How “Life of Pi” animators visualized Ang Lee’s blank slate

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – “Life of Pi” is a movie that has the proverbial cast of thousands… of animals, that is. In one shot set on the ocean, there are 40,000 flying fish. In another one set on a floating island, there are 60,000 meerkats. And not one of them was living and breathing, of course.

“No real meerkats were used,” senior animation supervisor Erik-Jan De Boer told the audience at an effects-themed Q&A following TheWrap’s screening of the movie at the Landmark Theatre on Monday night. “Except of course we went to meerkat sanctuaries and zoos to shoot a lot of reference footage…”

“And the two of us watched every episode of ‘Meerkat Manor,’” interrupted visual effects supervisor Bill Westenhofer. “We were gonna watch one, but it gets addictive.”

That was about all the time these two had to indulge in reality TV during the long gestation and post-production of Pi, which establishes a new benchmark for awe-inspiring digital trickery – particularly in 3D, or “stereo,” as Westenhofer and De Boer refer to the effects-complicating process.

“In total,” De Boer told TheWrap’s editor-in-chief Sharon Waxman, “we animated 580 animals in about 290 shots for the movie, which includes a giraffe, a fox, a fish, and of course the hyena and orangutan.” Not to mention the little matter of the tiger, “Richard Parker,” whose appearances as one of the movie’s co-leads are 15 percent real, 85 percent digital.

That’s not including the aforementioned meerkat and flying fish extras, brought to life via a software program appropriately titled Massive. (If only it had been around in Cecil B. DeMille‘s day.)

“The flying fish sequence is where we start to take some artistic liberties, since Pi’s telling you a tale,” said Westenhofer. “Maybe there were a thousand flying fish in reality, or even a hundred, but you’re seeing his mind’s eye, which saw this multitude, so we have 40,000 in one particular spot. The Massive software is almost artificial intelligence, where you write a little program that’s the brain for each individual fish, and it decides if it’s going to hop out of the water, and how long it’s going to fly; if it sees someone in its path, it does avoidance.”

But before any of that was animated, there was the live-action filming that took place on a 70 meter-by-30 meter wave tank that director Ang Lee had specially built for the film. And there, said Westenhofer, “you had (star) Suraj Sharma on a boat with two guys in rubber rafts just chucking rubber fish at him as hard as they possibly can. It’s a good mixture of the low-tech and the high-tech.”

Of course, it wasn’t fish but previous experience with big cats that got Rhythm & Hues the assignment from Lee to go from lions to tigers and Pi. “He knew we had done the lion in the first Narnia movie. He asked, ‘Does a digital character look more or less real in 3D?’ We looked at each other and thought that was a pretty good question.”

As well as a leading one, since Lee had already made the decision at that point, in 2009, to shoot in 3D. “We took one of the shots and rendered it in stereo and said ‘Yeah, it gives it a little more presence and makes it more real.’” Good answer! “That was the start of our relationship with him.”

Although “Life of Pi” doesn’t exactly go for documentary-style realism, every effort was made to keep the tiger’s actions and reactions to what experts and trainers told them a creature would really do in those situations. Not having him spout any Aslan-style aphorisms was a nice start on that de-anthropomorphizing.

“We always strive for photorealism,” said De Boer – even when they’re working on a Narnia or Cats and Dogs. “Motion-wise we strive for perfect physicality and try to get that animal to behave as characteristically as possible – and then we always have to make them talk or dance or do something really weird, and the realism goes out the window and everybody knows that we were there. For me what was really cool about this movie is not only do we stick with the real animal but we also have to intercut it with a live-action animal, so that made the challenge for us that much bigger.”

Added Westenhofer, “We told the crew we wanted to work ourselves out of any recognition by making it look as real as possible.”

It was at least as big of a challenge, as far as Westenhofer was concerned, to make the digital waves match or amplify the real tank waves – and to create the film’s skies completely from scratch. “There’s not many films where we spend this much time on the water. I think ‘Old Man and the Sea’ harkens back! But even with ‘Titanic,’ you’ll see the water and then go inside.” For much of “Life of Pi,” “inside” amounts to a few furtive peeks under a tarp.

Hence what, on a project like this, becomes a fine line where digital effects providers are also, to some extent, taking over the role of cinematography and art direction. Going to work on filling up these blue-screen shots, the Rhythm & Hues people might well have been humming Bruce Springsteen’s “Empty Sky” to themselves.

“What I’m absolutely most proud of is with these visual effects is that we were given a blank slate for a lot of these shots,” Westenhofer told the audience. “We were given a boat in front of a blue screen, and it was the visual effects team who really were a lot of the creative innovators on the movie. Certainly it was Ang’s vision we were creating. But we’d start a shot, and though Ang absolutely knows what he wants, his communication is sometimes not as specific as you want. Instead of saying ‘I want a three-quarters cloudy sky with yellow over here and some blue,’ he’d say ‘I want a pensive sky.’

Or, ‘I want it to be operatic.’ So it would be our job to go translate that, and the team did a great job of supplying that.

“And Claudio Miranda did an awesome, awesome job on the cinematography, but a lot of the cinematography on the ocean is digital effects.”

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Police Commission eases LAPD's illegal immigrant policy

The Los Angeles Police Commission on Tuesday approved a plan from Los Angeles Police Department Chief Charlie Beck to no longer turn over illegal immigrants arrested in low-level crimes to federal authorities for deportation.

The new rules, which are expected to go into effect early next month and affect about 400 people arrested each year, mark a significant move by the state's most influential local police agency to distance itself from federal immigration policies that Beck has said unfairly affects undocumented immigrants who are caught committing petty offenses.

For years, police departments have sent fingerprint information on every person arrested to Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials. Federal officials, in turn, use the fingerprints to identify people suspected of being in the country illegally and often ask local agencies to put a 48-hour hold -- a detainer in law enforcement jargon -- on people.

These detainers authorized police to keep suspected illegal immigrants in custody for 48 hours longer than they otherwise would have been held in order to give ICE officials time to take them into federal custody.

Until now, the LAPD honored all ICE detainer requests, regardless of what offense the person was suspected of committing. When Beck announced the outline of his plan in October, he said he supported the basic idea of cooperating with federal officials, but believed ICE officials had failed to distinguish between violent criminals and those accused of low-level offenses.

Under the terms of the new policy, the LAPD will continue to honor detainer requests for anyone arrested on suspicion of a felony offense, a misdemeanor charge with a bail above $5,000, or a vehicle violation with a bail of more than $2,500, according to a report presented to the commission at a meeting Tuesday. Documented gang members and people with previous felony convictions will also be detained regardless of their offense.

Otherwise, unless ICE officials can spell out special circumstances that require someone be held, the department will release people after they have been booked and ordered to appear in court for the alleged crime.

Several immigrant-rights advocates spoke out against the plan, claiming it did not do enough to protect illegal immigrants.

Commissioner John Mack called the plan "an enlightened first step," telling the critics that the policy "was not set in stone" and may be revised again in the future if police officials believe it is warranted.

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Meet the Assadosphere, the Online Defenders of Syria's Butcher

You might think it’s hard to defend Bashar Assad, the Syrian dictator responsible for the murder of 40,000 human beings. You must be new to the internet.

Assad doesn’t have many allies IRL — Iran and Russia are about the only ones remaining. But as the Syrian rebellion stretches into its 20th month, he’s found (and paid for) a whole heap of friends online, who warn of an impending NATO invasion to dominate Syria; secret CIA shipments of weapons to terrorist groups; and, of course, that Assad’s enemies are all really Jews. Welcome to the Assadosphere — on Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and the web.

Assad has maintained a robust propaganda presence for years: Remember the infamous Vogue profile of his wife Asma, which praised the “wildly democratic” Assad family right as it began its wave of bloodshed. Assad’s online buddies are the next wave of that propaganda: They’ve taken a defense of his regime viral, to the point where they don’t need to take their marching orders from Damascus. They’re contesting the web and social-media space that would otherwise be filled with recitations of Assad’s war crimes — and flooding the zone.

We’ve seen these characters show up occasionally in our comment threads and Facebook pages. But the most efficient portal into online Assad apologias comes from the Twitter hashtag #RealSyria. There, you’ll learn that the Free Syrian Army, “aka al Qaeda” is “preparing suits etc. for chemical weapons false flag.” You’ll see links to YouTube clips from the “Eretz Zen Channel” to learn how the rebels torture citizens with “flesh burning materials.” (Not that said rebels are in said video.) And you’ll find people skeptical of the “HUUURR DURRRR” that that nice Mr. Assad would ever use his “supposed” chemical weapons. It’s not like an Assad spokesman warned the world last July that “these types of weapons are [under] the direct supervision of the Syrian armed forces and will never be used unless Syria is exposed to external aggression.”

Then there’s the News About Syria-English blog, Facebook page and Google+ account. It invariably describes the Syrian rebels as “terrorists”; takes at face value Assad’s declarations that he’ll “not use chemical weapons, if it possesses any, whatever the circumstances“; and warns that last year’s war in Libya has yet to satisfy NATO’s “thirst for blood.”

And on like that. SyriaTribune maintains a YouTube channel stocked with clips from — surprise — Vladimir Putin’s Russia Today portraying Assad as the victim of a bloody-minded western conspiracy. A self-described French intellectual named Thierry Meyssan — author of 9/11 The Big Lie — reveals that TV images purporting to show Assad’s massacres of civilians were prepared by the CIA, along with White House deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes, and “aims at demoralizing the Syrians in order to pave the way for a coup d’etat.” The #FakeRevolution hashtag on Instagram provides pictorial, meme-filled boosterism for Bashar, like a screengrab from Time’ app kindly telling user mybubb1e to stop voting for Assad for Person of the Year or Hillary Clinton with flames shooting out of her eyes and ear, courtesy of Bashar4Ever.

Now, the Syrian rebellion is eclectic, and it includes some rather extreme elements –including al-Qaida-aligned terrorists. Human Rights Watch has borne witness to its willingness to execute and torture detainees. But human rights abuses can’t be the real issue for these web and social-media accounts: if so, they’d be turning on Assad, who drops cluster bombs on Syrian cities and has killed more civilians over the last 20 months than perhaps any other despot in power. And anyone defending Assad because they hate the idea of another U.S. invasion might consider that the Obama administration evidently wants to stay out of Syria at all costs. Yes, the Syrian rebels might actually acquire chemical weapons in the wake of Assad’s downfall, and that’s legitimately worrisome, but perhaps some ire might be spared for the regime that, you know, created that chemical stockpile.

Of course, the Syrian rebels use Twitter, Facebook and YouTube for everything from propaganda to weapons training, so perhaps it’s unsurprising that Assad’s defenders seek to contest that online space. It’s the internet; people say terrible things on it. But the Assadosphere is the sort of thing that Block and Unfollow functions were created for.

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Lawsuit claims A&E’s ‘Storage Wars’ show is rigged

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Some of the valuables found hidden in abandoned lockers on A&E’s “Storage Wars” have been added by producers to deceive viewers, a former cast member of the show claims in a lawsuit filed Tuesday.

David Hester‘s suit claims producers have added a BMW Mini and newspapers chronicling Elvis Presley‘s death to lockers in order to build drama for the show and that his complaints about the practices led to his firing.

Hester is seeking more than $ 750,000 in his wrongful termination, breach of contract and unfair business practices lawsuit. A&E Television Network declined comment, citing the pending lawsuit.

“Storage Wars” follows buyers who bid for abandoned storage lockers hoping to find valuables tucked inside.

“A&E regularly plants valuable items or memorabilia,” the lawsuit states. Hester’s suit claims he was fired from participating in the series’ fourth season after expressing concerns that manipulating the storage lockers for the sake of the show was illegal.

He claims that producers stopped adding items to his units after his initial complaints but continued the practice for other series participants. The lawsuit alleges entire units have been staged and the practice may violate a federal law intended to prevent viewers from being deceived when watching a show involving intellectual skills.

“Storage Wars” depicts buyers having only a few moments to look into an abandoned unit before deciding on whether to bid on it at auction. The lawsuit claims some of the auction footage on the show is staged.

Hester, known as “The Mogul” on the show, has been buying abandoned storage units and re-selling their contents for 26 years, according to the suit.

Nielsen Co. has ranked “Storage Wars” among cable television’s top-ranked shows several times since its 2010 debut.

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Rate of Childhood Obesity Falls in Several Cities

Jessica Kourkounis for The New York Times

At William H. Ziegler Elementary in Northeast Philadelphia, students are getting acquainted with vegetables and healthy snacks.

PHILADELPHIA — After decades of rising childhood obesity rates, several American cities are reporting their first declines.

The trend has emerged in big cities like New York and Los Angeles, as well as smaller places like Anchorage, Alaska, and Kearney, Neb. The state of Mississippi has also registered a drop, but only among white students.

“It’s been nothing but bad news for 30 years, so the fact that we have any good news is a big story,” said Dr. Thomas Farley, the health commissioner in New York City, which reported a 5.5 percent decline in the number of obese schoolchildren from 2007 to 2011.

The drops are small, just 5 percent here in Philadelphia and 3 percent in Los Angeles. But experts say they are significant because they offer the first indication that the obesity epidemic, one of the nation’s most intractable health problems, may actually be reversing course.

The first dips — noted in a September report by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation — were so surprising that some researchers did not believe them.

Deanna M. Hoelscher, a researcher at the University of Texas, who in 2010 recorded one of the earliest declines — among mostly poor Hispanic fourth graders in the El Paso area — did a double-take. “We reran the numbers a couple of times,” she said. “I kept saying, ‘Will you please check that again for me?’ ”

Researchers say they are not sure what is behind the declines. They may be an early sign of a national shift that is visible only in cities that routinely measure the height and weight of schoolchildren. The decline in Los Angeles, for instance, was for fifth, seventh and ninth graders — the grades that are measured each year — between 2005 and 2010. Nor is it clear whether the drops have more to do with fewer obese children entering school or currently enrolled children losing weight. But researchers note that declines occurred in cities that have had obesity reduction policies in place for a number of years.

Though obesity is now part of the national conversation, with aggressive advertising campaigns in major cities and a push by Michelle Obama, many scientists doubt that anti-obesity programs actually work. Individual efforts like one-time exercise programs have rarely produced results. Researchers say that it will take a broad set of policies applied systematically to effectively reverse the trend, a conclusion underscored by an Institute of Medicine report released in May.

Philadelphia has undertaken a broad assault on childhood obesity for years. Sugary drinks like sweetened iced tea, fruit punch and sports drinks started to disappear from school vending machines in 2004. A year later, new snack guidelines set calorie and fat limits, which reduced the size of snack foods like potato chips to single servings. By 2009, deep fryers were gone from cafeterias and whole milk had been replaced by one percent and skim.

Change has been slow. Schools made money on sugary drinks, and some set up rogue drink machines that had to be hunted down. Deep fat fryers, favored by school administrators who did not want to lose popular items like French fries, were unplugged only after Wayne T. Grasela, the head of food services for the school district, stopped buying oil to fill them.

But the message seems to be getting through, even if acting on it is daunting. Josh Monserrat, an eighth grader at John Welsh Elementary, uses words like “carbs,” and “portion size.” He is part of a student group that promotes healthy eating. He has even dressed as an orange to try to get other children to eat better. Still, he struggles with his own weight. He is 5-foot-3 but weighed nearly 200 pounds at his last doctor’s visit.

“I was thinking, ‘Wow, I’m obese for my age,’ ” said Josh, who is 13. “I set a goal for myself to lose 50 pounds.”

Nationally, about 17 percent of children under 20 are obese, or about 12.5 million people, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which defines childhood obesity as a body mass index at or above the 95th percentile for children of the same age and sex. That rate, which has tripled since 1980, has leveled off in recent years but has remained at historical highs, and public health experts warn that it could bring long-term health risks.

Obese children are more likely to be obese as adults, creating a higher risk of heart disease and stroke. The American Cancer Society says that being overweight or obese is the culprit in one of seven cancer deaths. Diabetes in children is up by a fifth since 2000, according to federal data.

“I’m deeply worried about it,” said Francis S. Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, who added that obesity is “almost certain to result in a serious downturn in longevity based on the risks people are taking on.”

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European Parliament Adopts Uniform Patent System

BRUSSELS — It only took four decades of wrangling.

On Tuesday, the European Parliament adopted a uniform patent system for Europe. If the plan goes into effect as expected by early 2014, it would try to remedy the country-by-country approach whose time and costs have long been an impediment to innovation across the European Union.

Achieving the new unified system could conceivably provide encouragement for another, far more ambitious project that European leaders will be grappling with at their summit meeting this week: a uniform system of banking regulation and supervision for the euro area. But the long, tortuous route to the patent agreement might also serve as a cautionary tale.

The banking union has already bogged down in national battles that some experts warn could drag out the process for years — particularly if changes to the bloc’s treaties are needed to give the central bank new and wide-ranging supervisory powers, or to set up a joint financial backstop to ensure the orderly winding down of failing banks.

“What’s clear is that the E.U. continues to operate on a hopelessly optimistic time scale,” Mats Persson, the director of the research group Open Europe, wrote in a briefing note on Tuesday. Mr. Persson was referring to the time it would take to set up a “proper safety net” for Europe’s banks, including a bank resolution fund.

In the case of the patent system, decades of discussions resulted in an unsatisfactory compromise, according to Bruno van Pottelsberghe, the dean of the Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management. The new system will “still be a mess” and “we should not expect any of a change in Europe’s innovative performance,” Mr. van Pottelsberghe said.

Meeting in Strasbourg on Tuesday, the European Parliament voted 484 to 164 to pass the key plank of the new patent system. Nation-by-nation vetting of the new system will formally start in February, when governments are expected to sign a treaty creating special patent courts.

The system would supplement the current patchwork of patent rules in the European Union; under the current system, a ruling in one of the union’s 27 countries has no automatic bearing on another. The patchwork approach has made protecting inventions and innovations in Europe 15 times more expensive than in the United States, harming competitiveness, according to the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union.

The cost of patent protection should initially drop to around 6,500 euros, or $8,400, from about 36,000 euros, or $46,500, the commission said. That change is largely because the new so-called unitary patents granted by the European Patent Office in Munich would no longer need to be validated in all of the countries where protection is sought. Nor would they need to be translated into all local languages. Instead, English, German or French would suffice.

Benoît Battistelli, the president of the European Patent Office, said the decision on Tuesday would “equip the European economy with a truly supranational patent system.”

Yet the long, tangled history of working toward a common patent — repeatedly shelved after bumping up against national interests and with squabbling over languages — is a timely reminder of how much easier it is to make commitments to a unified Europe than to put unity into practice.

In the case of the banking rules, also known as banking union, European governments still must overcome differences over the system’s most fundamental element: a single banking supervisor operating under the aegis of the European Central Bank.

European finance ministers are expected to work through the night on Wednesday in Brussels debating whether a new supervisor would oversee all 6,000 lenders in the euro area. France, Germany, Sweden, Hungary and Britain are among countries with concerns about the plan. The timing for an agreement “is likely to slip, as member states remain far apart on a number of key substantive issues,” Mujtaba Rahman, an analyst for the Eurasia Group, wrote in a briefing note on Tuesday.

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Movie massacre: Defense challenges police on suspect's notebook

CENTENNIAL, Colo. -- The handling of a key piece of evidence in the Aurora movie massacre fell under scrutiny on Monday as defense attorneys raised the question of whether law enforcement officers were careless when they confiscated a notebook that might have detailed suspect James E. Holmes’ plans in advance.

An intriguing, even eerie, fact emerged about the notebook tied to the man who is accused of opening fire on a crowded theater showing a Batman movie: The notebook  has been stuffed with money that had been burned. Burned money appeared in the Batman movie "The Dark Knight."

The spiral notebook was sent by Holmes to Dr. Lynne Fenton, a University of Colorado-Denver psychiatrist, on July 19, hours before he is alleged to have unleashed an attack on a packed screening of the Batman movie “The Dark Knight Rises.” The July 20 rampage killed 12 and wounded at least 58.

Fenton counseled Holmes once on June 11, four days after he failed a key exam as a doctoral neuroscience student and one day after he began to withdraw from the university.

Public defenders in the case also sought Monday to determine who leaked details about the contents of the notebook to the press in violation of a strict gag order.

Detective Alton Reed of the Aurora Police Department testified that he “fanned” through the notebook addressed to Fenton from Holmes on July 23 in the mailroom of the Anschutz Medical Campus. However, he did not disclose the contents in court beyond saying he saw writing and money that had been burned. He also insisted he did not tell the news media about the notebook.

It is unclear what significance, if any, the burned money has to the case but there is some speculation it is tied to a scene in a previous Batman movie in which the homicidal Joker burns piles of money. Holmes has reportedly said he thought of himself as the Joker. Before the shooting Holmes had dyed his brown hair a neon orange, perhaps to evoke the Joker, though the character's hair is green.

On July 23, the Aurora police, FBI agents and the Adams County bomb squad were called to the university mailroom after employees and campus police searched for anything addressed to Fenton or Dr. Robert Feinstein, chairman of the university’s outpatient psychiatric clinic. Holmes’ public defenders had alerted Fenton the day before that a package would be arriving for her and that they wanted it back.

Although Reed said he wore protective gloves to preserve the evidence as he briefly examined the notebook, campus police Chief Douglas Abraham admitted he did not when he briefly shook the notebook to see if anything else was inside.  “I was careless,” he testified.

The defense team has been strongly critical not just of press leaks but also of the prosecution for making what the defense calls false statements about Holmes’ time at the university. Previously prosecutors have said Holmes was banned from campus after making unspecified threats to a professor. University officials immediately denied that, saying Holmes’ campus pass was deactivated as part of his withdrawal process.

Holmes was admitted to the elite neuroscience doctoral program in June 2011 but withdrew a year later. He is being held without bond.

Holmes was back in court Monday. He seemed alert as he glanced around the courtroom.

Last month a pretrial hearing was abruptly postponed after his lawyers said he had been taken to the hospital for an undisclosed reason. Local media outlets reported he had tried to bash his head against a wall in his cell.

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Two Cheers for <em>Zero Dark Thirty'</em>s Torture Scenes

One scene features a bloodied, disoriented and humiliated man strapped to a wall with his pants around his ankles. A second scene depicts the same man having liquid forcibly poured down his throat; later, he’s shoved into a box that could barely hold your stereo. And all of this takes place in the first 45 minutes or so of Zero Dark Thirty, the new movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden. It’s enough to make you wretch. It’s arguably the best and most important part of the movie.

Kathryn Bigelow’s new film about the decade-long manhunt for Osama bin Laden begins with an unsparing, nauseating and frighteningly realistic look at how the CIA tortured many people and reaped very little intelligence. Never before has a movie grappled with post-9/11 torture the way Zero Dark Thirty does. The torture on display in the film occurs at the intersection of ignorance and brutality, while the vast, vast majority of the intelligence work that actually does lead to bin Laden’s downfall occurs after the torture has ended.

You wouldn’t know this from the avalanche of commentary greeting the film. Bigelow is being presented as a torture apologist, and it’s a bum rap. David Edelstein of New York says her movie borders on the “morally reprehensible” for presenting “a case for the efficacy of torture.” The New York Times’ Frank Bruni suspects that Dick Cheney will give the film two thumbs up. Bruni is probably right, since defenders of torture have been known to latch onto any evidence they suspect will vindicate them as American heroes. But that’s not Zero Dark Thirty.

Bigelow instead presents a graphic depiction of what declassified CIA documents indicate the torture program really was. (A caveat: The CIA has actively blocked disclosure into that program, going so far as to destroy video recordings of it.) The first detainee we meet, in 2003, is a bruised and mentally unstable man forced to stay awake by having his arms strapped to thick ropes suspended from the walls of his undisclosed torture chamber. Or, in the bureaucratic language of former Justice Department official Steven Bradbury: “The primary method of sleep deprivation involves the use of shackling to keep the detainee awake.”

Later, the detainee — apparently Amar al-Baluchi, nephew of 9/11 conspirator Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, or based on him — is shown to be kept hooded in that position, in a dark room while deafening music blasts. (Specifically, “Pavlov’s Dogs” by cerebral early-’90s New York hardcore band Rorshach.) He is interrupted by his captor, CIA agent “Dan,” who informs him: “When you lie to me, I hurt you” and that “partial information” will be treated as a lie. The detainee is stripped from the waist down to be humiliated in front of a woman CIA agent — the film’s protagonist, Maya; more on her in a second — before being stuffed into a wooden box the size of a child’s dresser. That would be the “confinement box,” one of the earliest torture techniques the CIA used on an al-Qaida detainee known as Abu Zubaydah. (The agency wanted to put insects in it, to heighten Abu Zubaydah’s fear levels.)

The film goes on like this for about 45 brutal minutes. “Uncooperative” detainees are held down by large men and doused through a towel with water until they spew it up. (There’s no “boarding” in this “waterboarding.) Helpless detainees are shown with rheumy eyes, desperate for the torture to stop, while their captors promise them nourishment and keep their promises by forcing Ensure down their throats through a funnel. Amar al-Baluchi, mocked for defecating on himself, is stripped and forced to wear a dog collar while Dan rides him, to alert the detainee to his helplessness.

These are not “enhanced interrogation techniques,” as apologists for the abuse have called it. There is little interrogation presented in Zero Dark Thirty. There is a shouted question, followed by brutality. At one point, “Maya,” a stand-in for the dedicated CIA agents who actually succeeded at hunting bin Laden, points out that one abused detainee couldn’t possibly have the information the agents are demanding of him. The closest the movie comes to presenting a case for the utility of torture is by presenting the name of a key bin Laden courier, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, as resulting from an interrogation not shown on screen. But — spoiler alert — the CIA ultimately comes to learn that it misunderstood the context of who that courier was and what he actually looked like. All that happens over five years after the torture program initiated. Meanwhile, the real intelligence work begins when a CIA agent bribes a Kuwaiti with a yellow Lamborghini for the phone number of the courier’s mother, and through extensive surveillance, like a police procedural, the manhunt rolls to its climax. If this is the case for the utility of torture, it’s a weak case — nested within a strong case for the inhumanity of it.

Nor does Bigelow let the CIA off the hook for the torture. “You agency people are sick,” a special operator tells Dan. Dan, the chief torturer of the movie, is shown as not only a sadist but a careerist. “You don’t want to be the last one holding the dog collar when the oversight committee comes,” he tells Maya before decamping to Washington. Other CIA bureaucrats are shown sneering at the idea of canceling the torture program — more fearful of congressional accountability than of losing bin Laden. Maya is more of a cipher: she is shown coming close to puking when observing the torture. But she also doesn’t object to it — “This is not a normal prison. You choose how you will be treated,” she tells a detainee — and Maya is the hero of the film.

“It’s a movie, not a documentary,” screenwriter Mark Boal told The New Yorker. “We’re trying to make the point that waterboarding and other harsh tactics were part of the C.I.A. program.” That quote has electrified the internet as a statement of intent to gussy up the importance of torture. But the fact is torture was part of the CIA’s post-9/11 agenda: dispassionate journalists like Mark Bowden presents it as such in his excellent recent book.

Zero Dark Thirty does not present torture as a silver bullet that led to bin Laden; it presents torture as the ignorant alternative to that silver bullet. Were a documentarian making the film, there would surely be less torture in the movie: CNN’s Peter Bergen deems the scenes overwrought, both in their gruesomeness and in their seeming estimation of their role in nabbing bin Laden.

But that would also come at the expense of making a viewer come to grips with what Dick Cheney euphemistically called the “dark side” of post-9/11 counterterrorism. Meanwhile, former Bush administration aide Philip Zelikow, who termed the torture a “war crime” in a recent Danger Room interview, will probably find the movie more amenable than Cheney will. What endures on the screen are scenes that can make a viewer ashamed to be American, in the context of a movie whose ending scene makes viewers very, very proud to be American.

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‘Skyfall’ launches back to top spot with $10.8M

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The James Bond blockbuster “Skyfall” has risen back to the No. 1 spot at the weekend box office, taking in $ 10.8 million.

That brought its domestic total to $ 261.4 million and its worldwide haul to a franchise record of $ 918 million.

The top 20 movies at U.S. and Canadian theaters Friday through Sunday, followed by distribution studio, gross, number of theater locations, average receipts per location, total gross and number of weeks in release, as compiled Monday by Hollywood.com are:

1. “Skyfall,” Sony, $ 10,780,201, 3,401 locations, $ 3,170 average, $ 261,400,281, five weeks.

2. “Rise of the Guardians,” Paramount, $ 10,400,618, 3,639 locations, $ 2,858 average, $ 61,774,192, three weeks.

3. “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 2,” Summit, $ 9,156,265, 3,646 locations, $ 2,511 average, $ 268,691,029, four weeks.

4. “Lincoln,” $ 8,916,813, 2,014 locations, $ 4,427 average, $ 97,137,447, five weeks.

5. “Life of Pi,” Fox, $ 8,330,764, 2,946 locations, $ 2,828 average, $ 60,948,293, three weeks.

6. “Playing For Keeps,” FilmDistrict, $ 5,750,288, 2,837 locations, $ 2,027 average, $ 5,750,288, one week.

7. “Wreck-It Ralph,” Disney, $ 4,859,368, 2,746 locations, $ 1,770 average, $ 164,402,934, six weeks.

8. “Red Dawn,” FilmDistrict, $ 4,236,105, 2,754 locations, $ 1,538 average, $ 37,240,920, three weeks.

9. “Flight,” Paramount, $ 3,130,305, 2,431 locations, $ 1,288 average, $ 86,202,541, six weeks.

10. “Killing Them Softly,” Weinstein Co., $ 2,806,901, 2,424 locations, $ 1,158 average, $ 11,830,638, two weeks.

11. “Silver Linings Playbook,” Weinstein Co., $ 2,171,665, 371 locations, $ 5,854 average, $ 13,964,405, four weeks.

12. “Anna Karenina,” Focus, $ 1,544,859, 422 locations, $ 3,661 average, $ 6,603,042, four weeks.

13. “The Collection,” LD Entertainment, $ 1,487,655, 1,403 locations, $ 1,060 average, $ 5,455,328, two weeks.

14. “Argo,” Warner Bros., $ 1,482,346, 944 locations, $ 1,570 average, $ 103,160,015, nine weeks.

15. “End of Watch,” Open Road Films, $ 751,623, 1,259 locations, $ 597 average, $ 39,989,766, 12 weeks.

16. “Hitchcock,” Fox Searchlight, $ 712,544, 181 locations, $ 3,937 average, $ 1,661,670, three weeks.

17. “Talaash,” Reliance Big Pictures, $ 449,195, 161 locations, $ 2,790 average, $ 2,397,909, two weeks.

18. “Taken 2,” Fox, $ 387,227, 430 locations, $ 901 average, $ 137,700,304, 10 weeks.

19. “Pitch Perfect,” Universal, $ 305,765, 387 locations, $ 790 average, $ 63,517,408, 11 weeks.

20. “The Sessions,” Fox, $ 218,973, 197 locations, $ 1,112 average, $ 4,948,342, eight weeks.

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Online:

http://www.hollywood.com

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Universal and Focus are owned by NBC Universal, a unit of Comcast Corp.; Sony, Columbia, Sony Screen Gems and Sony Pictures Classics are units of Sony Corp.; Paramount is owned by Viacom Inc.; Disney, Pixar and Marvel are owned by The Walt Disney Co.; Miramax is owned by Filmyard Holdings LLC; 20th Century Fox and Fox Searchlight are owned by News Corp.; Warner Bros. and New Line are units of Time Warner Inc.; MGM is owned by a group of former creditors including Highland Capital, Anchorage Advisors and Carl Icahn; Lionsgate is owned by Lions Gate Entertainment Corp.; IFC is owned by AMC Networks Inc.; Rogue is owned by Relativity Media LLC.

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Vital Signs: Smoking Tied to Less Dense Bones for Girls

Smoking in teenage girls is associated with slower development of bone mineral density, a new study reports.

The scientists studied 262 healthy girls ages 11 to 19, using questionnaires and interviews to assess their smoking habits. The researchers also measured the girls’ bone density at the hip and lumbar spine three times at one-year intervals.

Smokers entered adolescence with the same lumbar and hip bone density as nonsmokers, but by age 19, they were about a year behind on average. After adjusting for other factors that affect bone health — height, weight, hormonal contraceptive use and more — the researchers found that even relatively low or irregular rates of smoking were independently associated with lower bone density.

The study, published last week in The Journal of Adolescent Health, used a sample that fell below national averages for calcium intake and physical activity, so the results may not be generalizable to wider populations.

The lead author, Lorah D. Dorn, a professor of pediatrics at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, pointed out that this is only one study and that more research is needed. Still, she said, “It tells me that for care providers — clinicians and parents — this needs to be something they’re vigilant about.”

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