Hurt Locker a pain in my ass

I watched Hurt Locker in Bangkok. I haven't read any reviews on it, so I don't know, and also don't care what anyone thinks about it.

Here's what I think.

First, the good: It had a lot of action.

Ok, now for the rest. It's the most blatant bit of pro-George W. Bush propaganda since FOX's 24. There should have been a disclaimer at the end, "This Program Bought and Paid for By the RNC." It doesn't even bother with policy apologetics. In Hurt Locker, the big picture doesn't matter, because it doesn't exist.

If you haven't seen the film, it has all the elements of your old-timey Western, complete with the natives, who range from obtuse to villainous, and the cowboys, who are, well, cowboys, sauntering through the dust-blown streets, cavalier in the face of IEDs (I always confuse that acronym with IUDs, never a good mistake to make), rescuing the innocents (or trying) and killing the bad guys.

I don't know the exact mix of Thais to ex-pats in the theater in Bangkok, but I think it was at least 1/3 to 1/2 expats, and there's no way of knowing how many were Americans. I don't run into too many Americans in South Asia. But it was disturbing to hear everyone in the audience cheer whenever an Iraqi died. There was no parsing of which side he was on. In this film, the only good Iraqi is a dead Iraqi.

The hero of the story is William James, played by Jeremy Renner, who for this role has been nominated for an Oscar. The acting isn't terrible, given the one-dimensional roles each character is given. James at the onset takes the position of team leader of a bomb-removal squad in Iraq and immediately starts outcowboying the cowboys, refusing to communicate with the rest of his team and defying death and common sense to defuse what is said in the film to be a record-breaking 837 improvised explosive devices.

And so it goes, with the evil Iraqis killing innocent civilians, even at one point gutting a young boy and filling his abdomen with explosives, presumably to hit the heroic James in a rare vulnerable spot: he had befriended the boy in the process of purchasing mass quantities of bootleg DVDs from him (I assumed they were pornographic, but now that I think of it, it may not explicitly say this).

At the end of the film, James returns to the States to his girlfriend and infant son, whom he admonishes in a touching soliloquy,

"You love Mommy, your Daddy. You love your pajamas. You love everything, don't ya? Yea. But you know what, buddy? As you get older... some of the things you love might not seem so special anymore. Like your Jack-in-a-Box. Maybe you'll realize it's just a piece of tin and a stuffed animal. And then you forget the few things you really love. And by the time you get to my age, maybe it's only one or two things. With me, I think it's one."

And, of course, the one thing James loves is revealed at the close, as he swaggers out into the setting sun to defuse yet another bomb at the start of another tour for which he had volunteered. It was implied his girlfriend might leave him if he returned to Iraq, so it makes him all the more heroic.

Give it some goddamn context! I cannot believe this film is on the short list for an Academy Award! You can't tell the story of one man in a war without giving the context of how America decided to start the war itself. It is immoral to portray Iraqis as treacherous, murderous snakes in the grass without making any effort to explain why they are fighting an occupying force.

What is sickeningly ironic is that the film itself, and its director, Kathryn Bigelow, is being portrayed as an underdog as they go up against Avatar, the film of Bigelow's ex-husband, James Cameron, a movie I may or may not go to see.

In case you missed my point, it is ironic that this, a film portraying the world's most powerful country, invading another, much less powerful country, could be seen as an underdog in any sense. An underdog is a contender that has some merit but has been underrated. Hurt Locker is merely a shitty movie.

How the movie was received in Thailand is irrelevant. But I can just imagine how it played in the States, with all of the chest-thumping 'support the troops (but forget the (false) premise of the war)' folks latching onto it. It's really discouraging to think that after what, nearly 10 years in Iraq, someone can produce a film that is such blatant cheerleading for one of the biggest bait-and-switch jobs of the century and get so much critical acclaim.

After this, I had better not to hear anything more about the 'liberal media' or 'liberal Hollywood.' It's just too much.