or the other, it makes for an engaging movie that leaves you smiling, full of culinary optimism, and hungry for beouf bourguignon.

District 9.

District 9 (Neill Blomkamp, 2009) (Bayers Lake) About 30 years ago, a massive alien spacecraft entered earth's atmosphere, passed over the great cities of Washington, Paris, and Rome, and came to rest above Johannesburg, South Africa. And it just hovered there, making no contact and showing no signs of life. As time passed, curiosity got the better of those living in its shadow, and a team was sent up to cut its way into the ship.

First Contact
First contact was not epiphanic nor even remotely uplifting - rather than the marvels of a more advanced civilization, those that entered the ship found a motley crew of dirty, malnourished, and thoroughly stranded arthropod-like aliens. A full-scale humanitarian mission ensued, ferrying the pathetic creatures to earth for resettlement and rehabilitation.

The aliens quickly wore out their welcome, as the people of Johannesburg increasingly resented the time and money that was being spent on the newcomers. Far from integrating into human society, the aliens were herded into District 9, which became a heavily-guarded slum rife with crime (such as an underground cat food market to complement a booming arms trade), gang violence, and prostitution.

District 9 picks up up at around this point, with the government having decided to adopt a policy of "out of sight, out of mind." MNU, the multi-national security company charged with policing alien affairs, is assigned the task of evicting the aliens - derogatorily referred to as prawns - and transporting them some 200 miles into the desert to a makeshift concentration camp.

Wilkus van de Merwe (Sharto Copely) is the hapless (read ignorant) middle manager tasked with overseeing the eviction, which quickly devolves into mayhem as heavily-armed, government-sponsored thugs break into the stinking, broken-down hovels and heap both insult and injury on the degraded inhabitants

Echoes of Reality
District 9 is presented as a pseudo-documentary, and is shot in a grainy, raw light that makes it feel very real - similar to The Hurt Locker, or footage you would see from Iraq or the Middle East on the evening news. Everything we view looks extremely real and, more to the point, plausible: the space ship is dirty and rust-streaked even in its hovering majesty; the aliens are individuals with children to care for and mundane real lives that are very apparent rather than merely sci-fi, special effects eye candy; and the MNU agents are (for the most part) bumbling bureaucrats with very human failings. This is not a slick, spit-and-polished movie with a patina of reality - it is gritty realism done right.

Ranging as it does from pseudo-documentary to gory-horror film, shoot-em-up action movie, and thinking man's sci-fi, the look and feel of District 9 is a great accomplishment in film making and a pleasure to behold - even if the short "gory-horror part" was a little more than I could handle.

This sense of realism is further heightened by - and indeed adds to - the eerie resonance of the aliens' milieu vis-a-vis South Africa's very real experience of apartheid, particularly when the fictional neighbourhood of District 9 is contrasted with historical reality of District 6, an inner-city area of Johannesburg that was forcibly cleared under apartheid.

District 9 opened in South Africa yesterday (August 31), and the viewers I heard interviewed on the radio this morning made much of this retelling of the history of apartheid and the all-to-present legacy of that system today - but those reports strike me as a little biased towards the feel-good marketing side of things.

Social Commentary or Rehashed Stereotypes?
I have no doubt the filmmakers were very aware of the correlations between the fictional world of District 9 and South Africa's history of racism and abuse. However, after viewing the film and discussing it with a few friends, I am not sure that this intention is more than skin deep.

There are three main reasons for this, the most glaring being the stereotypes that the filmmakers fall back on. The slum area of District 9 is not a post-apartheid collection of the disadvantaged segment of South Africa's population. Rather, it is an old-school ghetto inhabited by the near-feral aliens and black African arms dealers, pimps, and drug lords who prey on the newcomers. Now, true to the allegory that the makers claim to be presenting, the aliens move towards a light at the end of the tunnel, ending the film with a glimmer of hope. Not so their black cohabitants, who are a literal embodiment of the heart of darkness, not given even the most subtle hint of redemption.

Secondly, the glimmer of hope that the film ends with is not achieved by the aliens overcoming odds. Rather, it is handed to them by a white bureaucrat (Wilkus) who has seen the essential flaw in his character and taken the high road. No, in District 9 the possibility of dignity for the aliens is a gift from a white ruler, not a natural expression of the will to be free on the part of the oppressed.

Thirdly there is the arc of the story itself, which does, as I alluded to earlier, an incredible job of portraying everything from the spaceship to the aliens as very real rather than as fantasy. However, this tone, which is particularly suited to prompting introspection on the part of the audience, is severely undermined by the film's climax. By abandoning the reality augmented by the odd piece of alien technology that seems altogether feasible in favor of a no-holds-barred alien robot vs human heavy weaponry showdown (the shoot-em-up action sequence alluded to above), any semblance of this being a topical film is lost.

Worth a Visit to the Multiplex
I still recommend District 9 highly, especially - as I discussed above - for the sheer pleasure of experiencing the dystopian reality that the filmmakers have so artfully created. However, I do caution that you should not attend in hope of seeing the in-depth analysis of apartheid-era South Africa that the media has gleefully portrayed it as being. Watch, enjoy, cover your eyes at times - but mostly, discuss the issues I have raised above upon exiting the cinema. Even if the film subverts its supposed intention of educating and/or inspiring its audience, you can bring this analysis of the real world it echoes to the table yourself - that's what I would call responsible viewing.

Inglorious Basterds: Delicious Indulgence

The reign of the summer blockbusters seems to have come to an end, and it has been a marvelous few weeks to be a movie lover!

Inglorious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009) In the opening scenes of Inglorious Basterds, Col. Hans Landa (Christopher Waltz), the notorious German "Jew Hunter," arrives at a small French farmhouse to "investigate" the possible presence of Jews in hiding. Banishing the farmer's three buxom daughters from the house, the two sit down, switch to English, and begin a delightful verbal game of cat and mouse. Landa is a pleasure to listen to, with words seeming to sparkle as they pass his lips, and is equally satisfying to watch, as he visibly takes great pleasure in the dialog Tarantino has furnished him with.

What Landa wants, Landa gets, and with a first blazing flourish of violence capped with one sweet but moment of release, Inglorious Basterds has begun.

Cut to England. Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) is giving his boys - his ten basterds - a pep talk ahead of their deployment deep behind enemy lines on a mission with a sole purpose: to kill Nazis and collect their scalps. And in this film, that is synonymous with killing Germans - cause save one honorary basterd, Tarantino's script allows for only one kind of German: a dyed in the wool, Jew-hating, Hitler-lover Nazi. You will not find an Oscar Schindler (Schindler's List) or a Claus Von Stauffenberg (Valkyrie) in this film...

Game on
From this point on we follow twin stories that slowly converge: that of a mild-mannered young Jewish woman who improbably operates a cinema in Nazi-occupied Paris with the soul help of her African lover, and that of the swaggering basterds. These stories slowly converge towards a delightfully indulgent conflagration that encompasses the ultimate revenge fantasy of the twentieth century - one worthy of the pages of the Sgt. Rock or Sgt. Fury comics of my childhood.

Along the way the audience cringes at the sight of almost unimaginable violence, but always ends up laughing uproarously in a coup of black humor that few save Tarantino and perhaps the Coen Brothers are capable of pulling off . I think back to Pulp Fiction, and the audience roaring with shocked laughter after Jules (John Travolta) accidentally blows Marvin's (Phil LaMarr) head all over the back seat of the car.

And the Award for Best Actor Goes to...
Basterd's is an ambitious, big-budget, Hollywood movie, and there is no doubt that Brad Pitt is the big gun of the cast. His name is emblazoned on the poster and his cocky, redneck American swagger is all over the preview for Basterds. So when it comes to the best actor award for this film, it is seemingly his to give away - and he does.

I like Brad Pitt, I like many of his movies, and I like his character in this film. However, the bottom line is that I found his character pretty one-dimensional in Basterds. Sure he is supposed to be a caricature, but if this is the case he could surely have a little more fun with the role. He could knead it and punch it up into something as gloriously indulgent as the film it inhabits. But no, much as was the case in Burn After Reading, Pitt plays a delightful stereotype perfectly straight - faithfully rendering the typecast to the millimeter without seems to understand that its all in good fun.

So the award goes to ... Christopher Waltz as Col. Landa.

No, I'm not kidding. Waltz gets the fact that he is playing a stereotype, and he is out to have fun with it. He enunciates every word with glee, adds extra flourish to every motion, and drips Dr. Evil-level eeee-vil with every word he utters. Bravo! Tarantino's words become art when Waltz utters them...

Love it or hate it, as you will...
Aside from my measured disappointment with Brad Pitt, which in no way detracted from my enjoyment of the film as a whole, there is little to criticize in Basterds - you either love it or you hate it, period. I hinted before that I was less than pleased to see every German in the film save one portrayed as pure evil, but that is the type of film we are watching - it wouldn't work if you made the evil in Basterds in any way ambiguous or open to interpretation.

My last bit of praise for Basterds will be to commend Tarantino for making a WWII film in which Germans for the most part speak German, the French for the most part speak French, and the English speak English, red neck, a bit of German, and spaghetti Italian. Again, bravo.

Once Upon a Time
Basterds lays it all on the table within five seconds of the beginning, when those five magic words are painted across the screen in medieval script: Once upon a time.... Keep this in mind if you ever find yourself shaking your head (something I never thought to do even when some scenes got a little laborious): this film is indulgence, pure and simple. Roll with it...

Food, Inc.

Food, Inc. (Robert Kenner, 2008) (Park Lane) The basic premise of Food, Inc. is that the way that a society treats its food - plants and animals - mirrors the way that it treats its people. But that can't be true, because if it were, the film would be saying that North Americans are selfish, materialistic, gluttons who value instant gratification, a chemical high, and social isolation over true connection to and communication with each other and the world of wonders that we live in.


Oh. OK ... he may actually have something there.

The Food Factory
Food, Inc. is divided into chapters, each discussing one aspect of the highly mechanized path that food - corn, wheat, fruit, vegetable, chicken, red meat, etc - travels from the expansive factory farms of middle America to the warehouse grocery stores where Americans and Canadian shop. Kenner paints a picture of a food supply chain that has sacrificed nutrition, hygiene, and humane practices (towards workers and livestock) in favour of calories, shelf life, cost cutting, and market share.

Highly disturbing images are de rigeur as the film progresses, ranging from dark, high-density coops housing chickens that cannot even stand under the weight of their enormous breasts to the appalling conditions in which migrant workers risk their lives on slaughterhouse floors. These images do not stand alone, however, as facts and figures accompany at a frenzied rate - like many documentaries with one axe to grind, the facts come so fast and furiously that it is hard to actually "learn" anything specific. Among the scariest bits are the fact that:

• One of every three children and one of every two minority children born after 2000 will develop type II diabetes;
• Middle American farms portrayed on butter and pork chop packages that grace supermarket shelves have long given way to highly automated high-intensity feedlots, nation-state-sized corn fields, and genetically modified crops;
• While five American slaughterhouses controlled 20% of the US market in the 80s, four control about 90% of that market today (not sure I remember the exact figures, that this is the idea).

Phew...and its almost lunch time.

Light on the Horizon
But Food, Inc. is not only about the lamentable state of America's current food supply. It also takes the time to visit and document the efforts of small-scale farmers and food producers who are working to counter these disturbing trends: a rootsy farmer in Virginia who is grass feeding cattle and letting chickens run free and eat worms; farmers that are engaged in life-or-death courtroom struggles to resist the advances of Monsanto and its frankencrops; and the multitude of smaller food processors that are driving and organic revolution, which even Walmart is acknowledging with its decision to provide organic produce in response to customer demand.

But for me, Walmart's shift to providing organic produce also undercuts the hope that Kenner sees in the organic revolution. The very companies that he portrays as having ripped the heart out of North America's food supply are even now co-opting the revolution: Walmart jumping on the organic bandwagon (he does not address the problematic issue of what USDA "organic" actually means) and the myriad of smaller-scale organic producers that are rapidly being bought up by the same conglomerates that he vilifies so thoroughly (Kashi, for example, is now owned by Kraft).

Unfortunately, this leads me to the point where I must note my exceptions to this overall laudable film. With the organic revolution not serving as a solidly positive note to end on, Kenner flails around a bit for a ray of light to end with. I take issue with the fact that he ultimately concludes with an inappropriate comparison between the tobacco companies and food suppliers: he argues that the "fact" that tobacco companies have been brought to heel proves that food producers can also be brought into line. In the first place, I would argue that the assumption that tobacco companies have been brought to heel is just plain mistaken (they remain highly profitable multi-national corporations peddling sickness and decay). I would further suggest that if they had been, it would still be irrelevant - when government "took on" the tobacco companies in the 80s and 90s, corporations were but a shadow of the multi-headed hydras they now are, and they were not nearly as deeply embedded into the fabric of society and the government itself (as Kenner himself points out, most government regulatory agencies are run by former executives of food conglomerates).


Not a "Fun" Film
Ultimately, Food, Inc. is a compelling film that is sure to spark debate among friends and family, but is not a film that you "enjoy" watching - however, as I have said before, respectable films usually raise issues that are pertinent and important but ultimately disturbing. In this sense, I greatly enjoyed Food, Inc. and recommend it highly - not much of what you hear will be new information, but the impact of hearing it together in a more-or-less coherent narrative is worthwhile experience.

That being said, this is not a film that needs to be seen in a theater. The full effect will be conveyed on your home theater system, and, as a bonus, you will be able to pause it and discuss individual points, and/or launch into discussion at the end instead of having to file out of the cinema and drive home while gesticulating and pontificating. Actually, I think that a student union building would be the natural setting in which to watch the film and then hold a panel discussion.

The Hurt Locker

I have a thing for war movies, the legacy of many weekend afternoons spent with my Dad in front of WWII flicks ranging from the shoot-em-up bravado of The Dirty Dozen and The Guns of Navarone (a tradition of war movie seemingly soon to be reincarnated in Brad Pitt's Inglorious Bastards) to veritable docudramas like The Longest Day, Patton, and Der Untergang (Downfall).

WWII is by far the conflict most covered by Hollywood, with the recent HBO mini-series Band of Brothers probably best capturing the individual soldier's experience of this conflict. With the exception of M*A*S*H, the Korean War seems to have been largely skipped over in the cinema, as it has been in the popular imagination (please correct me if I am dismissing classics of the genre). Vietnam, like WWII, has spawned as many films as casualties, with my favorites being Scorcese's The Deer Hunter, Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, Stone's Platoon, and, of course, Coppola's Apocalypse Now.

Modern conflicts are a little harder to address on the silver screen, or over coffee for that matter, as our culture has not had a chance to reach some form of consensus on them (WWII as a righteous campaign, Korea as a "forgotten war,"and Vietnam as superpower hubris). Perhaps for this very reason, the war films - modern and classic - that I love are ones that shy away from explicit judgements on the justification of the specific campaign and more on the individual experience of the soldiers posted to the maelstrom - and filmmakers have not shied from contributing to this aspect of the conversation.

For cinematic treatment of modern wars, my top picks include David O. Russell's Three Kings, Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down, Stephan Gaghan's Syriana (a stunning film that is seemingly out of place, but very relevant in my opinion for its perspective on corporate involvement the US War on Terror), and the recently released The Hurt Locker.

The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2008) (Park Lane) Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner) is replacing the bomb sapper in an active explosive ordinance disposal (EOD) unit nearing the end of its tour in Iraq. Tasked with finding and difussing the seemingly endless number of deadly contraptions that take young lives every day in Iraq, I can't think of a better scenario for investigating the bonds of trust and the sense of connection that I can only imagine that soldiers depend on in the field, each looking out for the other regardless of the grand political slogan that they are fighting for.

Indeed, when James arrives, one his new partners, Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), welcomes him to "Camp Victory." Upon replying that he thought it was "Camp Liberty," James is informed that it was recently changed to something that "sounds better." So the slogans keep changing and soldiers have neither influence over nor allegiance to them, but they can do something about keeping each other alive. Period.

I don't think I need to go into detail regarding why a replacement sapper was necessary, but needless to say, the tight-knit team that James joins is counting the days til they can return State-side, and more than a little bit wary of the unknown quantity that has been thrust upon them. Is James someone that they can trust with their lives?

Early in the film, the recently arrived James is approached by an officer who queries him on his track record. A telling dialog ensues:

Officer: "How many bombs have you disarmed?"
James: "873"
Officer: "873! You're a wild man."

And herein lies the problem: James is a wild man. The dialog continues with the officer asking what the best way is to disarm a bomb, to which James replies "The way that keeps you alive." The thing is, James seems to care just a little bit less about staying alive than do the other members of his team, who quickly find his way or working to be uncooperative and even reckless. During an EOD assignment when James is sent to disarm a booby trapped Hyundai Sonata (product placement gone horribly wrong?), he removes his protective headgear with the glib comment "If I'm going to die, I'm going to die comfortable," and goes on to also remove his radio headset, cutting off communication with his frustrated and scared compatriots.

Where the Wild Men Are

The story arc of The Hurt Locker, in a sense, is how the team members come to trust each other through the process of understanding their individual reactions to being constantly haunted by the specter of death. James, Sanborn, and the younger and more timid Specialist Owen (Brian Gerachty) all share the seemingly standard soldiers' diversions of loud heavy metal music and heavy drinking, but each also has their own private coping strategy:

• James cares less, seeming reckless to others but actually freeing himself of surely crippling fear. He lives by the seemingly contradictory coda that the less you care about living the more likely you are to survive.
• Sanborn trusts procedures, relying on constant contact with the team to ensure that basic army protocols are followed: perimeters are maintained, standard procedures are adhered to, and x-factors (like James) are eliminated.
• Owen has faith in the longevity of his more experienced peers, constantly turning to them for confirmation of the instincts that should be automatic survival mechanisms.

None of these three leopards is about to change his spots, so what we witness is a chain of increasingly intense encounters with progressively more complicated and essentially evil explosive devices planted to kill Americans and wreak havoc for "collaborators." Through these trials by fire we watch the slow and painful process of the three men learning to become - despite their differences - what Shakespeare so aptly called "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers."

I find it interesting that this film was made by a woman, Kathryn Bigelow. In The Hurt Locker, if I recall correctly, there are a total of two female characters who collectively garner about 25 seconds of screen time. On the surface that makes this is a movie about men - brothers, so to speak - in combat, but in reality it probably makes it a realistic portrayal of the war experience. Women soldiers fought on the front line of operation Desert Storm, and, presumably, the subsequent Desert Shield campaign of "shock and awe," but I imagine that they remain statistically irrelevant in combat situations - and probably virtually non-existent in the ranks of EOD specialists that are a hair from death at every moment and reliant on highly specialized and very heavy suits and equipment that are probably still designed with men in mind.

One way or the other, Bigelow, like Ridley Scott in Black Hawk Down, is masterful at her craft. The filming of The Hurt Locker is sublime, with explosive shock waves rolling across the screen like a ripple on a calm lake or the undulation in a flapping satin sheet. The ugliness of the surroundings and the sheer menacing evil of the bombs that James uncovers for our voyeuristic eyes is contrasted sharply with the strange sense of beauty that is evoked by the explosions themselves - the sense of catharsis that allows the viewer to relax again and take a deep breathe. To get a sense of this visual effect, it is only necessary to see the opening flash presentation on the masterfully designed movie homepage (http://thehurtlocker-movie.com/), which boldly declares that the film has "an intensity you can't shake."

I certainly left the theater with the shock waves rebounding in my head, and even a little bit of a feeling that I had experienced something of the EOD specialist's life. I didn't necessarily understand James, Sanborn, and Owen or agree with their individual coping mechanisms - but I felt that maybe I could trust them if, god forbid, I were ever to find myself in such ravaged climes.