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 Posted: Tue Sep 08, 2009 4:30 pm |
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After watching _The Hurt Locker_ I felt compelled to
see _K19: The Widowmaker_ too. (Another lapse on DVD
rental prohibition, of course.) This is a very polished
film, and superficially has little to do with the hand-held
aesthetic of _The Hurt Locker_. The background and the
motivations are very clearly laid out, compared to the
recent film where the Renner character seems to be
disarming bombs for its own sake.
I'm more impressed with the commentary track with the
director and cinematographer of _K19: the widowmaker_
than the film itself. The film is very powerful,
not to take anything away from that, but I didn't feel
it is truly revelatory, or redines (or even tries to
redine) the form the way _The Thin Red Line_ does. The
larger, philosophical questions of nuclear holocaust and
patriotism (including why the U.S. should be making a
film honoring the Red Navy submariners when so many
stories about U.S. submarine personnel goes unfilmed)
are not addressed. The Russian (soviet) sailors prevent
a nuclear accident on the sub, but their main motive is
to save themselves; preventing a political (and ecological)
disaster is only secondary, if that. If they really care
about those, they should clearly have sought the help of
the U.S. destroyer to help neutralize their nuclear reactor.
I also wish that the new Indian Jones plot had centered
on the nuclear bomb threat; this is something we can
profitably be reminded of 20 years after the cold war
ended!
The commentary doesn't really deal with these either, but
the sing-song, alternating descriptions by Kathryn Bigelow
and Christopher Kyle ranks with Annette Insdorf and her
co-commentator on _Shoot the Piano Player_ as one of the
most accomplished I've ever heard. Bigelow has such a
surprisingly soft, feminine voice, and a poetic, image-
laden, professorial way of speaking ... it hardly seems
possible that someone with that refined a way of talking
is capable of making all these action films! She and
her cinematographer takes turn, deliver one detail-rich
story after another. What they talk about barely has
anything to do with what's on screen, but they have the
darnedest stories about visiting the desolation that is
Murmansk naval base, with assault rifles pointed at their
car; or anecdotes about the submarines' construction,
such as the fact that the tools are always at arm's length
inside the deliberately narrow hulle so that, if the
lights go out, repairs can still be made.
The helicopter/crane shots are great but I'm mostly in
love with that voice. |
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