The Hurt Locker: Grade C

C
The Hurt Locker (2009)
Jeremie Renner, Anthony Mackie, Ralph Fiennes, David Morse; Director Katheryn Bigelow.

This docudrama portrays combat life in Baghdad in 2004. We follow a patrol of US soldiers who disarm bombs. That is an inherently tense setup , as uncountable films and TV shows have demonstrated with timers ticking toward zero while the hero decides which wire to cut. No matter how many times we have watched that cliché, it still has some power, I don’t know why.

In this film, that scene is played out about six times in several mini-dramas with slight variations. Some bombs explode, some don’t. One scene is different, a gun battle at half a mile using long range, high powered rifles.

In between battles and bombs there are the predictable scenes of the guys in barracks, laying on their bunks, smoking cigarettes, talking about the girl back home, making macabre jokes, fighting, the usual stuff.

The lead demolition expert for most of the film (Renner) is a psychopath who scoffs at personal peril, even seeks the excitement, putting the rest of his team at risk. Other cliché characters include the young recruit who is afraid to die, the Iraqi boy who befriends a soldier, and so on. The movie reminds me of “Combat,” a WWII TV series from the sixties that had a similar episodic structure.

Sound effects/music were interesting and well engineered, although emotionally manipulative, like the rest of the film. I did not feel this was a good portrayal of a genuine experience of war in Iraq because the situations and characters were so obviously contrived, yet the film did not exploit its fictional possibilities to make any sort of political or moral statement, as Apocalypse Now did, for example. So as a war movie, it is well made and watchable, but it doesn’t add up to anything.

Body of Lies: Grade B

B
Body of Lies (2008)
Russell Crowe; Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Strong. Director Ridley Scott.

This CIA spy thriller set in the middle east delivers the action and suspense we expect from Ridley Scott. DiCaprio is a field agent who has a lead to a big, bad Arab terrorist lynchpin that the CIA has not been able to find or identify. To get to this bad guy, DiCaprio must maintain the trust of the head of Jordanian intelligence, well played by Strong. However, DiCaprio’s CIA boss in Langley (Crowe) keeps meddling in the plan, disrupting the operation whenever he tries to “help,” causing breach of trust with the spymaster in Amman.

DiCaprio meets an attractive girl there, which is as good as stamping “hostage” across her forehead. There are suitable fiery explosions that blow out whole buildings, aerial surveillance drones, machine gun battles, frantic chases through crowded markets, and so on. Locations seemed real because of the lighting and city scenes, and were attractive. Sound engineering was particularly detailed. I appreciate hearing brass shell casings hit the ground. However, it was not convincing for DiCaprio and Crowe to have instantaneous, secure, and perfectly clear conversations across half the world on their cell phones (no doubt they were “special” phones) nor that CIA staff could sit omnisciently in a video paneled room counting every whisker on DiCaprio’s chin. Acting by DiCaprio was mature and convincing, and Crowe really shone as the southern-drawling, dumb-as-a-fox CIA spymaster. The movie was intellectually engaging and suitably kinetic but not thematically serious. It is just an adventure for the sake of adventure, though well-done for its genre.

The Axis of Evil Comedy Tour : Grade B

B
The Axis of Evil Comedy Tour (2007)
Ahmed Ahmed, Maz Jobrani, Aron Kader, Dean Obeidallah. Director Michael Simon.

Four Middle-Eastern stand-up comics talk about the immigrant experience. Each enters the stage through a mock metal detector and is scrutinized by a TSA employee, then does a 15 minute routine. There is no interaction among the performers. The stand-up acts are well-rehearsed and high quality. Many jokes are anecdotes about the average American’s ignorance of Middle Eastern history and culture (“Oh, you’re Arab? I love hummous!”). There are predictable jokes about Middle-Eastern accents, police profiling, TSA profiling, the Patriot Act, hijacking airplanes and Bin Laden. Many jokes seem manufactured, not flowing out of the comics’ personal experience, but that’s ok because these topics need to be brought out in the open and laughed at. The four acts effectively defuse a lot of subterranean cultural anxiety. My favorite part was watching the mostly Middle-Eastern audience squirming in their seats with a mixture of appreciation and embarrassment. The jokes were all political, social and ethnic, with not a single reference to body functions (refreshingly), and virtually no jokes about history, romantic or domestic relationships, pets, children, television shows, sex, drugs, rednecks, and all the usual topics that stand-ups cover. It was a self-consciously focused presentation on Middle Eastern stereotypy, ethnicity, and prejudice, and its purpose was obviously to send a message to the mainstream: Middle-Easterners are people too! The show succeeds at delivering that message, and also simply as a LOL hour of enjoyment.