Salon.com > zd30

Kathryn Bigelow is modifying her tune

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 19:21:00 +0000

Kathryn Bigelow can't stop breaking her silence.

The director of "Zero Dark Thirty" has had a not-entirely-jocular interview on "The Colbert Report," written an Op-Ed for the Los Angeles Times, and now appears on the cover of Time. (The venerable magazine notes that this is only the 12th appearance by a director on the cover, as Bigelow joins the likes of Steven Spielberg, Woody Allen, and David Lean.)

It represents a gradual shift away from the presentation of "Zero Dark Thirty" as a sort of documentary or "reported film" and toward portraying it as just a movie. The Time interview goes into detail about Bigelow's artistic and aesthetic impulses, and allows her to walk back some of the claims about her film's extraordinary, extra-cinematic nature, a task she also undertook with Charlie Rose today when she called her film "a movie, not a documentary."

Is Jon Stewart turning off his fan base?

Sat, 19 Jan 2013 19:00:00 +0000

Jon Stewart is known among his fans for speaking truth to power -- see his dismantling of the CNN show “Crossfire,” for instance, or his criticism of President George W. Bush and the “Mess O’Potamia” in Iraq on “The Daily Show.” However, his recent work may have turned some liberals against him.

Stewart defended present-day cinema punching bag “Zero Dark Thirty” as having not been made in cooperation with the government and said the torture it depicts is “difficult,” raising the ire of liberals across the blogosphere. (Andrew Sullivan wrote that “this subject is too important for equivocation or the ‘I'm just a comedian’ cop-out.”)

Then came Stewart's smug dismissal of the “trillion-dollar coin” idea floated in order to stop the debate debacle in Congress. While the idea was not tenable for many reasons (including optics), Stewart’s open mockery and suggestion of alternatives got him in hot water with Paul Krugman, the Nobel-winning economist and New York Times columnist.

Does truth really matter to Oscar?

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 17:08:00 +0000

Oscar voting hasn't even started yet, but "Zero Dark Thirty" has already been through about 15 cycles of backlash. Most recently, director Kathryn Bigelow — surprisingly not nominated for an Oscar this year — defended her work in the pages of the Los Angeles Times.

"On a practical and political level, it does seem illogical to me to make a case against torture by ignoring or denying the role it played in U.S. counter-terrorism policy and practices," Bigelow writes, in response to critiques that the movie overemphasizes the role of torture, that the creators of this work of "reported film" have been spun by the CIA. The disclaimer attached to the film, “Based on Firsthand Accounts of Actual Events," hasn't mollified critics.