So a movie about war won this year's Oscar for best film. Its director won the award for best director too - Ms Bigelow is the first female director to be so honored- that's definitely good news. Mystic Medusa wrote about Bigelow's astrology yesterday, so I won't bother to repeat it.
As for the movie - I haven't seen Hurt Locker yet, and am not sure I want to see it having read the synopsis and reviews. The idea of movie makers' bank accounts growing fat by depicting, as entertainment, our most current version of man's inhumanity to man makes me feel decidedly queasy. War movies depicting history are slightly more acceptable - as long as they don't glorify the horror of war in a juvenile gung-ho fashion.
The only movies with a war theme I've been able to stomach can be counted on one hand (and still have fingers left over): The Great Escape, From Here to Eternity, and the best and least lauded of all, Carl Foreman's The Victors.
It's ironic that a movie like Hurt Locker can win an Oscar in 2010, while, in the early 1960s The Victors was more or less blacklisted. It had certain sections cut out of it after preliminary screenings - sections never to be seen again......presumably because they were too anti-war, or "anti-American". I've noticed a few less than complimentary reviews still available on-line, written by then contemporary US film critics.
I saw the movie back in 1963, in England. I've never forgotten it. My husband had neither seen nor heard of it, so not long ago I went about trying to find a VHS or DVD recording of the movie. I found one, probably a bootleg, and the shortened version. Even in its less than ideal quality the film impressed my husband enough to be keen to find a recording of the full-length original somewhere. No luck so far.
It's inevitable that British and Europeans have different perspectives from Americans on World War 2, or had, in the 1960s, when it was still fresh in many memories. People in the USA have never had bombs raining down upon their cities, night after night. In what one sour critic described as "a mawkish scene" towards the end of the movie, when George Peppard's character is waiting for a 'bus in a northern English back street, in the rain, a kindly family invites him into their home to get dry and have a cup of tea (naturally!) Peppard chats with the family and asks a youngster about his Dad, who is away in the army. "What does your Dad say about the war", he asks. "He says he doesn't like it." A simple, unaffected, underplayed exchange, but it said so much.
As for the movie - I haven't seen Hurt Locker yet, and am not sure I want to see it having read the synopsis and reviews. The idea of movie makers' bank accounts growing fat by depicting, as entertainment, our most current version of man's inhumanity to man makes me feel decidedly queasy. War movies depicting history are slightly more acceptable - as long as they don't glorify the horror of war in a juvenile gung-ho fashion.
The only movies with a war theme I've been able to stomach can be counted on one hand (and still have fingers left over): The Great Escape, From Here to Eternity, and the best and least lauded of all, Carl Foreman's The Victors.
It's ironic that a movie like Hurt Locker can win an Oscar in 2010, while, in the early 1960s The Victors was more or less blacklisted. It had certain sections cut out of it after preliminary screenings - sections never to be seen again......presumably because they were too anti-war, or "anti-American". I've noticed a few less than complimentary reviews still available on-line, written by then contemporary US film critics. I saw the movie back in 1963, in England. I've never forgotten it. My husband had neither seen nor heard of it, so not long ago I went about trying to find a VHS or DVD recording of the movie. I found one, probably a bootleg, and the shortened version. Even in its less than ideal quality the film impressed my husband enough to be keen to find a recording of the full-length original somewhere. No luck so far.
It's inevitable that British and Europeans have different perspectives from Americans on World War 2, or had, in the 1960s, when it was still fresh in many memories. People in the USA have never had bombs raining down upon their cities, night after night. In what one sour critic described as "a mawkish scene" towards the end of the movie, when George Peppard's character is waiting for a 'bus in a northern English back street, in the rain, a kindly family invites him into their home to get dry and have a cup of tea (naturally!) Peppard chats with the family and asks a youngster about his Dad, who is away in the army. "What does your Dad say about the war", he asks. "He says he doesn't like it." A simple, unaffected, underplayed exchange, but it said so much.
