Now that we have your attention.

Andrew Klavan’s written a terrific piece for City Journal looking at Katherine Bigelow’s “Hurt Locker,” which tanked at the box office, is a frontrunner to win this year’s Best Picture Oscar and has generated debate among conservatives over whether the dynamic action-director’s visceral look at a U.S. Army Bomb Squad is just another Iraq War film or something a little more worthy.

It’s a good debate… Be sure to read the whole thing and then feel free to have at it in the comments…

City Journal:

[I]s The Hurt Locker yet another piece of idiot agit-prop that makes our soldiers’ jobs harder and our enemies’ lives easier? The filmmakers and the media are desperate to convince us otherwise. For weeks before Hurt Locker’s release, they loudly reassured the public that the movie was, in the words of Roger Ebert, “completely apolitical. It has no opinion on the war in Iraq, except that there is one.” Some conservative reviewers agreed. Mark Hemingway at National Review wrote that the film “is not a straight depiction of American heroism; but it is a revelatory examination of the experiences and motivations of U.S. soldiers.”

But John Nolte, the voice of reason who runs Andrew Breitbart’s indispensable Big Hollywood website, would have none of it. He condemned the film. (more…)

Note: This is the second part of a two-part interview. Part one can be found here.

Big Hollywood:  Where did the idea for “The Last Thing I Remember” come from? I know there’s an evolution to a good story, well told. How did this evolve from that first spark to final draft?

Andrew Klavan: Some of it in this case was a matter of putting my money where my mouth is.  For years, I’ve been complaining that there are no books with real boys in them, that when we want to write about manhood or patriotism or battling evil, we suddenly have to write about fantasy lands and dragons or Gotham City or whatever.  There’s real evil in the world, real people who do real evil, and they need to be fought and there’s no appeasing them.  So I started from that point of view.  Let me just speak plainly about what we’re fighting for, what kind of people do the fighting and what they believe that empowers them and why.  And I guess it started from that.

BH:  I know the secret to your success is having your wife read everything first. Are you like me? Do you get angry at her criticism, especially when she’s right?

AK: LOL.  I know your wife, you have the sweetest wife on earth and shame on you for getting mad at that good, good woman when she’s only trying to help.  But yeah, I do exactly the same thing.  You know how it is.  We pour our hearts and souls into these things and at the point when we show them to our wives, we’re still raw with it, the wound is still bleeding.  And she says, “This is the greatest novel I’ve ever read but on page 116, you misspelled whirligig,” and you’re, like, “How dare you, you harridan!  Don’t you realize I’m an ARTIST???  I meant to spell it that way!!!”  Luckily, my wife knows I worship the ground she walks on.  (more…)