The 10 best Arab films. The Night (Al-Lail) Mohammad Malas, 1993.
J. Hoberman Reviews Margarethe von Trotta's New Film 'Hannah Arendt' Barbara Sukowa as Hannah Arendt in Hannah Arendt, a film by Margarethe von Trotta.
(Zeitgeist Films) You can keep Fast & Furious 6 and The Hangover Part III. My guilty pleasure this week is Hannah Arendt (premiering at New York’s Film Forum May 29), the latest collaboration between actress Barbara Sukowa and director Margarethe von Trotta. Guilt, of course, being the operative word. Zero Dark Thirty and the Problem of Pakistan. Zero Dark Thirty has been the subject of heated debate since its early release on Christmas Day last year.
Michael Wood reviews ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ · LRB 21 February 2013. Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty is based, a title-card tells us, on ‘first-hand accounts’, but it’s not a documentary film.
It’s a sort of revenge western, clean, elegant, relentless. Loved ones are killed, a lone hero, in this case a heroine, sets out to find the killer or the man behind the killing; finds him, has him executed. Zero IQ Thirty. Recent Hollywood blockbuster, ‘Zero Dark Thirty’, was quite an experience.
Though sharp in its production and direction and largely accurate in depicting the events that led to the death of Osama Bin Laden, it went ballistic bad in depicting everyday life on the streets of Pakistan. With millions of dollars at their disposal, I wonder why the makers of this film couldn’t hire even a most basic advisor to inform them that 1: Pakistanis speak Urdu, English and other regional languages and NOT Arabic; 2: Pakistani men do not go around wearing 17th and 18th century headgear in markets;
Zero Dark Thirty: the view from Pakistan. It would be nice to watch Zero Dark Thirty in the cinema in Pakistan.
The extraordinary final sequence when Seal Team Six swoops into Abbottabad and raids the compound where Osama bin Laden had remained undetected for six years would definitely benefit from surround sound and a big screen. And it would be fun to listen to the chortles of derision from a Pakistani audience in a real time, rather than following the tweets and Facebook updates of those who watched versions downloaded from the internet weeks before its release in the UK.
But I'm not holding my breath that Kathryn Bigelow's account of the hunt for America's greatest enemy will go on general release here any time soon. The film's distributors have not offered it for theatrical release in Pakistan over concerns that the official censors would take exception to it. So, in Pakistan many people are making do with illegal downloads and pirated DVDs. Zero Dark Thirty: Hollywood's gift to American power. Here is how, in a letter to the LA Times, Kathryn Bigelow justified Zero Dark Thirty's depicting of the torture methods used by government agents to catch and kill Osama bin Laden: "Those of us who work in the arts know that depiction is not endorsement. If it was, no artist would be able to paint inhumane practices, no author could write about them, and no filmmaker could delve into the thorny subjects of our time.
" Really? The '50 Shades of Grey' Film Will Be Better Than the Book (But Still Bad) - Noah Berlatsky. The movie version of E.L.
James's series—which began as Twilight fan fiction—will be an adaptation of an adaptation. Which is at least a better reason to exist than the original novels had. AP / Andrew Matthews 50 Shades of Grey, the erotic romance series by E.L. James, was a massive international best-seller and publishing phenomenon. It's probably needless to say, but I'll say it anyway: The movie is going to be dreadful.
Michael Wood reviews ‘Django Unchained’ · LRB 24 January 2013. This year’s discussions of the Oscar nominations, especially before they were announced, centred on the notion of American history and managed somehow to suggest that this is both a very strange subject for mainstream movies to take on and something they do all the time.
Slaves are freed in Lincoln, a slave takes operatic revenge in Django Unchained, Osama bin Laden is traced and killed in Zero Dark Thirty, Argo recounts an old secret mission in Iran. 0D30. Let’s start with the title, a phrase that probably meant nothing to you before you associated it with this movie.
Apparently “Zero Dark Thirty” means 12:30 a.m. in military parlance, but that’s not what it means to you, Hollywood’s consumer. To you, it means “the name of the movie about the CIA finding and killing Osama bin Laden.” It’s a cipher, a code, a set of words stripped of any context but the meaning which the movie gives them, and in its very absence of meaning, it comes to stand for the movie’s own howling absence of meaning.As Kathryn Bigelow put it, “it’s a military term for 30 minutes after midnight, and it refers also to the darkness and secrecy that cloaked the entire decade-long mission.”
Imagine if the movie was titled “Geronimo,” by contrast. Think about how the name would pass judgment on the events it describes, would frame how they were to be received. To put it simply, this is a movie that teaches you how to fear terrorism and to reassure yourself with torture.