Hurt Boom
It’s well and good for The Hurt Locker to have Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic ratings of 98% and 91% respectively, but you know something really special is happening when the notoriously fickle and eccentric N.Y. Press critic Armond White is standing arm-in-arm with the usual elite-critic suspects — i.e., Joe Morgenstern, A.O. Scott, David Denby, David Edelstein, Scott Foundas, Dana Stevens, etc.
Some excerpts:
(a) “The Hurt Locker might be the first Iraq-set film to break through to a mass audience because it doesn’t lead with the paralysis of the guilt-ridden Yank. The horror is there, but under the rush.” — Edelstein, New York;
(b) “So far, the best fiction films about the Iraq War are Nick Bloomfield‘s Battle for Haditha, Irwin Winkler‘s Home of the Brave and John Moore‘s allegorical Flight of the Phoenix remake. It’s sufficient praise to say The Hurt Locker joins that short list. Kathryn Bigelow has found her perfect subject.” — White, N.Y. Press.
(c) “The Hurt Locker is a viscerally exciting, adrenaline-soaked tour de force of suspense and surprise, full of explosions and hectic scenes of combat, but it blows a hole in the condescending assumption that such effects are just empty spectacle or mindless noise. If it’s not the best action movie of the summer, I’ll blow up my car.” — Scott, N.Y. Times.
(d) “With her strength of revealing character through action, Bigelow comes closer to the tradition of Anthony Mann, Sam Fuller, and other bygone practitioners of the classic Hollywood war movie than to today’s dominant breed of studio A-listers, who create (mostly incoherent) action at the expense of character. The Hurt Locker is the best American film since Paul Thomas Anderson‘s There Will Be Blood.” — Foundas, Village Voice.
(e) “In this period of antic fragmentation, Bigelow has restored the wholeness of time and space as essentials for action. Occasionally, a plaintive reader writes me a note after I’ve panned some violent fantasy movie and says something like ‘Some of us like explosions. Ease up.’ Well, I like these explosions, because I believe in them. Realism has its thrills, too.” — Denby, New Yorker.
(f) “A first-rate action thriller, a vivid evocation of urban warfare in Iraq, a penetrating study of heroism and a showcase for austere technique, terse writing and a trio of brilliant performances. Most of all, though, The Hurt Locker is an instant classic that demonstrates, in a brutally hot and dusty laboratory setting, how the drug of war hooks its victims and why they can’t kick the habit.” — Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal.
(g) “After The Hurt Locker (which is without question the most exciting and least ideological movie yet made about the war in Iraq), everyone will remember Jeremy Renner‘s name.” — Stevens, Slate.
Cue all the bloated empties out there in middle America. Are we ready? One, two….”we’re not seeing it because we’d rather just be entertained!”
I was already plenty excited to see this….
“best American film since Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood” just turned it up a notch for me.
“Irwin Winkler’s Home of the Brave and John Moore’s allegorical Flight of the Phoenix remake. ”
He must have figured praising these was more than his normal dose of insane contrarianism.
Flight of the Phoenix? Home of the Brave? Is Armond White kidding? Why does anyone take this man seriously?
does allegorical mean “hit the fast forward button?”
Jeff, are you up to 1o or more viewings yet?
I’m going to see it this weekend and looking forward to it greatly.
The problem is that it’s only opening on two screens in NY, so all these positive reviews will be forgotten about by the time it expands. I hope it does well and becomes a sleeper hit, but it seems like it’s going to be difficult to find a place to see it.
I was just about to say — even in a seemingly mild-mannered and straight-headed review — Armond just can’t resist propping up films like “Home of the Brave” and “Flight of the Phoenix” to make us question our existence as film fans.
The man is either certifiably insane, has poor taste, or is just fooling around because he enjoys watching the aftermath — he’s like The Joker.
Even at the height of its expansion, does anyone know how many theaters “Hurt Locker” will top out at? Is this thing even going to touch 1,200 screens at some point?
White also praises Transformers 2 in the same issue.
I’d like to personally punch in the face EVERY SINGLE fat, bloated, mouth-breathing, retarded, red state, middle-American shit for brains who doesn’t see this film at least twice on opening weekend. (I’ve seen it 156 times)
Not since “Che”, “Zodiac”, “Children of Men” or “Public Enemies” have I seen a film as viscerally exciting as “The Hurt Locker”.
Wells to Travis Crabtree: That’s pretty funny.
Since when is unanimous critical praise anything but completely suspect?
I knew White was crazy, but Irwin Winkler? The worst American director in history.
What’s suspect about unanimous critical praise, p.Vice? Do you think they’re all in cahoots?
Maybe, just maybe, “Up” and “The Hurt Locker” are getting a 97 and 98% Rotten Tomato rating because they are really good movies.
I’ve never considered widespread cretinism to hold potential for some form of mass collusion, but now that you mention it, Crabtree, I think you might be on to something.
And as I’ve learned from experience, really good movies and Rotten Tomatoes percentages rarely have anything to do with each other.
Pixar movies always have very high Rotten Tomatoes ratings not because they’re always 100% masterpieces, far better than any other films made in the last 20 years, but because they’re not aiming high, so it’s easy to accept them for what they are – slightly intelligent, not-too-cute kids movies.
As for Hurt Locker, I’m damned excited about it, although mentioning it in the same breath as “There Will Be Blood” does it no favors for me. What a horrid, thoughtless waste of celluloid that was.
And before I’m criticized as one of those people who has the internet-no-sense-of-middle-ground-disease with everything being either an “AMAZING MASTERPIECE OF EPIC PROPORTIONS” or “A HORRID, THOUGHTLESS WASTE”, I really don’t. I’m usually quite placid, open-minded, and willing to see shades of quality.
There Will Be Blood was genuinely that bad to me.
Consider There Will be Blood a lazy, halfspun anomaly from an otherwise brilliant career.
Chapman, I agree. I admire PTA very much, particularly Hard Eight and Punch-Drunk Love. Magnolia, I thought, was quite good as well, though highly flawed.
But There Will Be Blood was the work of someone in way over their heads.
3 1/2 stars (out of 4) from Slant! Only a pan from Ben Lyons could make me want to see this more.
“Consider There Will be Blood a lazy, halfspun anomaly from an otherwise brilliant career.”
Sorry, but it’s the highlight. A 21st century masterpiece — a gaint, sprawling PTA mindfuck with strokes that recall the great Stanley Kubrick at his most visually perverse in the late 60′s/70′s.
I mean honestly, okay, you didn’t like the film. But Robert Elswit’s photography, Daniel-Day Lewis’ performance, Johnny Greenwood’s score — those three qualities alone are almost impervious to criticism, even if you hated the rest.
Sorry, Chase. I did enjoy the photography, and Greenwood’s score was indeed mindfuckingly evocative, but Day-Lewis’s performance, to me, was a mixture of a bad John Huston impression and one of Al Pacino’s overwrought shout-y look-at-me! performances.
Just saw it today, and I agree with all the praise – this, along with IN THE LOOP, is my favorite movie of the year so far (I’d count RED CLIFF, but so far as I know, it has no U.S. release date yet).
Not to take anything away from its alleged quality (I have yet to see it), but this thing wont make any money. Iraq war movies with no stars dont make money.
Neither do Iraqi war movies WITH stars, or even multiple Oscar-winners, but that’s a different argument for a different day.
The best PTA film is Punch-Drunk Love.
And that’s final.
P Vice:
“Since when is unanimous critical praise anything but completely suspect?”
Exactly my point.
I keep telling people who are enthusiastic about this movie solely from reading its good reviews to temper that excitement by reading the two bad review the movie got.
I agree the movie is decent, but it did not change my life, and I feel that the criticism it received from those two bad reviews was justified, completely sensible and not delusional hysteria like all the rest.
Stringer,
Iraq movies WITH stars ALSO don’t make money.
Woops, Edhaven beat me to it.
Just got back from a morning screening. It was very good, but I think the ecstatic reviews are only going to leave people feeling a bit disappointed. It was a really first-rate war movie, but I think to go overboard and claim it’s a classic for the ages is a bit much. And no offence Wells, but I really can’t understand why someone would go see it five times in the theater.
Renner and Mackie were excellent and it was tense as all hell. But we didn’t really get into the heads of the soldiers that much. Mackie’s character didn’t have much to him really. Only Renner was really fleshed out that much, and it was kind of obviously signposted when some characters were going to meet their doom.
That said, it was a top-notch war movie and so I’d give it 4/5. Just don’t expect it to be as good as it’s being made out to be.
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