Word: details
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Halder, a liberal professor who is made complicit in the atrocities of the regime through promotions, seduction and his own laissez-faire cowardice. Casting a flinty hero type like Mortensen in the role of a moral weakling seems inspired, but the movie isn't. Its attention to period detail and emotional nuance is lax, plodding, lacking either the grinding power of inevitability or a brief, fierce glint of Halder's conflicted conscience. As he is sucked into the morass, the film and the viewer sink with...
...have to hand it to travel writers who take on huge subjects. And traversing Europe, Russia, central Asia, India, southeast Asia and Japan by various modes of transport (mostly rail), then writing a 500-page book about the journey - with detail piled upon observational detail - is pretty huge. It takes guts, and some might say a bit of hubris, even...
...creepy marvel to watch James in action. He has the cool aplomb, analytical acumen and attention to detail of a great athlete, or a master psychopath, maybe both. A quote from former New York Times Iraq expert Christopher Hedges that opens the film says, "War is a drug." Movies often editorialize on this theme: the man who's a misfit back home but an efficient, imaginative killing machine on the battlefield. Bigelow and Boal aren't after that. They're saying that, in a hellish peace-keeping operation like the U.S. deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan (James' previous assignment...
...heart of the film is a half dozen sequences, most of them on bomb-squad detail, one long, terrific one showing the unit holed up with some Brit mercenaries (led by Ralph Fiennes, the star of Bigelow's 1995 futuristic movie Strange Days) fighting off fire from al-Qaeda-in-Iraq types out in the desert. Boal and Bigelow know that there's enough tension in the act of walking up to a bomb and trying to defuse it; they don't have to amp up the suspense with theatrics...
Malik defended the prime minister's security detail, saying that "even in the U.S. there are assassination attempts against leaders." Bhutto's widower, Presidential candidate Asif Ali Zardari, moved from his private Islamabad residence to the prime minister's house last week because of security fears. The attempt comes just weeks after Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud announced that his militants would target "every city" in Pakistan, in retaliation for a military crackdown on extremist groups in Pakistan's tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan. Nearly two weeks ago, two suicide bombers blew themselves up at the gate...