lookie

http://www.filmsite.org/warfilms5.html

The Guardian, Jarhead review by Peter Bradshaw

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2006/jan/13/3

The American Conservative, The Hurt Locker. By Jack Hunter

Why “The Hurt Locker” Hurts, By Jack Hunter March 12, 2010

The Oscar for Best Picture this year went to Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker,” and rightfully so. It was a great movie with a powerful message. But what message? Some critics said it was pro-war, while others declared it antiwar. Regardless of its political slant, one thing remains clear: “The Hurt Locker” is about war-and war is awful.

The Hurt Locker follows a unit of Army specialists whose daily, often deadly mission is to defuse and dispose of “IED” bombs (Improvised Explosive Devices), placed intentionally by insurgents along roads, in cars, inside the bodies of murdered children, strapped to crying adult men and pretty much anywhere else imaginable. Led by Staff Sergeant William James (actor Jeremy Renner, also nominated for best actor), James somewhat reckless, cowboy attitude is unnerving to his fellow soldiers, whose main concern is simply surviving each mission. Without getting into too many of the gory details (and scenes that will disturb and stay with the viewer), “The Hurt Locker” is a story of American soldiers, who in dealing with inhumanity every day, become satisfied with just making it through another day.

The characters in this film do not talk about “victory,” or “winning” or the politics of the situation in which they find themselves. Indeed, given the everyday situations these soldiers experience, notions of victory seem almost laughable. The closest thing to political commentary is when an Iraqi taxi driver is manhandled by American soldiers, Renner’s character remarks “If he wasn’t an insurgent, he sure the hell is now.” Former CIA terrorism expert Michael Scheuer recently criticized “Obama’s brass” for “continuing to reassuringly chant the Bush-Clinton-Bush lie to Americans that Islamists attack us because of our way of life not because of our interventionism.” Though still hard for some Americans to comprehend, Scheuer’s observation that US foreign military intervention breeds Islamic terrorists would not be considered controversial, but fairly obvious, to the soldiers in this film.

The film’s intention is to make us think about the Iraq war in realistic terms, and it accomplishes this, or as much as any Hollywood production possibly could. Writing for the Japan Times online, film critic Giovanni Fazio explains the hopelessness of “The Hurt Locker”: “The whole question of ‘why we should/shouldn’t be in Iraq’ is practically a moot point. American soldiers walk down devastated streets… count the days until their tour is up, and view every Iraqi they see as a potential threat. Iraqis, glimpsed in windows and doorways, are just as wary of the Americans, viewing them with fear, curiosity or hostile intent. The gulf between them is immense. All that neocon talk about ‘flowers in the streets’ and ‘an Iraqi Marshall Plan’ now seems like so much la-la faerie-land head-tripping. The only goal left seems to be – survive.”

Indeed. It is not the soldier’s job to ask questions. Soldiers simply do their duty, and hopefully, survive. Asking questions is our job. When leaving the theater after seeing this movie in July, my first, obvious question was “was Iraq worth all that?”

Virtually everything we were told about our reasons for invading Iraq — Saddam Hussein being behind 9/11, possessing weapons of mass destruction or threatening the U.S. — turned out to be untrue. Though there is plenty of evidence to suggest that Bush administration had been less than forthright from the beginning, let’s just say, for argument’s sake, that the intelligence leading up to the Iraq war had been a succession of honest mistakes. Why do so many continue to still say the Iraq war was “worth it?” If this is true, then any war our government can possibly conceive of could be considered “worth it.”

Americans too often tend to justify war for its own sake. As citizens we neglect our important role of questioning our government, and that neglect has translated into too many de facto endorsements of the reckless use of our military. It seems we would rather eternally send more soldiers into even more “hurt lockers” than ever confront and deal with gross government incompetence on foreign policy. As with Vietnam, if Iraq wasn’t a mistake, it’s hard to imagine Americans admitting any war was a mistake.

Typically couched in a vague context of yellow ribbons, waving flags and political rhetoric, questions of war become questions of patriotism in the most wrong-headed ways imaginable. If our government pushes for national healthcare or stimulus spending — there is no end to the questioning. But if our government decides to go to war-too many Americans assume that it is their patriotic “duty” to support those wars without question. This is obscene, as the only thing standing between a soldier and a bad government decision is the American public. With the invasion of Iraq, Americans did not “support the troops”-we needlessly abused them. “The Hurt Locker” is a movie about that abuse.

Box Office Figures

http://industry.bfi.org.uk/article/18144/UK-Box-Office-7---9-September-2012

http://www.imdb.com/boxoffice/

Focus Films:

Black Hawk Down: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hawk_Down_(film)

Budget	$92 million
Box office	$172,989,651

Jarhead: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jarhead_(film)

Budget	$72 million
Box office	$96,889,998

The Hurt Locker: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hurt_Locker

Budget	$15 million[1]
Box office	$49,230,772

Flop Films:

Home of the Brave: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_of_the_Brave_(2006_film)

Budget	$12 million
Box office	$499,620

Redacted: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redacted_(film)

Budget	$5 million
Box office	$781,441

Battle for Haditha: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0870211/business

Box Office

Gross:

 $7,098 (USA) (18 May 2008)

Interview with Sam Mendes, director of Jarhead

SPIKE
Jarhead - Interview with director Sam Mendes
www.spike.com
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Interview with Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker)

Sight & Sound, February 2008 By Ali Jaafar

Ali Jaafar describes how that even though the war is still at it's height there are still films being released about it.
He begins to describe the film "In The Valley of Elah" then states the Iraqi civillian losses and the US Military losses and then goes on to say that "Hollywood has trained its sights on the consequences of it's government's decision to topple Saddam Hussein"
He laters goes on to name a few documentaries about the Gulf war, he then goes onto say that the films created about the Iraq/Afgan war are created during the war itself whereas films about the vietnam war were created after.
Ali Jaafar then goes on to tak about Haggis and De palma, he talks a lot about De Palma's Redacted which is best known for it's portrayal of how the US soldiers behave during the Iraq war, the film showed US troops raping and murdering innocent children and their parents.
Where as "Haggis, by contrast, is a model of restraint" suggesting that even though De Palma and Haggis share same views each of them are willing to go to different lengths in their film's narrative.

Ali then quotes Haggis when he is talking about how disturbing it is that "We put our young men and women in a place like that, with rules of engagement like that, and ask them to do things they were sacrificing their humanity for?"

Ali then proceeds to compares the films "In the Valley of Elah" and "Grace is Gone"

C.P Blog

http://hsfc-a2film-2010.blogspot.co.uk