Careful readers will note the absence here of American independent films of the Sundance stripe — those sensitive dramas in which an outsider connects with home truths. I find most of them a little too aware of their worthiness, as well as structurally and cinematically timid. (No, not you two, Synecdoche, New York and The Squid and the Whale; you were swell.) I want my naturalism with a bang, and I got it with this scary, thrilling war movie about a U.S. Army bomb-defusing squad in Iraq, c. 2005. Mark Boal’s taut script focuses on one GI (Jeremy Renner, superb) who tersely insists on doing his own thing, which is to keep little pieces of Baghdad from blowing up. First shown in Sept. 2008 at the Venice Film Festival, The Hurt Locker took a while to make its impact in the U.S., but the movie and its director, Kathryn Bigelow, have dominated the year-end critics’ awards. If the shower of prizes ends with her becoming the first woman to win an Oscar as best director (over her ex-husband, James Cameron), that’d be OK too.
The musical, that grand old film form, had been dormant for a couple of decades when Baz Luhrmann, rather than just reviving the musical, attached it to the defibrillator of his wild imagination. In this mash-up of 42nd Street and Camille, the nightclub chanteuse played by Nicole Kidman evokes Marilyn and Madonna as she swings above the crowd warbling “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” Ewan McGregor, as the poor writer who falls for the courtesan, is a nouveau Gene Kelly — a hunky Joe with a radiant smile, haunting the Left Bank like An American in Paris, twirling an umbrella a la Singin’ in the Rain. A sultry chorus line coos, “Moulin Rouge-ez avec moi ce soir?” and performs a tantric cancan. An all-out tribute to India’s Bollywood musical — a kind of “Springtime for Hindu” — has enough eye candy to give the viewer diabetes. Mixing the romantic and the grotesque, the songs of MGM and MTV, and two stars at the peak of their appeal, Luhrmann created a rhapsody in red, a musical that is both retro and now-tro.
In light of the Material Girl performing at Super Bowl XLVI, TIME takes a look at her life and career, both of which have been lived firmly in the public eye.
