The Hurt Locker

My first truly Oscar worthy movie. The Messenger is only up for two, but Woody has a chance to win. This was the best I've seen in 2010 I think. This movie is a nontraditional Wild West story. For sure. Jeremy Renner plays an adrenaline junkie bomb defuser. And I completely don't understand him. I don't know who he is. I don't know what he's about. The closest we get to understanding him comes near the end when Renner is sitting in a Humvee with one of his men, played by Anthony Mackie, the bad guy rapper from 8 Mile and Tupac from Notorious, and he asks him "Do you know why I am the way that I am?" to which Tupac responds "No. I don't." And that's it. That's all we get. Academy Award Nominee Kathryn Bigelow directs, brilliantly I might add, and guides the story along with poise and ease. This movie is up for everything come March 7th. Best Actor for Renner, Best Director for Bigelow, Best Picture Cinematography, Directing, Film Editing, Original Score, Sound Editing, Sound Mixing (What's the difference?) Original Screenplay. That's really all the biggies, considering that there are no women in the film to speak of (except Kate from LOST who he turns out to be married to! It's all connected, I know it!) and therefore no female acting noms.

This movie was just really intense. And not really in a gory way. Even though it had some of that. It was just suspenseful from wire to wire. Renner was crazy the whole time. But not because he had a sense that he was somehow invincible. He seemed to have a real grasp on his own mortality. He knew that he could die every day that he went out. And he knew that death could come at any moment of that day. And his very real grasp on that was one of the things that made him so compelling. He kept, under his bed, a milk crate containing all of the defused detonators that came close to killing him. He kept them. Like, as some sort of macabre souvenirs or something. Tupac delivered a solid performance of his own. He was interesting too, in his own way. You thought you knew exactly who he was the whole movie. The pretty straightforward guy who just doesn't want to get killed. He's not to "by the book" but he clearly thinks that all of those rules are just the safest way to do things. Brian Geraghty plays an even further subordinate of Renner and Tupac's, the third guy of the bomb team. He's the most broken character in this movie. He thinks that he's to blame for the death of the soldier, seen only in the first seen and played by Guy Pearce from Memento, that Renner replaced on his and Tupac's team. And throughout the movie, we see him meeting with an Army shrink. He says that he wishes he had died instead, and that if he had only killed the insurgent who set off the bomb that killed Pearce then Pearce would still be alive. All of this was well written, well acted, whatever. It just wasn't that important.

What was important though I think, was the interaction between Renner and an Iraqi boy named Beckham. Beckham sold DVDs outside of the camp and Renner, for some reason, feels some sort of connection with him right off the bat. It's interesting. And I didn't really get it until Renner tells Tupac and Brian Geraghty about his infant son. Then it clicked, and I got it. He somehow and for some reason identifies Beckham with his son. I don't know why though.

This is the most Oscar worthy movie I've seen out of all of the ones up for nominations that I've seen so far. I've seen The Blind Side, Up, Inglourious Basterds, The Messenger, Sherlock Holmes, and Star Trek. Yeah, I know I'm missing some of the biggies, Avatar, Up in the Air, Invictus, Precious, A Serious Man. But this is still on the top of the list for me. See it. It's worth it.