_The Hurt Locker_

[sept...@millenicom.com]

_The Hurt Locker_ manages to be cinema-verite
and documentary-like, yet is also poetic, symbolic
and full of allusions (conscious or otherwise, residing
in the head of the director or just the viewer) to other
films. At the same time, like all of Kathryn Bigelow's
films, it feels flawed.

I'd bet that this film has its genesis in the single
image of the bomb tech as a spaceman, ponderously
manuevering in a protective suit, re-enacting zero gravity
space walks. The recurring image is by far the most
memorable in the film. It is shocking that Bigelow, who
experimented with so many genres, never tried science
fiction, unless one counts the _Peeping Tom_-infected
_Strange Days_. I suppose _The Hurt Locker_ gas ti
make do as her answer to Danny Boyle's _Sunshine_;
it is far more focused and psychologically acute,
although it can use more woman characters. The
solitary bomb-defusing combat engineer also works
in a vacuum, taking his life (and those of others) in
his hands. The protagonist, played by Jeremy Renner,
certainly has hubris that rivals those of the mythical and
mechanical Icariuses who challenged the Sun. (And
speaking of space-persons -- the film also reminds
me of Isild de Basco's in traditional Indian attire -- an
image that launches Benoit Jacquot's _The
Untouchable_, about another stranger in a strange land.)

In one scene, ace bomb-expert Renner, on all fours, digs
up a Improvised Explosive Device: a labyrinth of buried
artillery shells, like a string of potatoes, tied with poisonous
roots -- truly a plight upon the earth. In another (he took
down 800+ IEDs), he disarms massive howitzer shells in the
trunk of a burnt-out sedan. These are graphic reminders
of Donald Rumsfeld's criminal stupidity, his failure to
secure arsenals that led to thousands of deaths and a
hundred times more maimed. Iraqi civilians are repeatedly
shown cowering or staring, in fear and in rage, at the
occupiers' patrols and checkpoints. "If he isn't an
insurgent now we certainly made him one," Renner said
after a taxi driver is dragged from his car. So persistent
is the anonymity of the Iraqi, he can't even recognize the
face of the Iraqi kid whom he plays soccer with,
After taking a rogue detour out of the green zone,
he has a taste of the fear and humiliation going through
a U.S. Army checkpoint.

But there is little general anti-war sentiment in _The
Hurt Locker_, which really deals with the soldier's personal
involvement in the war (as Armond White puts it). There
is an interesting relationship between the two specialists
in Renner's unit, the well-spoken, ex-special force,
African American Sanford, who calls Renner a dangerous
adrenalin addict and white-trash, and the white Eldridge
initially worships the sergeant but later almost got killed
for his hero worship. The longest set-piece in the film
involves a static man-to-man gun-duel between Sanford
and insurgents in a distant emplacement after the
Americans come across ambushed mercanaries. In
an elaborate conceit, Bigelow has the mercs and the
soldiers exchange weapons, so that the trained sniper
Sanford can prevail after a drawn out desert sitzgrieg
that may have taken place on the moon (or perhaps
the lunar landscape of World War I, or the Stalingrad
of _Enemy at the Gates_). No calling for airstrike or
reinforcements here, or even the sensible course of
action: lay down a covering fire with the sniper rifle while
closing in with the Humvee and obliterate the enemy
with its mounted .50. In fact the film emphasizes a
new paradigm of warfare, this new clash of civilization,
as fundamentally static. Renner and company
denigrates the tanks sitting idle in camps; instead,
these foot-soldiers just do the job they have performed
for ten thousand years. From the looks of things in
this film, there will be no intercultural, Arab-American
reconciliation for at least that long.

The weakest part of the film is the Renner-gone-rogue
sequences near the end, especially when he endangers
his crew in a wild-goose chase down Baghdad alleys.
What the film does best is its sense of dread and tension,
its ability to evoke the feeling that something deadly can
happen any time. Other than that, I don't feel like
Never feeling that I understand _The Hurt Locker_ , I
go looking at other reviews. White evokes _Billy
Budd_ and thus indirectly _Beau Travail_. There is
little of Denis' quiet, sublime artistry here, however,
or the lived-in, Westerner-gone-native charm.
White also throws in the gun battle in _The Flight of
the Phoenix_ as an anology. I own a copy of this now;
this is indeed the best "B-movie" film I've seen since
_Pitch Black_, although objects *move* in _Phoenix_.
Curiously, that 2005 film has an ending more befitting
to Obama's age whereas _The Hurt Locker_ could
have comfortably been set in the dark ages.

Manohla Dargis's interview with Bigelow, which is
mostly about her other films, emphasizes the addiction
to war, that "war is a drug." True enough. Frank
Herbert has this wonderful saying that the species
yearns for war, the mingling of the genes. The
journalists love wars, they helps the ratings and
newspaper sales, and make journalistic careers. I
can certainly confess that I spent an obscene number
of weekends reading about Napoleon's campaigns,
the Civil War, and WWII. Unless you have the
misfortunate to be in one, reading so much about
wars is the best way to educate yourself just how
destructive they are. The last book I read happens
to be Hemingway's _Across the River and Into the
Trees_, The protagonist there, a colonel (demoted
from his general rank) certainly yearns for more action,
the adrenaline rush, even though the two world wars
broke his body and spirit (the latter when he sent
his regiment to die in vain in the Hurtgen forest).
Compared to the novel, easily Hemingway's weakest,
the protagonist in the film has very little self-reflexive
moments. I like the film a great deal but feel that it
falls quite a bit short of a masterpiece.

[sept...@millenicom.com]

After watching _The Hurt Locker_ I felt compelled to
see _K19: The Widowmaker_ too. (Another lapse on DVD
rental prohibition, of course.) This is a very polished
film, and superficially has little to do with the hand-held
aesthetic of _The Hurt Locker_. The background and the
motivations are very clearly laid out, compared to the
recent film where the Renner character seems to be
disarming bombs for its own sake.

I'm more impressed with the commentary track with the
director and cinematographer of _K19: the widowmaker_
than the film itself. The film is very powerful,
not to take anything away from that, but I didn't feel
it is truly revelatory, or redines (or even tries to
redine) the form the way _The Thin Red Line_ does. The
larger, philosophical questions of nuclear holocaust and
patriotism (including why the U.S. should be making a
film honoring the Red Navy submariners when so many
stories about U.S. submarine personnel goes unfilmed)
are not addressed. The Russian (soviet) sailors prevent
a nuclear accident on the sub, but their main motive is
to save themselves; preventing a political (and ecological)
disaster is only secondary, if that. If they really care
about those, they should clearly have sought the help of
the U.S. destroyer to help neutralize their nuclear reactor.
I also wish that the new Indian Jones plot had centered
on the nuclear bomb threat; this is something we can
profitably be reminded of 20 years after the cold war
ended!

The commentary doesn't really deal with these either, but
the sing-song, alternating descriptions by Kathryn Bigelow
and Christopher Kyle ranks with Annette Insdorf and her
co-commentator on _Shoot the Piano Player_ as one of the
most accomplished I've ever heard. Bigelow has such a
surprisingly soft, feminine voice, and a poetic, image-
laden, professorial way of speaking ... it hardly seems
possible that someone with that refined a way of talking
is capable of making all these action films! She and
her cinematographer takes turn, deliver one detail-rich
story after another. What they talk about barely has
anything to do with what's on screen, but they have the
darnedest stories about visiting the desolation that is
Murmansk naval base, with assault rifles pointed at their
car; or anecdotes about the submarines' construction,
such as the fact that the tools are always at arm's length
inside the deliberately narrow hulle so that, if the
lights go out, repairs can still be made.

The helicopter/crane shots are great but I'm mostly in
love with that voice.