Monday, March 08, 2010

"The Hurt Locker" wins best pic on Election Day 2010

The Hurt Locker won the Academy award for best motion picture last night. When I saw ads for the movie last summer I was looking forward to seeing it and I even posted about it in anticipation before it was released. I was hoping the movie would show how US soldier are helping Iraqis. I saw it a few days after its release date and was surprised to see few people in the theatre. Scott Bowles of USA TODAY wrote "no movie embraced obscurity like best-picture winner The Hurt Locker, which became the lowest-grossing film of all time to win best picture."

It was a good movie, but I did not think it was that good. Most Iraqis in the movie seem to be angry at American soldiers and want to kill them. Only one Iraqi professor and one Iraqi boy in the movie are shown interested in befriending the main character, an American soldier who specializes in defusing bombs. I doubt this portrayal of Iraqis as seeking death for US soldiers is accurate. Iraq Pundit seems to agree, and he may have liked the movie less than I did.

Also I was expecting to see in the movie a depiction of at least one market bombing. The bombings of Iraqi markets and public places occurred with horrific frequency between 2004 and 2007, yet there is not a single scene in the movie that depicts the reality of the "resistance", which has killed and wounded many times more Iraqis than Americans.

Nor did the movie reflect the reality of suicide bombers. There have been at least 1,700 suicide bombings in Iraq, a figure unprecedented in the history of the middle east. The majority of suicide bombers have been non-Iraqi and the majority of victims of such bombings have been Iraqi civilians. Many bombers and recruiters of bombers came from Jordan. Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the Jordanian terrorist who was belatedly killed by US forces, led his Arab brothers in mass murdering Iraqi Shia. Not a single mention of this fact in the movie. Instead the movie was shot IN Jordan! One of the award recipients thanked the "team in Jordan" for their role in the movie. This pill is still hard to swallow. I simply hate the Jordanian 3arab jarab.

Maybe I should not have expected so much from a Hollywood flick. I should not expect an accurate portrayal of Iraqis or Iraqi history and politics in any American movie. The Hurt Locker focuses more on the relationships between the soldiers. Perhaps I should be thankful that at least the movie shows what the resistance does to Iraqi boys who befriend American soldiers.

9 comments :

Maury said...

Al Jazeera did a 22 minute interview with Allawi. I'm thinking his party will get 75 seats. The Kurds should get 60 or so. They'll need about 30 others to form a coalition. The Kurds would seem to be natural allies of a secular coalition. Even if his list forms a coalition,Maliki is probably toast. He made too many enemies over the last 4 years.

Habis said...

Maury is offering "election" analysis from the other side of the world about a country he does not know that speaks a language he does not understand. It does not get any better.

Maury said...

Give us your expertise from California hababa.

Dolly said...

You can always tell a psycho by the way they calmly discuss 'constitution,' 'parliamentary blocs,' 'elections,' 'purple ink,' shortly after murdering 100,000 people in cold blood.

Maury said...

You sung a different tune when it looked like your glorious moohahadeen were going to murder half the Arab world Dolly. You were on cloud nine every time a market got bombed. What's the matter,things not looking so good for the unholy warriors?

Dolly said...

That's called retribution, there is a big difference between initiating evil and responding to it.
If the U.S. butchers Iraq, that is not acceptable. But if the occupation soldiers are blown up afterwards, that is cool.

Why wouldn't things look good for the mujahideen? The sham-vote turnout was better in 2005, and there was still fighting afterwards

Dolly said...

Sometimes I'm not sure if you people support this insanity because you only saw a sanitized version of the war, and you don't know the graphic details of what's been done.
Or the other possibility is: you do know everything, but you're evil enough to stand behind it.

Iraqi Mojo said...

Stand behind what, wahhabi sharmoo6a? The bombings of Iraqi markets? The mass murder of Iraqi Shia?

David All said...

I have not seen "The Hurt Locker" so can not tell whether it deserved to be Best Picture or not. I agree with you that not having at least one suicide bombing of Iraqi civilians was certainly a mistake and results in an inacurrate potrayal of the Iraq War. Suppose this is an indication of how a lot of Americans view Iraqis as generally hostile to Americans, which is not true. It is also an indication of how unpopular the Iraq War is with perhaps a majority of Americans.