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

At the cinema, 2008 was the year when it was hip to depart from the moral outrage any conscientious individual might feel about our countries’ on going illegal and immoral war 6,000 miles away. Light satire, be it of the buddy (Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay) or “five minutes in the future, things will be even more remarkably FUBAR” variety (War Inc.) were fashionable. Stop-Loss, much like last year’s ill conceived Lions for Lambs, luke warm Rendition and sneakily powerful In the Valley of Elah, was too sincere for most audience members and a large swath of critics’ taste. On the other hand, did we really need Morgan Spurlock to go looking for Osama Bin Laden? What if he would have found him? That might have been a beheading worth watching.

Thankfully the much-maligned documentarian Nick Broomfield, best known for his perpetual work-in-progress (i.e. shoddily constructed), Tragic Musicians of the 90s Docs Kurt and Courtney (1998) and Biggie and Tupac (2002), finally surfaced with a genuinely terrific film. His 2007 TIFF entry Battle for Haditha, a picture that, in perhaps the year’s biggest cinematic surprise given its author’s dubious track record and relative inexperience in the realm of narrative, is so eerily verisimilar that it puts much of what one could accurately call combat cinema to shame.

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• Despite the rule that audiences prefer comedies during tough financial times, the box office winner over the weekend was the thriller Lakeview Terrace with $15.6 million. Director Neil LaBute had his best opening ever with the film, and it’s certain to be his highest grossing film overall, so business-wise he’s making up for Wicker Man. Meanwhile, of the new comedies, My Best Friend’s Girl debuted well below expectations (#3 with $8.3 mil.) and Ghost Town seems to have described its auditoriums (#8 with $5.3 mil.). My theory is that audiences were for some reason craving period pieces this past weekend (see the excellent per-screen averages for new limited releases The Duchess and Appaloosa) and went into Lakeview Terrace thinking it was something else entirely.
• Speaking of English period pieces, Nicolas Cage is set to star in one. But don’t suddenly think he’s back to Oscar territory, as the 14th century-set film reunites him with his Gone in 60 Seconds director, Dominic Sena. Titled Season of the Witch, it sounds like a cross between 3:10 to Yuma and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Unfortunately, it’s likely to be nothing of the sort.
• And finally, just because it also has to do with a period drama, and there’s not much else to get excited about in today’s trades, Miramax acquired the rights to Muchas Gracias, Bob Oppenheimer, which is set in Spain in the ’60s and deals with a miltary appeasement mission and a love affair. And yet somehow it’s likened to Saving Private Ryan.

According to indieWIRE, the John Cusack satire War, Inc made an impressive $45,714 on two screens in its opening weekend. Not exactly Iron Man numbers, but a much higher per-screen average than any other film in limited release. For the sake of perspective: Indiana Jones and I’m Vaguely Certain Shia La Beouf’s IMDb Profile Exaggerates His Height made less than a thousand dollars more per screen in its by all accounts sufficiently massive opening weekend; Cusack’s last film, the also war-themed Grace is Gone, made just $50,899 in its entire theatrical run.

So this a victory for indie film, right? Yay! Except, of course, that the movie’s abysmally bad.

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According to Channing Tatum’s official website (no, I’m actually not a regular visitor, but I guess it wouldn’t be a stretch to assume that I spend my free time collecting information on a young, strapping “naturally talented dancer that taught himself how to dance by attending coming-of-age parties in the Hispanic community called Quiceneras when he was growing up in Tampa, Florida”), Kimberley Pierce’s troubled Iraq war drama Stop-Loss will be screening (premiering?) at the SXSW Film Festival in March.

Stop-Loss, Pierce’s first film since the Oscar-winning Boys Don’t Cry in 1999, was initially supposed to open last fall. According to various blog posts, it was then bumped to early March, then to April, and is now scheduled to open on March 28. When the first trailer for the film appeared online in October, Anne Thompson wrote that the Stop-Loss team were “heaving huge sighs of relief that they did not go out this fall, where they would have gotten lumped in with all the other ’serious’ ‘Iraq’ movies.” But regardless of timing, the film has already been damned, to some extent, by synopsis and marketing campaign alone.

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