The Hurt Locker Beats Avatar in 2010 Oscars

The Hurt Locker took the Oscars by storm, winning six of the major film honors, including best movie and best director for Kathryn Bigelow who became the first woman to win that award.

The drama about a squad of bomb defusing specialists and the emotional toll war takes on them also secured writer Mark Boal the Academy Award for best original screenplay, and claimed honors for film editing, sound editing, and mixing.

Hurt Locker and Bigelow won Oscars over stiff competition from her ex-husband James Cameron, whose sci-fi adventure Avatar; is the top-grossing movie ever with $2.5 billion at box offices and was seen as a favorite for best movie. Bigelow said, “This really is, there’s no other way to describe it, it’s the moment of a lifetime.”

The Hurt Locker Wins Big

The Hurt Locker, a little-seen war film with massive backing from the critics, pushed past Avatar & other crowd-pleasers to win the best picture Oscar at a Sunday night ceremony here, while its director, Kathryn Bigelow, became the first woman to win the directing award.

A night of firsts: Film on Iraq war grabs four awards. Kathryn Bigelow makes history becoming the first woman to win best director; best actor, actress, supporting actor, supporting actress go to first-timers

“There’s no other way to report it, it’s the moment of a lifetime,” said Bigelow in accepting her award. It was presented by Barbra Streisand, who announced it with the words, “Well, the time has come.”

Avatar & The Hurt Locker had come in to the night as favourites, but the smaller film took the prize from the bigger in the finish.

Mark Boal, a producer of The Hurt Locker, said of his modest expectations when the movie was shot back in 2007, “Hopefully, they would find a distributor & someone might even like the movie.”

Time for only one Oscar film? Make it Basterds

See "Inglourious Basterds" in lieu.

The Academy Awards are Sunday, March 7, which means that if you haven't seen all 10 nominees for best picture, you'd better hurry.
But what if, realistically, you can catch only two? It is a hard call, because most of the movies are well worth seeing, and you need to be part of the larger conversation about winners and such. The smart money is on "Avatar" or "The Hurt Locker" to take home best-picture gold.

It is not the best of the 10; two can certainly make the case that "The Hurt Locker," "A Serious Man," "Up," "Precious" and "Up in the Air" all are better (and, two way or another, I have).

But if you are preparing for the night that celebrates movies, why not see a movie that celebrates them as well?

In his World War II fantasy, Quentin Tarantino pulls out all his favorite moviemaking devices, including grim humor, ludicrous violence and crackling dialogue, to make a movie that features film as a central character.

The opening scene, in which Christoph Waltz (the likely supporting-actor winner), as a Nazi officer, interrogates a dairy farmer about the whereabouts of a Jewish relatives they believes is in hiding, is a tour de force of escalating tension until it is unbearable. And a scene in a basement pub bounces razor-sharp dialogue back and forth among a host of characters until it proves that, in Tarantino's world, words mean so much that uttering the wrong ones can be deadly.

Brooklyn's Finest

Inside the automobile, the accent is Vincent D'Onofrio, in two of those great character bits they used to do before they started his Olympic scenery chewing on "Law & Order: Criminal Intent."

The camera creeps up on a dark automobile, quiet street. In voiceover they listen to a peculiar New York accent telling how they got off on a DUI arrest because they had been fleeing from Mob thugs. "That's a true story," they insists.

At no point will Hawke or any of his big-name co-stars disappear in to their roles in "Brooklyn's Finest." It is not that the acting is bad, but the film, directed by Antoine Fuqua ("Training Day") & written by first-timer Michael C. Martin, takes its arty ambitions so seriously that the audience basically cannot.

It is a short role. As soon as they gets to the punch line, they takes a bullet to the head from dirty cop & lapsed Catholic Ethan Hawke, who scoops up a bag of money & scurries away.

& so the characters remain Detective Hawke, Officer Richard Gere & Don Cheadle, an undercover cop posing as a high-level drug dealer. Their parallel story lines are traced in film that pretends to the thoughtful intricacy of "Crash," the gritty realism of "The Wire" & the stylish intensity (& high body count) of "The Departed." , it is another collection of noir-lite clichés.

Hawke is racking up clandestine felonies trying to gather money for a deposit on a house. His asthmatic wife suffers from the mold in their tumbledown abode, but his selfless motives cannot wash the blood off his hands. (That is literal blood on his hands, from that bag of money. "Brooklyn's Finest" is large on obvious visual symbolism.)

Gere is a uniformed officer checking off the days till his retirement. (Again, literally, on a calendar hanging in his locker.) They first meet him sitting bolt upright to his alarm. They reaches for a shot of whisky, then sticks his revolver in his mouth & pulls the trigger. Nothing in the chamber.
Finally, there is Detective Cheadle, who is been impersonating a gangster so long they is no longer sure of his loyalties; it doesn't help that they cannot trust his handlers in the department, who like to shout things like, "You think you are a hard guy?" Unfortunately, the character is a lot less interesting than DiCaprio's in "The Departed," & Cheadle shows small rapport with his kingpin buddy, Wesley Snipes.

To add some street cred, the cast includes a few alumni of HBO's "The Wire," including Michael K. Williams (Omar) & Hassan Johnson (Wee-Bey), as drug enforcers. There is & a subplot about community protests over a case of police brutality, which only seems to raise the thematic stakes. In lieu, it is another filmic tool, like the deep shadows & oversaturated colors of the cinematography & the tense ambient soundtrack.

Cop Out

The idea of a buddy-cop comedy starring Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan as partners sounds like something ripe to make fun of. But how can they, when director Kevin Smith beats us to the punch? Despite reasonable doubts, the wink-and-a-nod "Cop Out" is not all that bad. Smith pushes Morgan even further over the top than usual, reins Willis in (they mostly stands around, looking bemused at Morgan's antics) and comes up with a movie that makes tiny sense, is dumb when it is not being stupid and yet is still sometimes laugh-out-loud funny.

A scene at the beginning of the film makes Smith's agenda clear. Paul (Morgan) insists on interrogating a suspect. Jimmy (Willis) watches as Paul runs through a series of movie quotes, ranging from the semi-appropriate ("Heat") to the ridiculous ("Star Wars") to, well, to "Dirty Dancing." So does Smith, dipping in to the well of practically every buddy-cop comedy you have ever seen, and doing so with glee. There is plenty of menace and violence, like in the "Beverly Hills Cop" and "48 Hours" movies. But most scenes are played for laughs, as well as a surprising number hit their mark.

It is an homage, Paul explains, an explanation that would over more weight if they pronounced the word right. No matter. It is funny, with Morgan growing increasingly manic, saliva flying as they calls up one quote after another. Jimmy's daughter (Michelle Trachtenberg) is getting married and wants an pricey wedding they cannot pay for, after they and Paul get suspended for botching a bust. Her smarmy step-dad (Jason Lee) is willing to foot the bill, but the proud Jimmy won't listen to of it. In lieu, they decides he'll sell a rare baseball card. But the memorabilia store he is gone to for an appraisal is robbed by the addled Dave (an out-and-out hilarious Seann William Scott), who makes off with the card.


Dave will prove useful to Jimmy and Paul (shades of "Lethal Weapon") as they work their way to Poh Boy (Guillermo Diaz), a drug dealer with designs on expanding his empire. They also has a fascination with baseball memorabilia, including, naturally, rare cards. If Jimmy and Paul can find a missing Mercedes for Poh Boy, he'll give them the card. Finding the automobile is no problem for them (one of their leads is a blue-mouthed kid automobile thief), but there is, of coursework, more to it than that. The finer details of the plot are not effective. Neither, , are Kevin Pollak and Adam Brody as rival cops. For nice measure, writers Robb and Mark Cullen throw in a plot line involving Paul being jealous of his wife (Rashida Jones).

Other bits work better, such as Susie Essman, channeling the curses-like-a-sailor character they plays on "Curb Your Enthusiasm," lambasting Jimmy and Paul with paint-peeling language, even as they saves them. But it is Morgan's movie. His and Smith's. This is the first film Smith has made that they didn't write, but they brings his usual pop-culture sensibility to it; without that, it would be hack work. "Cop Out" is not as nice as the films it continually salutes ("Lethal Weapon," "Beverly Hills Cop" and, , "48 Hours" were all nice, before they went down the sequel rabbit hole). But it is nice at what it does. Smith is not making fun of the movies they references. He is paying them offbeat tribute. An homage, you might say.

Don't miss: 'Minority Report'

This is not a slight. It is that Spielberg's greatest movies - "Jaws," "E.T." & "Schindler's List" among them - are so iconic that sometimes his minor-statement, major-entertainment fare like this gets lost in the shuffle.

Don't let it. Tom Cruise is nice as John Anderton, a police chief at work in a future in which criminals are arrested & charged before they commit crimes. The cops rely on the work of "precogs," psychics who lie in water or some such liquid & foretell future murders; the police department then rushes to prevent the crime & arrest the suspect. Imagine Anderton's surprise - & terror - when the precogs identify him as the next suspect.

There has to be some mistake, they figures, but the precogs don't make mistakes. His only hope is a "minority document," in which three of the three precog's vision disagrees with the other one. Spielberg is an expert at ratcheting up tension, & there is lots of that. & Cruise's Anderton is not the usual nice guy we are used to seeing him play. In lieu, Anderton is addicted to an illegal drug, unable to shake the disappearance of his young son. It is a more-layered performance than, say, his work in the "Mission: Impossible" movies. Then again, what is not? Still, they does nice work here. The scene in which they creatively figures out a way around the eye-scanning identification, well, that is memorable.

Cruise & Spielberg would work together again on a remake of "War of the Worlds" with less successful results. That work felt more like one heavyweights going through the motions. "Minority Document," on the other hand, with its healthy streak of paranoia & mistrust of authority, was more like one stars who had something to say, & said it well.

Drinking Blood: New Wonders of Alice’s World

Since “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and its sequel, “Through the Looking-Glass,” were first published 150 years ago, Alice’s tale has been retold in lots of versions and lots of media, including as a musical, anime, video game and over a score of film and tv adaptations. But for Mr. Burton the abundance and familiarity of the material “in the subconscious and in the culture” was an incentive — not a deterrent — to take it on.

Directed by Tim Burton, “Alice in Wonderland,” a 3-D blend of live action and animation that opens Friday, is meant as a contemporary, subversive take on a cherished story. With the 20-year-old Australian actress Mia Wasikowska, who had a breakout role in the first season of HBO’s “In Treatment,” as Alice, it begins with an unwanted marriage proposal before veering off in to Underland, where Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter and Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen await.

Linda Woolverton, the film’s screenwriter, had a similar attitude. They said that when they began her script, they “did a lot of research on Victorian conventions, on how young girls were supposed to behave, and then did exactly the opposite.” As they put it, “I was thinking more in terms of an action-adventure film with a female protagonist” than a Victorian maiden.

“I’ve seen mostly everything, but there’s never been a version for me that works, that I like or that blows me away,” they said this month in a phone interview from Los Angeles. “It always ends up seeming like a clueless small girl wandering around with a bunch of weirdos. And the fact that there was no three definitive version was helpful. It’s not like the Disney cartoon was the greatest. So I didn’t feel that pressure to match or surpass.”

“I do feel it’s important to depict strong-willed, empowered women,” they added, “because women and girls need role models, which is what art and characters are. Girls who are empowered have a chance to make their own choices, difficult choices, and set out on their own road.”

That emphasis on self-esteem and moral uplift has long been characteristic of Ms. Woolverton’s work — and of Disney itself. Originally a writer for children’s tv programs like “Ewoks” and “Teen Wolf” and also the author of a pair of novels for young adults, they wrote the screenplays of “Beauty and the Beast” and “The Lion King” and also contributed to “Mulan,” all for Disney.

This “sisters are doin’ it for themselves” reading of Alice also comes with a coda, three that seems inspired more by Joseph Conrad than by Carroll. Refusing to marry, Alice in lieu decides to prove her mettle by shipping out to a trading post her father’s company designs to open in a China that, under force of British arms, has been compelled to legalize the opium trade, cede Hong Kong and permit its citizens to be sent abroad as indentured servants.

Thus the river of tears that a confused Alice cries in Carroll’s original text on arrival in Wonderland has been written out of the story. “I couldn’t have her break down like that,” Ms. Woolverton said. Similarly, a drawing by John Tenniel, the illustrator who worked with Carroll, showing a boy fighting the dragonlike Jabberwock, as it was first called, was transformed in to an picture depicting Alice in action.