In Contention

Tag: Mark Boal

  • ‘Hurt Locker’ sweeps Chicago critics’ awards

    Sorry we’re a bit late getting round to this — as you know, Kris and I are in holiday mode this week. Anyway, while the Chicago Film Critics’ Association threw some curveballs in their nominations list, their winners stuck mostly to the status quo.

    When the “status quo,” however, is one of my favorite films of the year, you won’t hear me complaining. The pull of “The Hurt Locker” proved so powerful in the Windy City that it won every category in which it was shortlisted, with writer Mark Boal taking his first prize of the season. Carey Mulligan, meanwhile, was a double winner, beating Gabourey Sidibe in both the actress and newcomer races.

    Full list of winners after the cut; CFCA member Roger Ebert’s report is here.

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  • OFF THE CARPET: Original players

    (from left) Jeremy Renner and Evangeline Lilly in The Hurt LockerWhen I had the unmitigated gall last week to project a set of winners for this year’s Oscar race, I was a bit startled at how easy Mark Boal’s script for “The Hurt Locker” slid into the Best Original Screenplay slot.  Looking over the landscape of contenders in the category, it’s a little obvious why such a somewhat non-traditional entry would be pegged as a frontrunner: this is a pretty thin year for original screenplays.

    That should take nothing away from Boal’s work, which is certainly commendable.  But beyond Pixar’s “Up” (penned by Pete Docter and Bob Peterson) and the Coen brothers’ “A Serious Man” (my pick for best-in-show in the category), there isn’t much competition for Boal’s play at the statuette.  I even find myself struggling with two more solid bets for nods after that trio.

    Fox Searchlight, however, is making some pretty strong moves on behalf of “(500) Days of Summer,” written by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber.  The pair has already been cited by the Hollywood Film Festival as well as the Hamilton Behind the Camera awards.  Given the studio’s campaign prowess (and the undying spirit of the film’s champions), it makes sense to expect a spot to be reserved for the film here.

    To fill out the set, you’ve got a slot that is undeniably up for grabs.  So let’s dig into the field and see what we come up with.

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  • WEEKLY WRAP: Festivals, festivals and festivals

    George Clooney in Up in the Air• After weeks of hype, “Up in the Air” landed in Telluride, and delivered. (And finally got a trailer too.)

    • Meanwhile, as some compare director Jason Reitman to Billy Wilder, we interviewed him at the festival.

    • We also got chatty with possible awards contenders Paul Schneider and Venice prize-winner Mark Boal.

    • On the other side of the Atlantic, our Venice coverage continued, including a first look at Michael Moore’s “Capitalism: A Love Story.”

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  • INTERVIEW: Mark Boal

    Mark BoalFor a man more accustomed to the dirt-under-the-fingernails highs of hard journalism, the red carpets, photo calls and cosseted hotel suites of film promotion clearly represent a very different kind of strain for Mark Boal, the journalist-turned-screenwriter who on Monday won the prestigious Gucci Group Award at the Venice Film Festival.

    Back in August, on the hottest afternoon of the year, the tall, lank-haired writer of Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker” lopes into the lobby of London’s cooler-than-thou Sanderson Hotel, dressed in jeans and a plaid shirt, and politely asks if I’ll join him over a beer.

    “I’ve been on coffee all day, and it’s not working,” he grins, his face betraying missed hours of sleep, but still more boyish than its 36 years. “Maybe this’ll make a difference.”

    Boal registers a brief flicker of bewilderment upon learning that the only beer on the Sanderson’s ultra-precious bar menu is Sri Lankan, and rather exotically priced at that, but we order two anyway. “It’s still beer, right?” he confirms with the waiter.

    It’s regular-guy moments like this that shed a little light onto Boal’s humanistic gifts as a reporter and, now, as a screenwriter: modest, relatable and defiantly no-bullshit, it’s easy to imagine a group of soldiers welcoming him into the fold, as happened in 2004, when Boal was an embedded in (or, to use his term, “hung out with”) an elite bomb disposal unit for several weeks, laying the groundwork for the screenplay he then had no plans to write.

    “I was really keen to do a story on the bomb squad,” he explains. “It was clear that IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) would be the army’s central logistical element by 2004, but still, nothing was being written on it. Iraq was a bit of a news black hole after the invasion … people simply thought it too dangerous.”

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  • Mark Boal wins Gucci Award at Venice

    Mark BoalI’ve been promising my interview with “The Hurt Locker” writer Mark Boal for too long now, but simply haven’t had a moment to — as Kate Winslet would say — gather. With a lighter load today, I’m hoping I can have it ready for tomorrow.

    Meanwhile, however, I’m thrilled to report that yesterday, Boal claimed his first official award for his work on the film, taking the Venice Film Festival’s relatively young Gucci Group Award.

    Established in 2006, the award recognizes outstanding achievement in film by an artist from a different professional background — as you are surely aware, Boal is an accomplished journalist, whose “Hurt Locker” screenplay grew from his own experience embedded in an EOD bomb squad in Iraq.

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  • ‘Hurt Locker’ scribe Mark Boal up for Venice award

    Mark BoalI had the pleasure of interviewing Mark Boal, the celebrated journalist and screenwriter of “The Hurt Locker,” over a beer in London last week, and was glad to find him as alert and interesting a subject as the film he wrote. (The interview will crop up on these pages soon, by the way.)

    So as awards season unfolds over the coming months, I’ll be cheering every bit of recognition that comes his way. And the first such citation, neatly enough, comes at the place where “The Hurt Locker” made its first appearance nearly a year ago: the Venice Film Festival.

    Variety reports that Boal has been shortlisted for the Gucci Group Award, a prize presented during the festival since 2006 to honor outstanding cinematic achievement by individuals from outside the world of film. Should he win, he’ll be in excellent company: previous recipients include Julian Schnabel (for “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”) and Steve McQueen (“Hunger”).

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  • Action versus politics

    The Hurt LockerAnticipating a fresh batch of “Hurt Locker” press ahead of the film’s UK release later this month, The Times’s Kevin Maher takes an angle on the film that I’m surprised hasn’t been more of a media issue so far: the fine line the film walks between conscientious political filmmaking and gung-ho entertainment.

    One of the things I admire about Kathryn Bigelow’s film is its forthrightness in depicting the visceral thrill of warfare: it’s a courageous approach to take in a cinematic landscape where heavily weighted anti-war statements are de rigueur.

    “The Hurt Locker” paints its own unflattering portrait of U.S. military involvement, of course, but it remains resolutely an action film first — one more interested in capturing the physical sensation of combat than miring itself in rhetoric.

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  • REVIEW: “The Hurt Locker” (****)

    The Hurt Locker(Edinburgh International Film Festival)

    Put in the most glib possible terms, the longstanding industry perception of Kathryn Bigelow is that she’s something of an artistic tomboy: the girl who likes to play in the boys’ sandbox — and play roughly, at that. While true to a large extent, it’s a reputation that is rooted in the belief that genre filmmaking is principally a male preoccupation.

    Never mind that a number of her films — from vampire tale “Near Dark” to female-fronted cop thriller “Blue Steel” (to say nothing of the curious anomaly that was the brooding Elizabeth Hurley drama “The Weight of Water”) — aren’t exactly testosterone-fests; the fact that she frequently foregrounds the physical ahead of the emotional is enough to qualify her as a male-centric storyteller in most viewers’ eyes.

    So it’s somewhat surprising, upon closer inspection, to note that Bigelow has heretofore never made a film explicitly about masculinity. Yes, “Point Break” and her misfiring last feature, “K-19: The Widowmaker,” may have revolved exclusively around men, but the characters in these films were mere facilitators of action, not freestanding psychological subjects. For a woman who purportedly makes movies for men, Bigelow has never seemed particularly interested in the male experience.

    All that has changed spectacularly with “The Hurt Locker,” a formally simple but startlingly layered, savage war film that, in localizing its conflict to the internal battles between three unmoored soldiers, marries her dazzling staging abilities with a newfound level of human interest and compassion.

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