The Little Indie That Could—Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker—richly deserved all the honors it won during the recent awards season, up to and including its six Oscars. It's Bigelow's best work to date, no question. And one of the things that really struck me about it on first viewing was how much of a stylistic departure it seemed for the director. Her flair for visceral action sequences has long been noted, but the near-constant nervous intensity of this film—the hair-trigger editing, the swish pans and quick zooms, the unexpected shifts in perspective, the whole handheld, quasi-documentary look of the movie—wasn't quite like anything she'd ever done before. Or was it? I then recalled that she directed a few episodes of the NBC cop series Homicide: Life on the Street late in its run about a dozen years ago. The house style of that series was, much like that of The Hurt Locker, deliberately jittery, rough, and immediate; any director hired for the show had to conform to it. I lamented the demise of Homicide—it was so much better than anything its creator, Paul Attanasio, and executive producer, Barry Levinson, ever achieved with their big-screen collaborations. Though it lasted seven seasons, the series was never very popular, and now it's pretty much forgotten. Thus it cheered me a bit to think that it might have a legacy of sorts in Bigelow's much-praised Iraq war drama.
P.S. The Hurt Locker has been much on my mind of late, and I hope to have more to say about it in the near future.
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