War is hell, but it makes for good movies

THE HURT LOCKER. So in keeping with my attempt to catch myself up this will again be somewhat short. I ended up seeing the movie (trailer) on a whim as it was playing at the AFI theater, which is essentially one bus stop after the one I get off at and I decided just before pulling up outside the apartment complex to go on up and watch the movie.

First off I should say I find movies that revolve around war appealing as the topic is pretty inherently dramatic. I also think the title of the movie is quite good with the idea of "hurt" being used not just to describe a creation of pain but also in common, especially military usage, to speak of using violence.

It is certainly an odd movie to peg and one that I think reminds me of our earlier discussion of the concept of genre and this is certainly a movie that leaves one questioning how it fits in. On one hand there is certainly an action-movie aspect to the film with a number of truly intense situations featuring the bad-ass character that like those Bruce Willis has made a career out of playing. In this case we get Jeremy Renner (a previously underrated actor) as Sergeant William James, a bomb technician in the Iraq war whose job is to defuse IEDs and takes a particular risky (and, as is the case in an action movie, effective) approach to his job. But the tropes of the genre break down quickly with the lack of a true dramatic event to allow our protagonist to shine and win the day. Instead director Kathryn Bigelow leaves us with the monotony of what James does and allows the viewer question the worth of his sense of duty and daring, an outcome rarely seen in an action movie.

I was reading a somewhat unrelated article on Slate this past week that referred to The Hurt Locker, stating that "despite its visceral view of war as madness and addiction, [it] has been pegged as an Iraq war movie that has nothing to say about the Iraq war: action cinema unencumbered by politics." It seems to me that it takes a bit of a turn there to which I do not completely concur with what the author states is the conventional wisdom. For the most part The Hurt Locker is a character study of a hardened man that one might have seen in a Scorcese-De Niro movie of the 1970s but dropped in the Iraq war. Furthermore to say it has nothing to say about the war is quite off base. There have been a number of movies made about the current conflict and none have done particularly well with audiences of critics (a topic I broached before) and this has been heralded as the first noteworthy film made about the war. The reason it has acheived this recognition is because it has avoided the heavy-handed morality most Iraq movies thus far have utilized. It is not a "political" film by any stretch of the imagination, but the blunt and realistic way it presents the danger and futility of the war says a lot about what this war is and allows the viewer to draw conclusions, a conclusion taken even further by a veteran in a NYT op-ed piece likening it and The Messenger to a public service. Bigelow does not tell me I should come out of the movie angry about how nothing was accomplished by anyone in the movie, but I still came out thinking it. It is not that the movie has nothing to say about Iraq; it is more accurate to say it does not tell me what I should think about Iraq.

Aside from that, from a technical standpoint it was also a pretty great experience. The atmosphere really felt like a war zone (albeit to someone who has never been in one) and not something that had been prettied up for the cameras. It was raw and not very pretty, much like I imagine this war to be. At times I found myself wondering how Bigelow accomplished this with so many extras -- including whaling women -- who appeared to be somewhat authentic locals as opposed to, say, Italians in costume. Bigelow has a good chance of becoming the first woman to win a best director Oscar and her masterful handling of those tense sequences that manage to be tightly edited yet keep the situation lasting more than just through the quick jump-cut sequences of a Jason Bourne movie. There is a sustained tension through her scenes. Again she is using her craft to say something about the Iraq war without having tell us what she is saying.

Overall I think it turned out to be a pretty spot-on movie and I would enjoy seeing her unseat her ex-husband from his place as the king of the world at this year's Oscars.