Thursday, May 27, 2010

Thursday American Cinema Classic

Welcome to the final installment of Thursday American Cinema Classic. I was taking a course called American Cinema Since 1960 where we charted the history and development of American Cinema from the 1960s to the present. We’ve watched some pretty iconic films, some of which I hadn’t seen before. Now, here’s the final entry as the course comes to a close.

The Hurt Locker
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
Released June 26, 2009



When this movie first came out in limited release (I wasn’t in the New York area and had to drive fifty minutes to Waltham to see it), the general public had never heard of it, but reviews were uniformly excellent. Now, almost a year later, most people still haven’t seen it, but everyone knows it as the little film that could that took down megahit “Avatar” and won the Oscar for Best Picture, in addition to having the first female director to win an Oscar. My original review of the film was an enormously positive one, and at the end of the year I ranked it the sixth best film of 2009. I stand by both at this point, and I highly encourage any readers who still have yet to see it to check it out soon.

2 comments:

Greg Boyd said...

Pretty bold statement to call it a classic, but I completely agree with it. However, I take issue with it only being at #6 in 2009. For me, it blew all of the rest of the films released that year out of the water.

At some point, I plan to do a best of the decade list on my blog. I still haven't seen quite a few of the most acclaimed films from the 2000s, but if I was making it right now "The Hurt Locker" would be at #2 (right behind "Finding Nemo"). That's how good I think it is.

Anonymous said...

To be a noble benign being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an cleverness to trusteeship unsure things beyond your own restrain, that can govern you to be shattered in very exceptionally circumstances as which you were not to blame. That says something remarkably outstanding with the fettle of the principled passion: that it is based on a corporation in the fitful and on a willingness to be exposed; it's based on being more like a spy than like a prize, something rather dainty, but whose mere special handsomeness is inseparable from that fragility.