Word: thriller
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...rider attached. We've already touched on the Iwo Jima problem. Babel? Grand and sprawling, but maybe too sprawling, and it still hasn't connected with American audiences. The Departed? All-star, well-made, but a gangster movie, and a remake - of the Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs. (If you're wondering what the last famous film of its type was, and how many Oscars it received, the answers are Scarface and none.) Little Miss Sunshine? Feel-good, sure, but not of Best Picture stature. The Queen? Funny, poignant, pertinent, but at heart a TV movie...
...needs another Oscar. Deepa Mehta certainly deserves some kind of award for Water, which she made despite sabotage and death threats from Indian fundamentalists. And I'm pleased that The Lives of Others was cited: partly because it's a smartly pensive spy thriller, partly because this means that some Generation Why cutie will have to stand on the Kodak Theatre stage and try to enunciate the director's name: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. (Paging Gov. Schwarzenegger?) But I chose Pan's Labyrinth as my film of the year, so I have to go with that...
...film form: taking old narratives styles like the crime movie or musical or horror film and making them fresh, vital, dangerous. The subjects could be familiar--amnesia in Nolan's Memento, obsession in Aronofsky's Pi--but when the story was told in reverse, or turned into a weird thriller, the narrative ingenuity became bracing and delicious. They were different from Hollywood--and different meant better...
...conservative show? Yes, in the sense that the thriller is a conservative genre. Ticking time bombs and pure-evil bad guys make for exciting TV. Working patiently to improve America's image in the Muslim world--not so much. (Maybe Aaron Sorkin could spice it up with an office romance and lots of walk-and-talks.) Muddy a terrorism thriller with liberal concern over root causes and you get Syriana, whose plot audiences couldn't follow with a GPS device. "The politics of the show," says executive producer Howard Gordon (a registered Democrat), "are narrative politics...
...report said Columbia envisions an espionage thriller "exploring the collision between the deep rooted Russian power structure enforced by the KGB ... and the new wave of wild west capitalism" that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union...