When I was finishing my BFA in the Film Department at the San Francisco Art Institute in the early 00s, Kathryn Bigelow was the school’s most famous filmmaker alum, despite the fact that she matriculated at SFAI as a painter (she studied filmmaking as a graduate student at Columbia after a stint in the Independent Study program at the Whitney Museum). The work of the woman who made Point Break and Strange Days wasn’t exactly part of the curriculum of the then fine art-focused (sometimes to a fault) Film program at SFAI, where Hollywood film was rarely considered worthy of scrutiny; those who did readily embrace her success as part of the school’s pedigree often named glass ceiling smashing as Bigelow’s greatest achievement — as if to say, “Yes, she makes mainly action and genre blockbusters with big name stars, but she’s a woman, so that makes her subversive.” The argument that Bigelow’s work is somehow subversive just because she has a vagina is not only ludicrous, but unnecessary, being that her films are actually subversive. Marked by moral ambiguity, insistently complicating easy distinctions between good and evil, using Bigelow’s patented point-of-view camera to implicate the viewer in the dark worlds and questionable choices of her subjects, her films literally subvert the viewer’s expectations dictated by genre.

And yet the “good for a girl” backhanded praise continues to dog her. At the Q & A after the screening of The Hurt Locker at AFI Dallas on Saturday night, moderator Gary Cogill commented that his favorite book about the Iraq war was written by a woman (The Long Road Home by Martha Raddatz) and then asked Bigelow a question that essentially amounted to, “Isn’t weird that The Hurt Locker is so good, since you’re a girl and all?” Bigelow deflected the question, but the issue came up again when an audience member who introduced herself as a member of Women in Film gushed that it’s “almost miraculous” that Bigelow has “embedded” herself in the making of “big boys movies.” This is when I decided it was time to leave; as i made my way out, I heard Bigelow respond that he choice of material is chiefly “instinctual” and not motivated by a desire to step where she supposedly doesn’t belong by virtue of chromosomal difference.

That the conversation surrounding Bigelow’s work seems to consistently get stuck in the mud of gender politics is all the more tragic in the case of The Hurt Locker, a film of such complex construction and complicated values that it should be able to sustain much deeper inquiry than what it feels like for a girl. If anything, it’s a film that bears the mark of a painter, full of deceptively beautiful imagery masking multiple layers of meaning.

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Today’s news that Summit Entertainment has already chosen a release date for Eclipse, the third entry in theTwilight series, suggests the studio is in a hurry. With New Moon, the second entry in the series, currently in a production surge under the direction of Chris Weitz for a November 20 release date, Summit’s latest decision raises the bar even higher, by placing Eclipse right in the heat of summer 2010’s blockbuster season. What’s the rush?

Former New Line marketing chief Russell Schwartz, whose resume includes a steadily successful franchise about hobbits and rings, offers one piece of advice for the newbies at Summit: Slow down.

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Back in September, Kathryn Bigelow told SpoutBlog that there’s a misconception regarding the failure of movies dealing with the Iraq War because so far we’d really only seen dramatic films about soldiers coming home. We hadn’t exactly seen any war movies about the ongoing conflict. “I mean, war is inherently dramatic, look at Black Hawk Down,” she explained, picking a film released a year prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Now it should make more sense that she referenced that specific title, as a new international trailer for Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker almost makes this film appear to be Black Hawk Down reset in Iraq. There seems to be a lot of similarly chaotic action involving an ensemble of talented actors running around a war-torn metropolis. The main difference is all the stuff with Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD), which actually makes it potentially even more appealing to the action movie crowd, they who never tire of the “which wire do I cut?” cliches.

So why are we only seeing an international trailer, with no domestic release date for The Hurt Locker in sight (Summit Entertainment’s 2009 preview only mentions a Spring opening)? …Read more

Kathryn Bigelow hasn’t made a feature film since 2002’s Harrison Ford starrer K19: The Widowmaker, unless you count the “blink and you’ll miss it” Mission Zero with Uma Thurman. The Hurt Locker returns her to real roots as a character-driven action director, and she gets some terrific performances out of relative unknowns Jeremy Renner and Anthony Mackie in this film about the war in Iraq.

In our interview, she discusses fictionalizing real war stories, what The Hurt Locker does that other Iraq films haven’t, and the everlasting legacy of Point Break.

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The 2008 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival begins today, and Kevin Kelly and I will be there for the next ten days reporting back. What follows is not exactly an iron-clad preview of our Toronto coverage––in addition to some of the films below, I’m definitely planning to see new works by Claire Denis, Agnes Varda, Jonathan Demme and Richard Linklater, and would of course recommend that anyone on the ground see some of my favorites from past festivals, including Medicine for Melancholy and A Christmas Tale. This is more of a list of predictions of what everyone else is going to be talking about, while I’m pushing my glasses up my nose and rushing to to the next screening of the a South Korean movie about drunken lonliness. Enjoy! If you have your own predictions for what will catch fire in Ontario, let us know in the comments.

1. Zach and Miri Make a Porno (TIFF screening info)

Obviously, anything with “porno” in the title has a certain automatic contingent (hello, Google searchers! Sorry to disappoint!) But then, so does anything with the credit “written and directed by Kevin Smith.” And then there’s the leading man. Some perspective: Smith’s last three films have grossed an average of $26 million each; the last three films starring Seth Rogen have grossed an average of $117 million each. With Jay and Silent Bob finally retired (we think/hope), and Rogen in tow for the usual, MPAA-baiting Smithism, Porno could––however ironically––become what Jersey Girl was supposed to be: the tipping point that expands the Smith fan base beyond the longtime Clerks faithful.

2. Slumdog Millionaire (TIFF screening info)

Crowdpleasers make me itch. But then, to borrow a line from David Fincher, I’m an asshole. Assuming you are not, you might be interested to know that Slumdog Millionaire shows all the symptoms of becoming The Next Juno. Like Juno, Slumdog premiered in a TBA slot at Telluride, where reaction from all but our own Kevin Buist was enthusiastic, even hyperbolically so. Also ike Juno, it’s a music-fueled piece of pop art in which young love results from unlikely circumstances. And, thanks to Warner Brothers’ loss of faith in this tier of the distribution market, it’s now being distributed by Fox Searchlight––just like Juno. If looking for The Next Juno is now part of our jobs, at least Searchlight is taking all the arduous work out of it.

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***Director Kathryn Bigelow has cemented a cast for The Hurt Locker, which is, as far as I can tell, the first film by a major Hollywood director to be set in present day Iraq. The film was scripted by journalist Mark Boal, who spent time embedded with a bomb squad. He tells The Hollywood Reporter: “We wanted to show the kinds of things that soldiers go through that you can’t see on CNN, and I don’t mean that in a censorship-conspiracy way. I just mean the news doesn’t actually put photographers in with units that are this elite.”

***Variety’s Brain Lowry watched I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry so that you never, ever have to. And though he concedes that “Sandler’s fans should enjoy hearing him toss off lines about being ‘big-time fruits’ or having ‘boarded the dude train’,” ultimately “it will be slightly depressing if a barrage of schoolyard gay jokes passes for ‘edgy’ a quarter-century after Victor/Victoria.”

***After the massive critical success of her feature directorial debut Away From Her, Sarah Polley will return to the other side of the camera to star opposite Jared Leto in Mr. Nobody. It’s the first English-language feature for Belgian director Jaco Van Dormael, and THR’s Borys Kit says the script is “a multilayered love story inspired by the ‘butterfly effect, the chaos-theory notion that the beat of a butterfly’s wings can cause a storm thousands of miles away.”