So these three are the last three I was able to catch as the flu conspired to trim my movie-going even further. I know. Excuses, excuses. Still, I have some important things to tell you about:
After you do enough annual top ten lists you start to have a sixth sense for what films are secretly wrangling for a spot in the back of your brain before you even begin making those considerations. For me, The Hurt Locker is the first one for 2009.
With an economy that belies its 130 minute run time, director Kathryn Bigelow's breakthrough (I knew she had potential, but damn) tells the story of three bomb defusers in Iraq. That's it. There's no twisted plot. There doesn't need to be. The episodes depicted contain enough tension and misery to place this in the upper echelons of war films, period, much more Iraq War films which, to date, has been a pretty sorry lot (not counting docs — there are a ton of good Iraq docs).
I would say it's incidental that the film takes place in Iraq, but the dynamics of urban warfare in the 21st century add a particular flavor of intensity. The death-can-come-at-any-moment thing gets heightened when you don't know if that guy standing over there is trying to kill you or just making a call on his cell phone. To put a finer point on it, you don't know if you should kill that guy standing over there who may just be making an innocent call on his phone.
All of the performances here are knockout, which is key since you come to care for these characters deeply and wonder on an almost minute-by-minute basis if they're going to be alive in the next frame. Jeremy Renner in particular (whom you might recognize as the bad guy in S.W.A.T. but, if you're me, will always be that bad-ass vampire that Angel sired in season one of Angel) turns in - I'll say it - an Oscar-caliber performance as Staff Sergeant James, who begins as a bit of the "guy who takes crazy risks" cliché but quickly becomes a very sad, very compelling portrait of the strange, needy relationship men can have with war.
Two investigators (Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond) look into a series of grisly murders in middle-of-nowhere USA. Good premise, except I figured out the Big Spoiler about ten minutes in.
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