I know that I have a habit of writing “I had the pleasure of interviewing…” in my introductions, but most of the time that is generally true, and never has it been more true than when I got the chance to interview Kathryn Bigelow at SIFF last year, when she brought The Hurt Locker to Seattle. I didn’t have nearly enough time, but the time I had was great. And yes, as so many interviewers and commentators feel compelled to remind us, she is beautiful. More importantly, however, she is engaging, introspective, compelling. It felt we had just gotten started when my time was up, before I had a chance to reach back to the dynamic, passionate, cinematically thrilling films that marked her as one of the great directors of her time: Strange Days, Point Break and especially Near Dark, the film that grabbed me by the throat when I caught it on its last night of an abbreviated run at a second run house (it had skipped the first run theaters altogether).

My interview is now running on Parallax View as part of the site’s spotlight on Kathryn Bigelow.

You start the film off with a quote by Chris Hedges: “War is a drug.” There’s a real simplified reading of that comment, which is that likes the challenge and he thrives on the thrill. But I think it’s more complex than that. He’s the best at what he does and he’s at his best under pressure. He’s in charge and, for all the danger, he’s as in control as he ever is. When he gets back, he’s lost.

That’s beautifully put. I couldn’t improve on that. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the book that Chris Hedges has written, “War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning,” it’s a great book and required reading. He talks about that you’re looking today at a volunteer military and one of the many things he confronts is, war’s dirty little secret is some men love it. This isn’t everybody, it’s just a particular type of psychological state with some men, there’s a psychological allure that combat creates, some kind of attractiveness, and it does create an almost addictive quality that they can’t replicate in any other way and are lost in any other context.

Read the rest of it here.

Downhill Racer (Criterion) is the feature debut of Michael Ritchie, the first project that frustrated actor and future movie star Robert Redford developed for himself and the first of Redford’s proposed trilogy about the meaning of “winning” in American culture. That’s what gives such a riveting perspective to what would otherwise be called a “sports movie”: Redford’s David Chappellet, the brash, self-involved hotshot on the American ski team, is less concerned with the beauty of the sport than the attention of victory and fame.

Directed from a script by novelist James Salter and shot on location on the European ski circuit (where the director and star incorporated ideas and opportunities into the film as they arose), Downhill Racer makes no bones about Chappellet’s fierce ambition or dismissive arrogance, but the downhill runs are shot and edited with a visceral quality that takes us off the sidelines and into the skier’s perspective. The screen goes silent but for the cut of skis slicing a track through the snow and whoosh of the crisp mountain air whipping by and the camera captures the run in long takes and full shots to study the integrity of the athlete’s movement and at times watches the rush through the skier’s eyes, to give is the rush, the focus and the intensity of the experience. The rest of the film reminds us of the industry behind the sport—raising money for the national team, traveling from one contest to another, negotiating for top draws (the earlier the pick, the fresher the snow pack) and managing the media—and the culture of fame. Redford’s matinee looks are more than just Hollywood casting in this context; the film never says it in so many words, but it’s clear that Chappellet’s popularity is as much for his good looks as for his success. The crowds love a handsome champion. Gene Hackman is the practical coach who doesn’t like Chappellet or his attitude but knows that his ambition is the team’s best chance for a win and sixties screen beauty Camilla Sparv is Chappellet’s counterpart, a ski company rep who treats romance with the same emotional disconnection that Chappellet treats everything else.

Criterion’s disc advertises itself as 1.85 but is actually adjusted to the TV widescreen standard of 1.77:1. The disc features two interview featurettes, each running about half an hour. “Redford and Salter” features new video interviews with Redford, who lays out the history of the film and his career and his determination to get it made in the face of studio resistance, and writer James Salter, who discusses the evolution of the script and how it changed during the filmmaking. “Coblenz, Harris, and Jalbert” features film editor Richard Harris, production manager Walter Coblenz, and former downhill skier Joe Jay Jalbert, who served as technical adviser and ski double. There are audio-only excerpts from a 1977 American Film Institute seminar with director Michael Ritchie, the archival promotional short How Fast? and a booklet with an essay by critic Todd McCarthy.

I’ll be writing about another essential release this week, Milestone’s excellent two-disc edition of Kent McKenzie’s The Exiles, as well as two features from Seattle filmmaker Lynn Shelton, My Effortless Brilliance and Humpday, in another post. As I’m personally involved in the former (I participate in the commentary with author and filmmaker Sherman Alexie and interview Alexie for a bonus audio supplement) and am friends with Shelton, director of the latter, I can hardly be objective. But I can and will be supportive of both releases in a separate piece. (Update: it’s now up and posted here.)

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The Hurt Locker (dir: Kathryn Bigelow)

Set in the current Iraq war, after the proclamation of “Mission Accomplished” and the transformation of a battlefield army into an occupation force, The Hurt Locker follows the finals days in the rotation of a bomb disposal unit (the days count down with each mission) as it gets new cowboy team leader, Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner), a maverick who steps up to a bomb like a gunfighter in an old west showdown, tough and swaggering and on his own terms.

James doesn’t follow the rules. Every bomb is a challenge he refuses to back down from, even when the intelligence expert on the three-man team, Sergeant Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), counsels him that he’s vulnerable to snipers. James simply tosses the headset and assumes his teammates will watch his back, scanning the windows and the roofs for any potential gunman, which in a busy urban street surrounded by apartment buildings and open roofs can be myriad.

This may be the same sun-bleached Iraq of dusty dirt streets and open deserts we’ve seen in other Iraq war films, but it’s a different kind of movie. Kathryn Bigelow’s handheld camerawork roams like a spotter’s eyes, always surveying, always getting another look, and the cuts are shifts of perspective that both to keep you off-balance and give a sense of how vigilant they are. The digital photography is razor sharp with a clarity both hyper-real and adrenaline-charged. Bigelow shows us how they see the world out of necessity.

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More SIFF coverage at the Seattle Weekly. Next week, Seattle’s very own homegrown zombie movie ZMD: Zombies of Mass Destruction plays the festival. I profile the film and the filmmakers for the Seattle Weekly in “Axis of the Undead.” (My review of the film runs next week)

Also recently run: capsule reviews of Lee Yoon-ki’s My Dear Enemy and This Charming Girl, Yim Phil-Sung’s South Korean horror twist on Hansel and Gretel and Duncan Jones’ Moon.

Plus: excerpts from my interview with Kathryn Bigelow.

[published in conjunction with Parallax View]

The complications and tricky negotiations of family, as siblings grow up and leave to establish their own lives and their own families, was a central theme of numerous films at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival. Two of the best films from that festival, Olivier Assayas’ Summer Hours (L’heure d’ete) and Hirozaku Kore-Eda’s Still Walking, highlight the opening weekend of the 2009 edition of the Seattle International Film Festival.

Summer Hours is like a miniature, a small film of small dramas in the scope of large lives. Mortally once again hangs over the story of a family estate and the rich treasures of art history that goes with it. Family matriarch Helene (Edith Scob) has preserved the country home of her famous painter uncle as a tribute to him, complete with unpreserved works by French masters on the walls and rare pieces of furniture and glassworks as household items, and she drills in her eldest the list of valuables that need be accounted for and, if necessary, sold off when she dies. Frédéric (Charles Berling), who lives nearby in Paris, can’t bear to see the home broken up and sold off, but with his sister (Juliette Binoche) thriving in New York and younger brother (Jérémie Renier) settling in China, the holiday family home no longer has the same meaning to them all, let alone their children. The film moves from one decision to another and the arguments that inevitably ensue and it’s not all that subtly engineered. What Assayas brings is a generosity of understanding and a warmth of character to the siblings who love one another enough not to let disagreements change their feelings. It’s a gentle look at the way the ties to the past lose their hold on the next generations, and it closes with a pair of sequences that alone would recommend the film: one that takes you through the Musee D’Orsay from the workshops through to the galleries, and a final scene that recalls his brilliant (and still unavailable on DVD) early feature Cold Water, but with the angry, rebellious destructiveness of the earlier film replaced with a warm communal celebration. Plays Friday, May 22 and Sunday, May 24.

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Kathryn Bigelow pumps American blood into vampire lore

They hunt by night, picking off stray hitchhikers, wandering loners and anyone else unlucky enough to stray into their path. They keep to back roads and lonely towns of the American Southwest. They are a feral clan, more a pack than a gang. They are family. And they feed off the blood of humans.

To call Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark a vampire Western is to miss the poetry and the power of her uniquely American reworking of the classically European horror genre. The word “vampire” is never uttered in the film. There is no lore of crosses and garlic and holy water, only the searing threat of the sun, which burns through them like acid. They only know that they are eternal, they are nearly invulnerable and they hunger.

Adrian Pasdar is the blue-eyed young cowboy Caleb, a dreamer yearning for something beyond his family farm. Jenny Wright is the mysterious Mae, the doe-eyed beauty with the faraway look and the honey voice whose little-girl-lost charms lure him into her arms. She bites, but not to feed. She turns this beautiful boy into a night dweller like her, to become her companion and lover, to join the pack that is her family: Lance Henriksen’s scarred Civil War-survivor of a stern dad, Jenette Goldstein’s soiled peroxide blonde with maternal instincts, Bill Paxton’s wild-man big brother and Joshua Miller’s eternal little brother trapped in the body of a child.

Near Dark is both ferocious and lyrical, a moody horror film with the frontier community romanticism of a John Ford Western and the violent ferocity of a Sam Peckinpah film. The night scenes have a stiletto crispness to them, as if seen through the heightened senses of the nocturnal hunters, and the days have a foggy haze of innocence lost. The horror is laced with dark humor (“I hate it when they ain’t been shaved,” drawls Paxton after gorging on a particularly scruffy redneck) as well as the pulsing attraction between Caleb and Mae, but Bigelow never shies away from the animal savagery of their predatory nature.

Near Dark is about family and blood in the most primal sense: the blood that feeds, the blood that binds, and in this new chapter of vampire lore, the blood that heals. Bigelow infuses the European myth with fresh blood from a uniquely American vein.

Originally published as part of the MSN “Cadillac of” series.