Maybe I forgot I did enjoy the film the first time I watched it online since the rating I put here on Douban's record was "4 stars" which means "Good, recommend it ". Or maybe, I was more obsessed with the fact that the director, Katherine Bigelow, won Best Director over my mentor James Cameron in that year's Academy Award, which at that time pissed me off, that made me blind from re-recognizing or remembering how good the film is. Guilty as charged.
As I've been repeatedly educated to confirm by great films that it's never about how loud you can be to tell an impressive story, but on the contrary, how seemingly quiet yet essentially impactful it actually is. The theory tests well in this case too.
I had an academic argument with my boss the other day regarding Jeremy Renner, the heroic restless discharger leading the squad. Sharply opposite to my boss who thinks Jeremy would be huge in the time to come, I just thought he was kind of dumb/predictable as an actor, far from impressive, for the roles he played in Mission Impossible 4: Ghost Protocol, and The Avengers factually convinced me of my assumption. - Both characters fall in the same category of a hypocrite who appears in one way but turns out to be in the other way. I stayed uncorrected even after seeing his lasted The Bourne Legacy where, again, he was not impressive and also dumb (his test score was 20ish below the passing line, right?). But I'd flip my note pad this time and acknowledge that he was VERY IMPRESSIVE in The Hurt Locker where, to me this time, he suddenly became someone else, a totally stranger who fit seamlessly into the slot of his character. Bravo!
"You wanna work, or you wanna fuck around" was something echoing in my head during and after seeing this film in China Film Archive. The quote actually is not from this film but from a joke in an episode of The Newsroom, the HBO series. You want to live or you want to fuck around? In the war zone of Iraq, you fuck around, you get fucked and die. So, many soldiers tend to hold back than to stride out which seems to be the smart and safe call and no doubt is also reasonable. But, there are individuals like James, a "psycho" who clearly enjoys danger and the battlefield. He is controversial to different minds, which by the way is the beauty Chinese films barely have in genes, and in mine what one enjoys is his stage no matter it's a decent office or a brothel, or war in this case. Salute to that!
You like it, have fun and enjoy. You hate it, act and find the "like". You want to live, or you want to fuck around?
战争中的微妙人性与英勇决绝
