Jess

In an unusually cinematic period for me, I saw two CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED films recently. Apparently, other people did, too, and they have something to say about them, and they’re liberals too, goddamnit!

“The Hurt Locker” is Kathryn Bigelow’s latest directorial effort since K-19: The Widowmaker, so people’s expectations were awesomely high. Somehow this film’s quality surpasses that one, and you can read about all the nerdy stylistic details with the AV Club.

The film has been almost universally critically lauded, but those naive sheep can’t see how far the MSM has pulled the wool over their eyes, says the Prospect’s Tara McKelvey! The movie is propaganda, McKelvey claims, because there is (shockingly for a war flick!) action:

“The Hurt Locker sets itself up as am anti-war film. It opens with a quote, “War is a drug,” from Chris Hedges, a Nation Institute senior fellow and author of War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning. Yet for more than two hours, the film imbues Baghdad’s combat zone with excitement and drama.”

Come again? It really doesn’t sound like her characterization of a combat zone contradicts the nature of war. Last time I checked, drugs were generally considered to be 1) exciting and 2)on one level or another, wrong. So saying that drugs and war have both immediate highs and often terrible consequences is pretty accurate (see Trainspotting, Requiem for a Dream, and all other films about drugs).

McKelvey also takes issue with the fact that the protagonist, a bomb-defuser with a death wish, actually likes what he does. She specifically refers to a sequence that contrasts his days in Iraq with his quotidian life at home. “The fact that the war itself seems to have little point fades into the background,” she claims. But she forgets an important point–Staff St. William James is an asshole. He defies protocol and often leaves his team swinging by their balls. He takes risks that are more likely to fail than succeed. He’s weirdly sentimental about the bombs he defuses, keeping some of the components under his bed. He’d rather be alone in a desert than home with his son and girlfriend. Does anyone really want to be that guy?

Yes, the movie is more about soldiers than the macro rationalization of the war. It is more about the soldiers surviving and doing their job than politiking. So why does that automatically equal ‘pro-war’? As an Obama-loving liberal, I didn’t come out of the movie ready to suit up for Freedom; my reaction was more along the lines of, ‘wow, that job sucks, and the war seems pretty pointless and destructive.’ We’ve reached a point where we can say, ‘yeah, the war was a really bad idea. Now let’s stop people from dying, try to help a bit and get the hell out of there.’ Why can’t we say that in relation to a fictional portrayal of the war? And if we can, don’t we need guys who love defusing bombs more than anything in the world?

The second premiere that got a little more attention was for In The Loop, a political satire about the ramp-up to a war that smacks of Iraq. Again, people have really enjoyed it. Adele Stan chose to describe not the film, but the mise-en-scene of the screening, attended by the director, Armando Iannucci, David Rasche, who plays Linton Barwick, and “flip-flop-shod interns, and men donning khakis and polo shirts.” Hill staffers and people coming from work–who woulda thunk it, in DC of all places?!?

But seriously, guys. Stan has a bone to pick with Iannucci. And it’s not about the subject, the inspiration for the characters, or the questionable ethics of nearly every character in the movie. No, the most shocking thing is that some male characters sometimes fling around insults that–gasp!–aren’t totally PC!!!

“Granted the last question (I got lucky), I asked about the extreme level of gay-disparaging analogies spewed by the movie’s potty-mouthed characters. “Call me naive,” I said, “but do people really talk like that?”

Iannucci explained that James Gandolfini, who plays a general in the film, spent a few days at the Pentagon doing research. “That’s really the way they talk,” said Iannucci. “[Gandolfini] said there’s a lot of talk about dicks — ‘We’re gonna put our dicks on the table’ and that sort of thing.”

Can you believe that discourse in the Pentagon is sometimes homophobic??? Someone should make a law against that or something!!!

The review kind of devolves from there. Stan takes us to the afterparty at “a slick joint called Co Co” and trots out her knowledge of the behind-the-scenes action of the film. She also kind of makes it sound like she heard Iannucci’s story about a State Department meeting he attended while she was at the afterparty when it was actually during the Q&A, but little matter. For anyone who lives in DC, this is pretty much a non-story. A cultural event happened, people in polo shirts came, and the Pentagon is homophobic. Also, from an editorial point of view, the whole thing is riddled with asides that no one cares about, or worse, seem like plugs for one thing or another:

“I attended the screening with my friend Mike Rogers, himself a star in our world for his work “outing” anti-gay-rights politicians who lead secret gay lives, as featured in the recent film, Outrage.”

I assume “our world’=AlterNet readers, to which I cannot speak from personal experience. I don’t think, however, that shilling for your friends should be okay in any world, especially when it has absolutely NOTHING to do with the rest of the article.

That’s about all the kultur I can take for now, and as for this….

There are no words.