It's been quite some time since my last blog post. I haven't really had much to say over the past few weeks, and now that I'm back in Pittsburgh, I am settled in and ready to begin writing more stuff, especially with the Oscars coming up. I'm planning on an Oscar reactions post later this weekend, but I wanted to hold off on commenting on the nominations until I had seen Zero Dark Thirty. Normally, I would have been all over the nominations from the second they were announced, but I couldn't do that until I saw the highest-acclaimed movie of the year.
Highest-acclaimed. 94% on Rotten Tomatoes. Universal praise from everybody, including Grantland writer Andy Greenwald, who said that ZDT made The Hurt Locker look like an episode of the Cleveland Show. So last night as I sat in my seat at the midnight showing, I knew this movie had to be incredible for me to like it, because I always have problems with my pre-viewing expectations. Especially with Kathryn Bigelow directing. I liked The Hurt Locker, but I loved about seven movies in 2009 and 4 of them are in or around my top ten films of all time. So going in I had the idea that Bigelow was overrated.
Well, I was wrong. Zero Dark Thirty is head and shoulders above every other movie I have seen this year. Everything about it was mesmerizing. From the opening scene, the viewer is dropped into the hunt for Osama Bin Laden and Bigelow does an outstanding job making you feel emotion with every bit of action. You end up feeling bad for everybody. The detainees, the CIA operatives, everybody. It's just such an engaging movie-going experience. One would expect to be rooting for Seal Team Six, but by the time the actual raid of Bin Laden's compound is happening, the intensity has been so encapsulating that there's no more emotion to do so. Instead, you're captured in the whirlwind of maybe the most visceral movie of all time, hoping that killing Bin Laden leads us to some sort of inner resolution. And after the final scene, which, in it's own right, contains the best final shot of any movie in recent memory, you're shaken to the core. I left the theater in stunned speechlessness and it took a solid ten minutes to put together a fragment of my emotions, which were left shattered in pieces on the theater floor, into words.
I would have no problems with Zero Dark Thirty winning every award it is nominated for. It is completely deserving of a landslide Best Picture, and Jessica Chastain should absolutely win Best Actress for the finest performance of any actor this year. But just as the Oscar race settled into a Lincoln -vs.-ZDT-for-Best-Picture affair, Kathryn Bigelow was shockingly left out of the Best Director nominations. Recent Oscar trends show that Best Picture and Best Director tend to fall hand in hand, and the Academy has seemingly made a statement that Lincoln will win both awards and sweep the Oscars.
I saw Lincoln a week ago, and didn't feel like I should write a blog post about it. It's just not my kind of movie. Daniel Day Lewis! Slavery! Freedom! It was boring to me, as I knew it would be when I sat down to watch it. It's a fine film, but it's pure Oscar bait, and frankly, I don't think it's that hard to make a great movie when you've compiled a bunch of A-listers debating over the most important events in American History. And I can see why people are loving it - because it's the kind of movie where you feel happy and accomplished at the end. That's the kind of movie that wins Best Picture.
Maybe it's the torture scenes, or that the events of May 1 happened too soon ago, or that Bigelow won the Best Director/Picture package in 2009. But simply put, Zero Dark Thirty was the best movie of the year. It was also the most important and the most engaging and frankly, I haven't had an experience like that in the theater for a long, long time. Five stars, and a pantheon-level movie for the ages.
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