This film was important to me. This film is my American history. I marked off the events in this film with the milestones of my life. This terrorist attack happened the year I got married, that one two weeks before my first child was born, etc. I felt firsthand the pain, fear, frustration, confusion, ambivalence and anger, anger, anger that we all experienced. This is my Normady beach moment in film and I wonder if I will linger over it in future viewings. I did not know how badly I needed to see this go down, but I did.
I think Zero Dark Thirty was expertly made. I thought it showed restraint and avoided cliches and stereotypes. I thought it gave the proper heft and seriousness to these events without either minimizing or elevating them. (And I think any time you want me to love a navy seal while he's sorting through adults and children to kill just the right ones, put Chris Pratt in a uniform.) My only complaint was a five to eight minute section of the film where the pacing just seemed to fall right through the floor.
I think nailing this movie down was harder to do than it looked on screen and I do think Kathryn Bigelow was very sadly and mistakenly left off of the nominee list. My assumption has been that they just decided you can't get nominated two years in a row, but they were wrong to leave her off. (Unless, that is, they were simply following the unspoken rule of the cinema: it's not a good film if they don't say the title in the movie!)
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