Plaintiff, Master Sgt. Jeffrey S. Sarver, is, in fact, the film’s main character “Will James” or “Blaster One” [which was Master Sgt. Sarver's "call signal" during his tours of duty in Iraq]. 

Screenwriter Mark Boal with Director Katherine Bigelow

The suit alleges that the screenwriter of “The Hurt Locker,” Mark Boal, was allowed, as part of an armed services press program, to be embedded in Master Sgt. Sarver’s unit. Virtually all of the situations portrayed in the film were, in fact, occurrences involving Master Sgt. Sarver that were observed and documented by Screenwriter Boal.  Master Sgt. Sarver also coined the phrase, “The Hurt Locker” for Boal.

Ultimately, a magazine article about Master Sgt. Sarver, written by Screenwriter Boal, appeared in Playboy Magazine. That story was later adapted by Boal for the screenplay of “The Hurt Locker.” The suit alleges that the film’s makers falsely claim that the characters portrayed in the film are fictional when, in fact, the film’s main character “Will James,” IS Master Sgt. Sarver.

The suit alleges that the movie’s screenwriter and makers decided to cheat Master Sgt. Sarver [a man who has repeatedly risked his life for his country] out of financial participation in the film, and any acknowledgment of his heroic actions in Iraq.  Master Sgt. Sarver only learned of the Appropriation of his identity after the film’s release.

Full press release can be read here.

The Los Angeles Times:

At one point, “The Hurt Locker” might have been made with government cooperation. But just 12 hours before Lt. Col. J. Todd Breasseale was to fly to Jordan to serve as the Army’s technical advisor to “The Hurt Locker,” he said in an interview that he heard there might be problems. A Jordanian official told him that scenes were being shot that were not in the script that the Army had approved. Breasseale accused the producer of shooting a scene in which soldiers act violently toward detainees. (The military does not provide help to films depicting violations of the laws of war, unless their consequences are shown.) He also charged that the production had driven a Humvee into a Palestinian refugee camp in order to film angry crowd scenes.

This might refer to a scene where what are supposed to be Iraqi kids are seen angrily throwing rocks at an American Humvee. A scene that seems to say we don’t want you here.

“Nice working with you,” Breasseale said he recalled telling a producer before the military decided to stop working with the production. “Kathryn has a lot of talent, but I cannot trust that your company will honor its contract to the soldiers and government of the U.S.” Breasseale said the filmmakers had been solicitous of the Army’s opinion, “trying to get the look and feel right,” and they had been allowed to film at an Army logistics base in Kuwait.  …

[Screenwriter and producer Mark] Boal said that while the production initially worked with the U.S. military, it parted ways when it became clear they would not approve of “The Hurt Locker’s” script. He said the producers did not film on a base in Kuwait and never signed a contract.

Both screenwriter/producer Mark Boal, and military technical advisor Lt. Col. J. Todd Breasseale agree that at one time the U.S. Military was working with the “Hurt Locker” producers. Then, according to Breasseale, “scenes were being shot that were not in the script that the Army had approved” and that he could no longer “trust that ["The Hurt Locker"] company [would] honor its contract to the soldiers and government of the U.S.”

Boal’s response is that no contract was signed, but that’s taking the word “contract” literally. Even my inital reading of Breasseale’s comments weren’t that literal. My first assumption was that he meant an unwritten contract, and if scenes were added after the military had already approved the script  – scenes of our guys committing detainee abuse — Breasseale is absolutely correct.

Today, I’m here to talk about the latest idiocy to come out of his mouth. As our very own John Nolte pointed out, Cameron explained in an interview why he just might lose out on Best Director to Katherine Bigelow, director of The Hurt Locker, in the upcoming 2010 Ego Fest 2010 Academy Awards:

“I would say that it’s an irresistible opportunity for the Academy to anoint a female director for the first time. I would say that that’s, you know, a very strong probability and I will be cheering when that happens.”

Oy vey. Where to start?

A caveat: I didn’t see either Avatar or Hurt Locker. So, I can’t debate either of these movies on their merits. But the very idea that Cameron is already cushioning the blow if he doesn’t win with the “irresistible opportunity for the Academy to anoint a female director for the first time” argument is nearly enough for me to blow chunks.

First of all, Bigelow is not the first woman ever to have been nominated for Best Director. Lina Wertmüller (1975), Jane Campion (1993) and Sofia Coppola (2003) all received nominations for their work. So if the Academy was itching to “anoint” someone as its first female Best Director, they’ve blown three chances already. Besides, aren’t we always being told that the nominees are judged on their merits, not insider politics?

Secondly, Bigelow is one of the lucky members of the James Cameron Ex-Wives Club. The two divorced in 1991. No matter how amiable the two may be now, it’s gotta sting just a little bit that his ex might be beating him out of one of the most coveted awards Hollywood has to offer:

On the surface at least, Cameron and Bigelow claim there’s no rivalry between them. They insist they are “good friends.”

Indeed, Bigelow and her ex-husband collaborated on a film, the commercial mega-flop “Strange Days,” four years after their 1991 divorce.

She even asked him to peruse the script of “The Hurt Locker” before committing to the $11 million project.

Cameron, in the midst of making the $230 million “Avatar,” told her to immediately drop what she working on and go for it. Detractors claim the notoriously ego-driven director will twist this advice to his credit if “The Hurt Locker” beats him out on March 7.

But what’s really galling, aside from Cameron’s legendary ego, is the tired old leftist meme he’s spouting. Liberals are always on the lookout for “historic” firsts based on color, creed and sex. Accomplishments? Not so much. Just so long as we get the first Latina on the Supreme Court, the first black President, etc.

How’s that last one working out for ya?

As John Nolte points out in his post, this is a

… great example … of the corrosive evil of affirmative action, multiculturalism, political correctness — whatever you want to call it. The protected class that “benefits” from this nonsense always has an invisible asterisk after their name that questions the true merit of their accomplishments.

Exactly. If Bigelow wins, the seeds of doubt will have already been planted. Did she really win because she did such a fabulous job directing? Or did she win because the Academy decided that it’s about time a woman received the honor?

And if she doesn’t win, is it because her work just wasn’t quite good enough or because the Academy is full of sexists? See, it goes both ways.

Of course, affirmative action has much deeper implications than who wins silly awards Tinseltown, as Thomas Sowell points out:

The dishonesty that is incidental to other policies is central to affirmative action. Most of what is said in support of this policy is either wholly unsubstantiated or demonstrably false.

What about the notion that affirmative action has helped blacks rise out of poverty? The black poverty rate was cut in half before affirmative action — and has barely changed since then.

What about the notion that blacks would not be able to get into colleges and universities without affirmative action? After group preferences and quotas were banned in California’s state universities, the number of black students in the University of California system has risen.

Fewer are attending Berkeley and more are attending other universities, whose normal admissions standards they meet. These students are now more likely to graduate, which is the whole point. Before, they were being used like movie extras to create a background — until most either dropped out or flunked out.

Affirmative action hurts everyone, including those it purports to help. But to liberals, it’s all about good intentions. If things don’t work out, it’s really okay because they “meant well” and it made people “feel good” at the time. This is how we get saddled with not only policies like affirmative action, but claims of anthropogenic global warming which, if policymakers continue to kowtow to this discredited, politically-motivated junk science, will further cripple the American economy.

Hey, has anyone seen Al Gore lately? Hey Al, where are you?

Look, I understand that James Cameron and his Ego (hey, that sounds like the makings of a documentary!) are having a hard time with the fact that he might not only lose the Best Director award, but lose it to his ex-wife. But playing the “She’s a woman!” card makes him look like a sexist. Which is really what affirmative action is all about: sexism and racism. You aren’t good enough to get there on your own, so we’ll automatically assign you a handicap, like in golf.

I should think the self-anointed “King of the World” will survive if he doesn’t get that additional Oscar statuette to place on his mantel. Just shut your yap, let the votes be counted, and either be humble in victory or gracious in defeat. You know, act. Like the people in your films.

So, may the best man win! Oh wait, was that a sexist remark?

That’s pro-troop? Well, a lot of people said so and argued with my review – even some conservatives. But one day before Oscar ballots are due, some Iraq veterans are speaking up:

Sunday’s Washington Post:

But to those who were there, Iraq is real life. And they’re very sensitive — some would say overly so — when their war is portrayed via a central character who is a reckless rogue.

Hence a rising backlash from people in uniform, such as this response on Rieckhoff’s Facebook page from a self-identified Army Airborne Ranger:

“[I]f this movie was based on a war that never existed, I would have nothing to comment about. This movie is not based on a true story, but on a true war, a war in which I have seen my friends killed, a war in which I witnessed my ranger buddy get both his legs blown off. So for Hollywood to glorify this crap is a huge slap in the face to every soldier who’s been on the front line.”

In an interview, [Paul Rieckhoff, founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America] said the anger about “Hurt Locker” stems not so much from such small inaccuracies — for example, the uniforms the soldiers wear in the film weren’t available until well after the time the story took place — but rather from the depiction of the main character, Sgt. 1st Class William James.

Portrayed by Jeremy Renner, who’s nominated for Best Actor, James is a daredevil who in one scene takes off his protective armor while disarming a bomb because, as he says, “If I’m going to die, I’m going to be comfortable.” He runs alone through the streets of Baghdad with his sweat shirt hood up like a gangster. Later, he takes two soldiers hunting for insurgents in Baghdad’s back alleys without any backup.

James’s fellow soldiers are, or try to be, by-the-book professionals. They call James “rowdy” and “reckless,” and one worries out loud that his leader’s crazy antics are “going to get me killed.” James is as much cowboy as soldier, and vets fear he could become an iconic figure in the American imagination should the movie win a bunch of statues.

“Films, almost more than anything, will be the way Americans understand our war,” Rieckhoff said. “So we feel that there is a responsibility for filmmakers to portray our war accurately. We see ourselves as watchdogs. . . . When he puts a hood on like Eminem and starts roving outside the wire, it’s ridiculous.”

Gallucci, a former sergeant who served in Iraq from 2003 to 2004, says he kept hoping James would get “blown up throughout the entire movie. I wanted to see his poor teammates get another team leader, who was actually concerned about their safety.”

Money quote:

“Films, almost more than anything, will be the way Americans understand our war[.]“

Rieckhoff gets it.

After all, how many millions of men went to Vietnam only to return and settle back into their normal lives? That’s not to say the war had no effect on them. But how many were able to re-integrate into our society and resume their roles as productive citizens and family men? How about almost all of them. But how do we see the Vietnam Vet today? We see him as alternately troubled, angry, bitter, disillusioned, homeless…

This is Leftist Hollywood at work, forever and intentionally stereotyping these brave men. And if you watch the latest slew of war films — including “Hurt Locker” – you’ll see a proactive campaign to stereotype today’s warriors as either victims, monsters or cowboys. Anything but the brave and selfless professionals they are.

To portray our service men and women with the nobility they deserve undercuts leftist Hollywood’s agenda to trash American foreign policy. Noble people only serve and believe in noble causes, and when it comes to George Bush’s war that simply can’t be allowed. So the victim-monster-cowboy playbook is opened and the arc of Renner’s “Hurt Locker” character moves quite obviously from cowboy to victim.

And what’s the best way to tell what a film is “about?”

The arc of the main character.

Roger Maris at the House That Ruth Built

“The protected class that “benefits” from this nonsense always has an invisible asterisk after their name that questions the true merit of their accomplishments.” — John Nolte, James Cameron On Why He Might Lose the Oscar to Katherine Bigelow: She’s a Girl

Whenever we hear the word asterisk, we think of New York Yankees slugger Roger Maris who during the 1961 season, broke Babe Ruth’s 1927 single-season 60 home run record. Maris’ accomplishment caused some to cry foul, complaining that unless the record was broken in 154 games (the same number Ruth played in 1927), the new record would go into the record books with an asterisk beside it, because baseball’s season was now 162 games long, giving Maris an unfair advantage.

Though the season’s length wasn’t Maris’ fault, he could never celebrate and enjoy his  accomplishment because the “asterisk” dogged him everywhere, in every interview. It was something he never got over.

The asterisk was never actually appended to Maris’ name in the annals of baseball history, yet it figuratively occupies its own place in the pantheon of heroes at Cooperstown.  You might say the asterisk was awarded its own Oscar when 61*, a 2001 American baseball film made for HBO, directed by Billy Crystal and written by Hank Steinberg, was released on April 28, 2001.

Fast forward to James Cameron’s interview with MTV in which he says, “I would say that it’s an irresistible opportunity for the Academy to anoint a female director for the first time. I would say that that’s, you know, a very strong probability and I will be cheering when that happens.”

Is Cameron doing the same thing to his ex-wife Katherine Bigelow that was done to Roger Maris?  Is Cameron inadvertently — or deliberately — attaching an asterisk to Bigelow’s name if she wins for “The Hurt Locker”?   Is Cameron poisoning the well?  If Bigelow is awarded an Oscar, will it be because she was the best?  Or because Hollywood agreed with James Cameron that it is time to “anoint” a woman with an Oscar for Best Director?

The envelope, please.  The winner of the Academy of Arts & Sciences Award for Best Director…

Katherine Bigelow*

Produced and scripted by Mark Boal (who embedded with a U.S. Army bomb squad operating in Baghdad), the year is 2004 and Iraq is a country under siege, thanks mainly to determined insurgents and roadside IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) that seem to be everywhere and frequently come with nearby triggermen lying in wait for the opportunity to do the most amount of damage, preferably to American servicemen and women.  Charged with the dangerous and technically complicated job of defusing these bombs is a three-man EOD (Explosive Ordinance Disposal) team led by Staff Sergeant James (an excellent Jeremy Renner) and his squad mates Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Eldridge (Brian Geraghty).

The opening scene’s a wowser, and the 40 minutes that follow do their job in setting up characters, their relationships and at least giving off the appearance that we’re headed towards something bigger involving Beckham, a young Iraqi boy who sells DVDs on the base. When this storyline strangely pans out to be much ado about nothing, the plot slowly deflates into a series well-staged but interchangeable episodes with no over-arching story. You’re about an hour in when you start to feel the 130 minute runtime.

Every time “Locker” starts to weave any kind of spell something unnecessarily political comes along to break it. Mostly the sucker punches come at the end of a scene as if to say, “That will teach you for buying into it.”  A tense sequence involving an Iraqi cabdriver who runs a roadblock ends with our troopers roughly handcuffing him. This superfluous drama appears to have been filmed only to allow James to give this Leftist belief an airing, “If he wasn’t an insurgent, he sure the hell is now.”

And that’s just the beginning.

Most troubling is a frighteningly unstable, near-psychotic field commander, Colonel Reed (David Morse), who orders his men to let a wounded Iraqi civilian/suspect bleed out to death even after he’s informed the man could easily be saved with a simple radio call. After watching James work, Reed approaches him with crazy eyes gushing over what a “wild man” he is. Not only is this a monstrous depiction of an American Colonel, it’s faulty storytelling. Morse is a recognizable actor and the disturbing impression his character makes is so strong you keep expecting him to return – maybe even as the film’s antagonist.

Reed isn’t the only officer to take a hit. Christian Camargo plays the utterly clueless Colonel Cambridge, a therapist assigned to help Eldridge deal with battlefield trauma. He chirps cheerily, “Going to war is a once in a lifetime opportunity. It could be fun.”

The worst, however, comes near the end. In a moment of tender humanity James risks his life to treat the body of a dead Iraqi — who may or may not be someone he knows — with respect and care. But again, we’re not allowed a pure moment presenting our troops as they are. Instead we cut to Sanford and Eldridge – two characters we’ve come to admire – only to hear this coldly matter-of-fact exchange regarding the dead Iraqi: You think that’s the “little base rat?” “I don’t know man, they all look the same.”

Not one of these moments, and there are a handful of others, is in anyway necessary to the plot or the understanding of these characters. In a movie that’s already twenty-minutes too long, what motivated Bigelow to hang on to them in a film eager to be touted as being “above politics” is beyond me.

In a throwback to Hollywood’s stereotyped depiction of unstable Vietnam vets, the Iraq War has turned our protagonist, James, into an increasingly reckless adrenaline junkie whose disregard for safety and communication protocol puts everyone around him in danger. After defusing  873 of these things, James is certainly comfortable getting off cowboying around any kind of explosives he might come across (and enjoying a cigarette afterwards),  but he’s also a victim of this war, for he’s no longer in control of his own destiny. The film opens on the words “War is a drug,” and that drug is all James desires. So warped by war, even when looking into his infant son’s eyes, James can say out loud that there’s only one thing he loves … and it’s not the boy.

As the plot plods on James becomes increasingly reckless, eventually leading Eldridge and Sanborn on a night-time hunt for a single suspect through a dangerous urban neighborhood with about a million hiding places. James is beyond audacious now, he’s foolhardy and dangerous and this thoughtless venture results in the near-kidnapping of one of his own men who ends up severely wounded – and this wounded man speaks for all of us when he says, “We didn’t have to go out looking for trouble to get you your adrenaline fix, YOU FUCK!”

But because James has no character arc, he learns nothing from this tragic outing. He’s a slave to this drug … to war, an unprofessional loose cannon who can’t love his son, can’t function in the real world and is on a trajectory to either kill himself, or worse, someone else.  Like any junkie, he’s capable of humanity and leadership, he’s no coward and he knows his job, but he’s a victim to this thing and when we leave him we know it can’t end pretty.

It’s too bad the Iraqi people aren’t a protected class among Leftists. Of course, Leftists spent years lobbying in every imaginable way to abandon 25 million of them to death squads and terrorists, so why should it come as a surprise that Michael Bay’s satire of rap culture earns some outrage but “Hurt Locker” gets a pass.

The women are portrayed as either cannon fodder or screaming like savages, and other than a short, strange encounter with a man who wonders if James is CIA, the men are alternately terrorists, a menacing presence, victims, the butt of jokes or utterly clueless. The only Iraqi with a hint of personality is Beckam, but he’s never given a dimension beyond that of a hustler poisoned by our crass American consumer culture, “Wassup, my nigga…?  Want the cool shit?  I hook you up. Donkeykong? Gay sex…? Gangsta. Hey, man, fuck you!”

No, I’ve never been in the military, but when a film’s over I surely know what my opinion of the characters just portrayed up on that screen is, and I’ve seen this movie twice now trying to reconcile how everything listed above can add up to most every review labeling “The Hurt Locker” as “apolitical.”

Has Hollywood so worn us out that we’ve dumbed “apolitical” down to the point where this portrayal of our Iraqi allies, our troops and the officers who lead them qualifies? I’m not looking for John Wayne and I get battlefield cynicism. “Blackhawk Down” and “Brothers at War” do just fine by me. But when the men in the ranks display cold, casual racism, an American Colonel savagely orders that an Iraqi be left to bleed to death and a profoundly unprofessional protagonist, so demented by war he can no longer love his own son, repeatedly endangers himself and the men in his charge, I don’t see “nuance” or “depth” or “complicated” characters. What I see is politics of the worst kind.