Film Sweat: Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
RECOMMENDED: In the most recent issue of lit mag n+1, film critic A. S. Hamrah engages in a fairly daunting task: He spends two months watching every movie about the War on Terror he can find. What he discovers — and what we in turn discover through him — is that War on Terror movies are now a bona fide genre; a vulgar, awful, soul-deadening genre, but a genre nonetheless. So when I tell you that The Hurt Locker was directed by the same person who directed Point Break — Kathryn Bigelow — you may be predisposed to groan. You might also groan at the trailer at right, which sells the movie as the tale of an “extreme” young U.S. Army soldier stationed in Iraq who’s especially adept at defusing bombs — IEDs, specifically — before they go off. But The Hurt Locker isn’t an extended ad for the armed forces, as so many War on Terror movies are, but rather, it’s a morally ambiguous tale of a regular guy who is seduced by war, told in a dispassionate, fly-on-the-wall style that is nevertheless one of the most suspenseful movies you’ll see this year. It is, after all, a movie about a guy trying not to get blown up while faced with one insane bomb after another.
ALSO RECOMMENDED: Here is our major gripe with Brüno, Sacha Baron-Cohen’s latest faux-reality agitprop movie: We think those gay advocacy groups who’ve been sweating the film for months now, worried that it might, in the wrong hands, become an instrument of hatred, just might be right. Here’s why: If you took Borat, pound for pound, and added up its themes and segments, you’d be able to eke out a fairly well-thought-out political statement about American foreign policy, misogyny in less developed countries, and so on. But Brüno’s like-duh main themes seem to be that A) celebrity culture is vacuous and awful and that B) Americans are homophobic mouth-breathers. Well, no shit, Sherlock. On both counts. Brüno hammers these themes — especially the latter — into the ground, over and over again, and nearly wears out its welcome even in its short, 90-minute run. Does that mean that it doesn’t have some truly hilarious bits? No. It does. Does it mean that you don’t need to see it? No, you do. If only to argue with us in the comments. Does it seem like this will have to be the last “gotcha” movie that Baron-Cohen gets to do? Yeah, probably.
ALSO NEW IN THEATERS: I Love You, Beth Cooper, starring Hayden Panettiere in what would seem to be a rehash of every 80s teen screw comedy ever.
July 10th, 2009 at 1:26 pm
here’s what i don’t get about Bruno: the whole schtick is that he goes out and exposes and mocks homophobes, right? well i’m a big homo, a lot of my friends are pretty big homos; i’m no stranger to absurd amounts of faggotry. but if circumstance dropped me into the reception of one of Cohen’s little gotcha skits, i can say without a doubt i would have fucking knocked his teeth out. does this make me a homophobe? or just someone who’s tolerance for bullshit is extremely low? and how can you really make that judgement about any of the victims? it just all seems so half-assed.