Playing on the, now, clichéd Hitchcockian trick of killing off an above the title star in the first few minutes of the film (see PSYCHO, SCREAM, et. al.), THE HURT LOCKER begins by blowing Guy Pierce into the dirt. The opening sequence establishes the tension of the movie – but it has nothing to do with the dangers of defusing unstable ordinance. In fact, the potentiality of the bombs supplies none of the film’s tension, anxiety, nor power. Instead, as shown in the opening scene, the film relies upon more cynical tricks to fool the audience.

The tension is, first, built by the unreliability of military technology. The film blinks open through the lens of a grab-and-stab robot peeling along the side of a bustling dusty road, next to the shoes and burka hems of the locals. The tension mounts as the metal claw pokes at a laundry bag, I found myself cringing in anticipation, “How loud is this movie going to be?” But the booming sound effect is delayed. Next the improvised cart, a joke of ingenuity among the team, breaks down which means the bomb suit must be equipped. The first of a litany of action movie clichés follows, as the impressive suit is loudly snapped, tightened, and slapped into place, recalling scenes from COMMANDO to ALIENS to EVIL DEAD II, where the hero readies for battle strapping on a  personal arsenal that borders on the absurd. The fact that the suit fails, too, in the end, should surprise no one.

Second, the workaday aspect of the opening scene is set up to contrast the cowboy recklessness of the “wild man” to step on stage. The routine grind of mission, the deployment of the tools (i.e. robot and suit) and the good natured complaining/teasing, each remind us of the mundane banality that sets in to any situation when it becomes employment.  This setup establishes an internal tension between the team and their new cavalier leader. While the team excels at risk aversion, their new leader thrives on risk enhancement. It is a tension of macho opposites. Manly responses at odds with each other. Neither any less than the other, for both are potentially deadly, but inherently different in their embrace of the masculine as identity (war as hard work v. war as extreme sport). These roles play out most obviously during the barracks bonding night. The three team members share alcohol, confessions, and belly punches. The antagonism grows until the wild man takes the rough housing too far and mounts his more cautious opponent, riding his shoulders in an obscene bucking bronco simulation of oral sex and alpha dog dominance. And that is to say nothing of the more odious racial implications of the same scene.

The third, and most disturbing aspect of the film’s tension, is established in the opening scene. In the chaos of the moment, a butcher slips through the fingers of the military to rush back into his store hung with carcasses. There he detonates the bomb that kills Guy Pierce. This is extremely important for a couple of reasons.

The Iraqis are portrayed as crowds, as an omnipresent and dangerous audience. The intractable other whose singularity presents the greatest threat. In other words, in a crowd of suspicious looking characters, the one who is up to no good blends right in. This is a familiar trope of all colonial art, the casting of the colonized as babbling outsider intent upon obstruction, if not outright confrontation. The differences in cultural standards of personal space, duration of gaze, religious customs, style of dress, are all singed by hostility.

Language is the biggest stumbling block. The DVD selling kid with his broken English slang, cribbed from hip hop and action films, provides the lighter side of the language divide (the fact that he is engaged in commerce must be mentioned, for capitalism is the great mission of Iraq, the prime mover for assimilation to the ruling culture). While the sudden approach of friendly banter, “Where are you from?” provides a dangerous distraction during two scenes – one ending with a predictable explosion. Even by the last mission, where a translator is present, the blubbering incoherence of the suicide bomber, adds fatigue to the tension.

The depiction of the Iraqis as a crowd, or peeping audience, is the source of all of the movie’s tension. Again, touted as a realistic portrayal of the situation on the ground as experienced by American forces, the real purpose is more manipulative. Without defining any rules of engagement, the movie implicates its viewer by setting up scenes so the viewer expects a level of violence that never materializes. In other words, the viewer, tricked into thinking they are watching a standard cartoony action blockbuster, expecting that when guns are pointed they will be fired with deadly accuracy.  When this fury of bullets does not rain down in a pyrotechnic orgy, the viewer’s level of anxiety is elevated by the fact that the bloodthirsty expectations are left unfulfilled. What remains are the staring faces of the Iraqi extras. Their every move, gesture, and prop made suspicious, since as we learn from the opening scene, even the corner butcher might have the cell phone detonator that will set off the bomb. Again, we are informed of the colonial project. The crowds of onlookers are all suspect, all targets, all hostile – a point driven home by the slow motion scene where a group of boys throw rocks at the passing humvee. The viewer becomes frustrated by the inaction of the characters on the screen, as they hesitate and obey rules of engagement that are never clearly defined by the film.  The viewer’s impatience, anxiety and frustration implicates the viewer in the tension – a slick manipulation that displaces by jacking up the levels of suspicion and inaction by the characters. The best example of this is the UN car bomb scene, where the video camera guy might be receiving messages from a threatening group on a minaret. The audience fidgets impatiently, almost shouting at the screen “Shoot him! Shoot him!”

There are so many clichés packed into the rest of the movie it is hard to not want to list them all. THE HURT LOCKER almost mirrors, or at least mocks, with its structure, John Wayne’s GREEN BERETS – right down to the night firefight chaos, the secret missions, and the scruffy haired kid that hangs around the base. There are the four major war film archetypes – the shell shocked fatalist who makes good at war by killing the enemy; the rogue risk-taking cowboy; the pragmatic stoic; the Ivy League trained officer who should have just worn the dead meat t-shirt.

Had the movie been braver, then the critical accolades it received might be justified. But I can’t help thinking that, much like the war it is fictionalizing, we were tricked into supporting it. And maybe, that is its brilliant statement.

Over three millennia, the epic canto The Ramayana has provided an archetype for many cultures–Hindu, Thai, Lao, Malaysian–of the ideal man of virtue. In Paley’s film, the story is narrated humorously by three individuals in conversation with each other; their commentary provides different versions of the story (of which there are many), and as they debate the details the animation follows suit. What it boils down to is this:

Rama, the eldest son of an emperor (and supposed reincarnation of Vishnu), is forced to step aside and allow his younger half-brother to take the throne because of a favor the emperor owes to the younger son’s mother. Rama takes the news well and accepts his 14-year banishment to the forest, taking his young wife, Sita, along with him at her own insistence. Rama and Sita, the mythological “perfect couple,” live happily in isolation until the evil king of Sri Lanka, Ravana, stealthily captures Sita, leading to an 18-month war between the two men and their armies. Rama eventually wins Sita back, then turns her away because her living in another man’s home has made her impure. He will not allow Sita in the palace when he returns to the throne after his 14-year hiatus, and she responds by willingly moving back to the forest alone to raise Rama’s two sons-–all the while remaining devoted to Rama.

Upon first coming across the story while she was living with her then-husband in India, Paley writes on her website that she “considered the Ramayana little more than misogynist propaganda.” A few months later, while on a work trip to New York where she was dumped over email (all of which is related in the film), Paley says she saw something in the Ramayana that was universal. She developed one scene from the fable into an animated short, but the creative urge was not spent and early viewers of the piece wanted more. Sita Sings the Blues was fashioned in its full length over the next couple of years, and is currently screening in numerous North American cities.

As if that wasn’t enough, there is even more drama behind Paley’s Sita: following the first well-received screenings, the indie cartoonist happened upon another self-defining moment in her career – copyright infringement. At present, her film cannot be distributed in theaters unless Paley pays several hundred thousand dollars for the rights to use Annette Hanshaw’s music; also she may be getting sued. As a result, Paley is now championing a new cause, and she’s not being quiet about it. Read her blog or see if you can catch her at one of the film’s screenings this year. Her legal battle could be a watershed for independent filmmakers everywhere.

Melikyan, born in Azerbaijan and raised in Armenia, studied film in Moscow where she met Masha Shalayeva, an enchanting actress for whom she wrote the role of Alisa. The young girl’s interactions with the city of Moscow depict a sense of wonderment that must certainly be a close reality to how Melikyan would have felt upon first exposure to Russia’s capital.

Alisa’s comically ordinary story begins with her underwater conception — the first scene of the film. Her mother, whose character comes to define the picture of small-town frustration, has a chance encounter with a sailor when she is out by herself for a swim at a quiet beach on the Black Sea. The sailor never reappears in their lives, but Alisa’s mother continues to engage passing seamen in rendezvous to ease her boredom and single-mother stress. When Alisa’s curiosity leads her to walk in on one of these meetings at a young age, she reacts destructively, setting fire to their seaside shanty and refusing to speak for the duration of her childhood.

Throughout the grey and provincial scenes of the first half of the film, Alisa’s imaginative narration lends color and humor. She also develops a secret power — if she wishes for something to occur, it will indeed come to pass. A few months before her seventeenth birthday Alisa’s mental efforts cause a massive windstorm in her seaside town, destroying their home yet again and leading her mother to move her and her grandmother to Moscow. Alisa’s frank voice describes the event with innocent astuteness, explaining, “When people have nowhere else to go, they go to Moscow.”

The three women take up residence in a typical Moscow high-rise, and Alisa and her mother join the workforce — her mother working as a smartly-uniformed grocery store clerk, and Alisa handing out flyers around town dressed as a giant cell phone. The young girl’s tender childhood is humorously shattered by the appearance of “Sasha” (Yevgeni Tysganov), a depressed but attractive yuppie who makes his living selling real estate on the moon; he and Alisa meet when they both jump off a bridge on the same night.

The film succeeds in Melikyan’s use of Alisa’s humorously innocent narration, fantastical symbolism, and several visually-stylized dream sequences. It calls to mind Amelie and The Science of Sleep, though it doesn’t quite achieve the complexity of either of these films. What Rusakla lacks in density, however, it makes up for with pure charm. You’ll feel an instinctive pull toward Melikyan’s Moscow, and an honest desire to understand its people and its art. The film breaks through whatever “curtain” the city’s true heart has been hiding behind, as Moscow comes of age on screen, symbolically abandoning it’s tail alongside the story’s young narrator.