Every Friday Chris hand-selects a streaming recommendation for your weekend.
This Week’s Featured Flick
The Hurt Locker on Netflix
THE TRAILER
THE DETAILS
DIRECTOR: Kathryn Bigelow
WRITER: Mark Boal
CAST: Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty, Christian Camargo, Ralph Fiennes, Guy Pearce
GENRE: Action
RUNTIME: 130 min
YEAR: 2009
THE PLOT
Kathryn Bigelow directs this gripping drama following one of the U.S. Army’s elite explosive ordnance disposal teams operating in Iraq.
THE REASON
I’ll be honest, I’ve only seen this film from start-to-finish once, and that was when it came out six years ago. It introduced most of us to Jeremy Renner, and it gave us the oscar-winning female director. I really enjoyed it, but I didn’t love it. So why am I recommending it? Because next Monday Devin Faraci and Amy Nicholson will be discussing it on their great podcast, The Canon, in which they argue the merits of an “important film” and then ask their listeners to decide whether it should be immortalized forever in “The Canon”. I love this premise, and I’m excited to revisit The Hurt Locker through this lens. If you were to ask me right now if The Hurt Locker belongs in The Canon, I’d probably say no. Renner gives an incredible performance, and Bigelow’s exploration of PTSD is riveting without feeling preachy. But i recall feeling like everything fell apart with the final scene and thinking it completely undermined the rest of the film. I’m interested to see if this perspective changes a second time around.
WATCH NOW ON NETFLIX
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