Why ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ Fails

The Hurt Locker’s story offered a microcosm of war that did not try too hard to address the larger subject of the tragic invasion of Iraq, and so a viewer had no cause to compare the film’s choices to a record of historical fact.

Zero Dark Thirty has the inverse shape: it is an epic history that the filmmakers try to compress into a microcosm, by telling the story of the decade-long bin Laden hunt, which involved many hundreds of CIA officers and military personnel, primarily through the experience of a single analyst, “Maya,” who is played by Jessica Chastain, and who is based on a real-life CIA employee whom Boal reportedly met. In the film, the personal story of Maya’s pursuit of bin Laden—which is original and convincing—is juxtaposed against explosive external events, such as the terrorist attack in London on July 7, 2005, and the bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, Pakistan, in 2008. As much as the filmmakers’ claims to journalistic method, this narrative approach—the summoning of recent, dramatic public events—invites the viewer into judgment about the film’s reliability.

The first problem in assessing Zero Dark Thirty’s fealty to the facts about torture is that most of the record about the CIA’s interrogation program remains secret, including the formally sanctioned use of waterboarding and other brutal techniques between roughly 2002 and 2006. So does the full record of theCIA’s search for bin Laden after September 11. Documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups, as well as work by investigative journalists such as Dana Priest of The Washington Post, Jane Mayer of The New Yorker, Mark Danner in this journal, and Adam Goldman of the Associated Press, have brought forward some details about the CIA’s interrogation program. Yet the record remains riddled with gaps and unanswered questions.

Cornel West

Cornel West explains why it bothers him that Obama will be taking the oath with Martin Luther King, Jr.'s bible

Michael Haneke: There's no easy way to say this…

Michael Haneke's Palme d'Or-winning film Amour will strike some as brutal, as its elderly characters grapple with the indignities of ageing. The director proves a challenging subject to interview as he evades and obstructs – much like his films.
Michael Haneke likes to say that his films are easier to make than to watch. Cast and crew have fun, but he expects his audience to be disturbed, affronted, even sickened. "On the set I make jokes," he said when we met in Paris to discuss Amour, which deservedly won him the Palme d'Or at Cannes this year. "I can't get too involved, or it turns into sentimental soup. I try to keep it light."

Amour -Michael Haneke's second Palme d'Or

The title is a challenge: not ironic, not celebratory, and yet somehow not complicated either. "Love" is boiled down to something elemental, something like survival, or perhaps the exact opposite, though calling it L'Amourmight have been to risk a pun. This is Michael Haneke's second Palme d'Or winner and shows the director as a film-maker of incomparable seriousness and weight, and this is a passionate, painful, intimate drama to be compared with Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage.

La CIA: conexión Hollywood

“Al llegar vimos unos apaches”, asegura el oficial novato. A lo que John Wayne responde: “Si los vio, señor, no eran apaches”. Este famoso diálogo de Fort Apache resume la obsesión por el enemigo escondido, acechante y letal, ya sean indios, infiltrados comunistas como en la época de la Guerra Fría o terroristas islamistas, que ha marcado la visión de la seguridad de Estados Unidos y que ha sido trasladada tantas veces al cine. Tampoco es una casualidad que la operación para matar a Osama Bin Laden llevase el nombre del más famoso caudillo apache: Jerónimo.

La CIA y el espionaje siempre han formado parte de la cultura estadounidense pero este año, como ha quedado claro en los Globos de Oro que se entregaron la semana pasada, la pasión por la agencia ha superado todos los límites. Dos de los filmes de la temporada, Argo y La noche más oscura, la minuciosa reconstrucción de la caza y captura de Bin Laden, tratan directamente de la organización (y de Oriente Próximo, otra obsesión del cine político) y una de las series que más galardones recogió es Homeland, que va de los mismos temas pero desde la ficción. A diferencia del Reino Unido, donde los servicios secretos tienen una sólida tradición literaria que va desde clásicos como Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Lawrence Durrell o William Boyd, además de John Le Carré, claro, en Estados Unidos el espionaje tiene una tradición mucho más popular, está mucho más cerca de Jason Bourne que de George Smiley, hay mucho más cine que grandes obras literarias, con dos excepciones: El fantasma de Harlot (Anagrama), el novelón que Norman Mailer dejó inacabado en el que relata la historia reciente de Estados Unidos a través de la CIA, y La compañía (Paidós),de Robert Littell, otra rotunda y estupenda novela sobre el mismo tema. De hecho, El buen pastor, la película de Robert de Niro sobre el nacimiento de la CIA, fue escrita por Eric Roth cuando desistió en su imposible adaptación de El fantasma de Harlot.

Michael Haneke’s ‘Amour’

A masterpiece about life, death and everything in between, Michael Haneke’s “Amour” takes a long, hard, tender look at an elderly French couple, Georges and Anne — played by two titans of French cinema, Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva — in their final days. Set in contemporary Paris, it begins with the couple’s front door being breached by a group of firemen. One moves through the rooms, delicately raising a hand to his nose before throwing open several large windows. He may be trying to erase the smell that probably brought the firemen there in the first place and which has transformed this light, graceful, enviable apartment into a crypt.

Django Unchained -slavery western

Foxx plays Django, a slave in 1858, who on being transported through Texas in the bitter winter cold, has a fateful encounter with the extraordinary Dr King Schultz, a mysterious German former dentist played by Christoph Waltz with dapper and dainty eccentricity and smilingly faultless English. Django's new friend gives him a taste of freedom, but is astonished to learn of his connection with a fellow slave, a beautiful woman named Broomhilda (Kerry Washington); it is a mis-hearing of the name "Brünnhilde" given by her German masters. She is being held at the plantation Candieland in Mississippi, owned by the revolting racist and sadist Calvin Candie, unforgettably played byLeonardo DiCaprio. Somehow, and with Schultz's help, Django must get her out. His soul will never be unchained until he sets his love free and takes a terrible revenge on her oppressor.