New Moon is nothing if not an international advertisement for the hungry virtues of virginity and young people can’t get enough of it
The Twilight Saga: New Moon
Theatre
A smart, prickly and rewarding view of sexual and emotional confusion
Cock
Restaurants
Kitchen W8 is a bargain for this area, if such sophistication is what you crave
Kitchen W8
Too long and drawn out but very entertaining with excellent special effects
This is a peculiar play and does not work for me. Some of it is very funny but there are real flaws
Alex has a strong powerful voice and was faultless, she is far better now than she was on the X-Factor
London,
Andrew O'Hagan's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Kathryn Bigelow.
Cast: Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty, Ralph Fiennes, Guy Pearce, David Morse, Christian Camargo
Description: The men of Bravo Company's bomb disposal squad count down the 38 days left on their current rotation. Staff Sergeant William James is the new boy, joining levelheaded sergeant JT Sanborn and specialist Owen Eldridge on the streets of Baghdad, where IEDs (improvised explosive devices) can prove fatal to Allied forces. James's gung-ho, fatalistic approach to his job quickly creates friction with his team mates.
Country: US. 2008. 131mins
Picture people remember: The Hurt Locker
Cracking the codes of male violence: Sgt JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie)
Kathryn Bigelow is one of the most surprising directors in Hollywood. Not only is she a woman with a knack for fast and stylish thrillers, but she is an intellectual at the heart of the mainstream, a former student of Susan Sontag’s with a sharp eye when it comes to reading the codes of male violence. Indeed, the first film she ever made, a short called The Set-Up (1978), involves two actors having a fight while a couple of theorists discuss what is happening and what it means. She may have dropped the theorists from the payroll, but through the surf-and-detonate hit Point Break to her new movie, The Hurt Locker, she is a film-maker who makes us watch out for the drama of devastated lives.
The Hurt Locker is set in Iraq in 2004. American Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner) has just joined an OED unit — basically, bomb disposal — one of whose company-men was recently killed in Baghdad. Such units deal mainly in improvised explosive devices, roadside bombs, and James quickly gets a reputation as a nutcase for approaching these devices in his bomb-suit before they have been approached by the unit’s robots. The intricate world of Iraqi politics, of Iraqi hatred and violence in the face of these American invaders, as they see them, is searingly displayed in the film.
Thompson becomes friends with a young Iraqi called Beckham, and, long before we know what will happen, we feel that this relationship, like every other, will have to be understood in terms of brutal violence.
The OED team is constantly under threat from snipers as they go about their work. There is also the ongoing problem of suicide bombers. In one scene, a man appears in their midst pleading for his life. It becomes clear he has explosives strapped to his chest. Bigelow and writer Mark Boal — who was embedded with such a unit in Iraq before writing the script — reveal with devastating clarity the human conundrum contained in the situation. From a distance, the bomber is claiming he wants to be free of the bombs strapped to him. Can he be disarmed? Can his life be saved? Or is he intent on drawing the soldiers close and killing them?
Of all the films to have emerged from this terrible conflict, The Hurt Locker is undoubtedly the best. Not only does it bring you to the edge of your seat — a Bigelow speciality — but it forces the audience again and again to examine its moral precepts. This is a film that blazes with dramas both very large and very small: on the one hand the soldiers are caught up in a cycle of killing that they can only struggle to control, and on the other there are the struggles with each other, the men in the unit. The relationship between Sergeant James and his company-man Sergeant JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) must be counted some of the subtlest stuff seen in any film released this year. Bigelow was smart to cast relative unknowns in the main parts, keeping her stars — Ralph Fiennes, Guy Pearce — for brief but very effective appearances. The film’s power never lets up.
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One of the things that distinguishes great war narratives is their concentration on the workers — the life of a company and its real anxieties. In this sense, The Hurt Locker is The Naked and the Dead for the Xbox generation, a complex, shocking treatment of a modern war that shows the consequences of violent conflict not on nations and politicians but on the individuals going about their business on the ground. Bigelow crowns several decades of excellent artistic enquiry with a film that everybody should see. Films about Iraq have often failed at the box office, but there are signs that The Hurt Locker might be the picture people remember, and I applaud it from one end to the other.
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