War & Life: Film Reviews of The Hurt Locker and Up in the Air

Tonight was the beginning of the Hollywood award season, and two of the movies that are up for a lot of nominations are The Hurt Locker and Up In The Air.  Both of these movies are united by the fact that they depict real life - the life of our generation that is shaped by wars and economic recession. And both movies don't shy away from showing the horrors of war and recession and the toll that these events take upon us mere humans.

The Hurt Locker takes place in Iraq, circa 2004.  It chronicles the lives of three soldiers who are part of an EOD (explosive ordinance disposal) team - a bomb disposal unit that is called in whenever the infantry encounters a situation in which there might be a possible IED (improvised explosive devices) nearby.  The film is both remarkable and horrific in how you actually feel as if you are in the midst of the situations that the EOD team encounters.  It is as terrible as Saving Private Ryan because as you are watching the movie, you also realize that this is real - this is an event that takes place every single day in the lives of the soldiers.  You watch these men put themselves in impossibly dangerous situations in which they are exposed in every possible way and in which every single person that they encounter could be a possible enemy - someone who wants to blow them up.

That is the scary, horrific part of the film - that the "enemy" is dressed in everyday plain clothes and hiding in buildings with doorways, using oil tankers and cellphones to detonate remote bombs to destroy both soldiers and civilians.  Even in the desert, hiding behind goats, rocks, hills.  Modern guerilla warfare is absolutely terrifying and impossible.  After watching the film it is unbelievable that any semblance of democracy and stability has actually occurred in Iraq.

What is even sadder is watching the scenes of the lead sergeant trying to fit back in at home.  After risking his life multiple times diffusing bombs, he stands in a grocery store cereal aisle dumbfounded and annoyed by all the choices available to him.  He can't fit back in to "life" - it holds no meaning to him anymore.  Even his family isn't enough to make him want to stay.  So he chooses to go back for another tour of duty.

The film is emotionally traumatizing and exposes you to the horrors and impossible difficulties that soldiers face daily in Iraq and Afghanistan. Friends are there one moment, gone the next.  Death is feared and yet unavoidable.  It breaks my heart to know that a whole generation of men and women are experiencing this reality every day.  It is no wonder that they come home with PTSD and find it impossible to live life in America - our mundane reality compared to the highly charged and literal explosive reality of war.

And yet that mundane reality is a difficult and hard road for many right now, as the movie Up in the Air illustrates.  The movie is about a man who's job is to go around to companies and fire people - the companies literally hire him to come and lay off their workers.  The main character, Ryan Bingham, travels all around the country, from city to city, airport to airport, priding himself on how well he does his job and extolling the virtue of his lack of relationships and the ease of his life because of it.  He goes around to hotel conference rooms giving "motivational" speeches talking about an empty backpack - a life free of the burden of relationships and obligations.

This was a hard movie for me to watch.  Having gone through multiple layoffs at my company, it brought back many hard and painful memories of people that I knew and loved being told they no longer had a job.  Even though many of my old coworkers have gone on and found better, more fulfilling jobs, there are still many that haven't.

The ending of the movie also depressed me.  Ryan achieves his main goal in life, and yet finds that it holds no meaning.  When he finally realize that he wants the burden and obligations of relationships, he is rejected and forced to realize that his life has had little meaning.  Standing all alone in an airport, he has no where to go and no one to go to.

In the end, I guess it serves as a reminder to hold on to the relationships that we have in our life, because they are the only things that matter and are real.  Everything else is just an illusion and living a detached life ends up in a meaningless goal, like the one that Ryan achieves.

Both movies are relevant to life in 2010 as they depict the realities that we live with today - one that is a distant reality to the majority of Americans, but for the few that are experiencing the horrors of war, a reality that the majority will never fully understand; and the other, a reality that at least 10% of the population is experiencing and living through, but hopefully are holding as hard and fast to the relationships that they do have to help them get through this time.  It's hard to really recommend either one of them and I don't if you like to escape reality when watching movies.  But if you want to experience a heavy dose of life in the first decade of the 2000s, then watch them.

Have you seen either one of these movies? What's your take? Agree, disagree? Would love to know! Please share your thoughts in the comments section!

This is a Great Story

Click on the link for a great story pertaining to the creativeness of one guy in the job market. It encourages me!

Forgive Me...

This is my blog, my corner of the universe, and as such I am going to take a moment, be selfish and pat myself on the back for making so many correct predictions this past year. This is not humble of me and it will be showing a side of myself that I am acutely aware of and keep under wraps most of the time. But I can't help myself because it is kind of uncanny how many things I correctly called way back in January of this year (see this link for my original post).

1 - I was right on the economy. Fact is, being in the housing industry puts you on the forefront of what is actually happening in the American economy, and I could have told you back in August of 2006 that we were headed for troubled times. But the idiots in Washington put their heads in the sand and refused to say that the economy was in trouble - on the other hand, there was no other way for them to play it. It was a Catch 22 - if the government acknowledged that something was wrong in the economy, things would have collapsed a lot sooner than they did. It's all about politics and spin and if the spin is negative, the markets will come crashing down.

2 - I was right on the Democrats winning the White House. I must admit, I don't like it - I don't like having a Democrat in the White House. But McCain ran one of the poorest campaigns I have ever seen - what happened to him? I know he has the experience and the record and there is not a person who has served his country more faithfully than he has, but he became muzzled and the experienced statesman that he is never publicly showed itself. I also accurately called that he would have a chance if he picked Sarah Palin as his VP - she had a shining moment at her GOP convention speech, but was then quickly derailed by the media, late-night comedians, and herself. And I don't think he would have had a better shot if he had picked someone else as his Vice Presidential running mate. The public bought into Barack's message a long time ago and the Republican party shot itself in the foot with all of the corruption scandals and mishandling of the power they had. I think it is absolutely wonderful how many people turned out to vote in this election - that is amazing and incredible and right - too many men and women have sacrificed their lives to give us that right, and to not vote is to do them a dishonor and disrespect our own freedom and rights. BUT, I am just wondering how many people are going to be severely disappointed when all the changes promised don't happen. The Democrats will become drunk with their power, just like the Republicans did, and Washington will remain the way it has always been. THAT is politics and THAT is the reality of the political system that we live in. "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely".

3 - I happened to be totally right about the Giants winning the Super Bowl - which was a fluke guess, but still the correct one! Yay for the downfall of the Patriots :).

4 - I was correct about Into the Wild not winning the Best Picture, but I still maintain that it should have.

5 - I was also correct about the bright color trend continuing.

6 - I also correctly predicted that the writers strike would last into the Spring 2008 TV season, though thankfully it did end in time for new episodes of Lost to be aired - thank the Good Lord above!

7 - I am right about the troops not being pulled out of Iraq until at least 2010. Though Obama has promised a total immediate withdrawal, the reality of the situation will not allow this to be feasible until at least 2 years into his presidency.

8- Though, this prediction came just a week ago, I did correctly predict that gas prices would fall to $1.99 on the eve of the election (Karen G can back me up on this one!), and, guess what! They did! Anyone who tells me that the oil companies do not fix their prices and do not control the politics in Washington (dad) needs to then explain to me the coincidence of the dramatic drop in gas prices during the election. I mean seriously - $1.99 gas - when was the last time that we saw $1.99 gas!? 2005? I don't care that the "market" has all of the sudden seen such a dramatic slip in demand. You tell me that the market has seen a slip in demand when prices are back to $4 next summer. I don't see a slip in demand - there is still plenty of traffic on 66 and 495 and even around the little town of Warrenton - more traffic in fact! Maybe the bubble of Northern Virginia keeps me from seeing the decline in demand, but I just don't see it. No, the conspiracy theorist in me says that the politics of oil run SO much deeper than any of us really know, and that there is more going on behind the scene. And in fact, if the gas prices were to accurately reflect the price of oil on the market, I believe that the prices should be even lower than they are.

9 - I correctly predicted that I would be moving this year! I am really excited about this - I have been keeping it kind of under wraps, but I recently found out that I will be moving (still in Warrenton, back to where I originally started 2 years ago), but I will be living on my own, which will be something completely new and exciting. I have never lived completely on my own and I'm excited/nervous to see what this new arrangement has in store for me.

And finally, number 10 - I correctly predicted that our new business venture, Signature WoodCrafters would be successful. Being involved with this start-up has been one of the hardest things I have ever worked on. Every day is a battle for survival, which is capitalism at its core. I have always tried to work hard and do my best at whatever I'm given to do, but until the work itself is a day to day struggle for survival, I have found out that I didn't know what it truly meant to work hard. It is not easy and is a battle day in and day out. Though we will probably only break even this year with this venture, that is still a victory, because I don't know many start-ups that have turned a profit in their first year, considering the massive advertising costs needed to get your name into the market. BUT, as hard as it has been, I don't know if I would trade this year for anything else. It has been exciting, taxing, draining, thrilling, hard, and totally worth being involved in. It has helped saved the rest of my coworkers' jobs, has given our company a new source of revenue, and taught me a ton - I really couldn't ask for more. I am really lucky to have the opportunities that I have at my company.

So, I ask for all of my legions of readers (all 2 of you :)) to forgive me for applauding myself and bragging about making some correct predictions about this year. And the fact that I hedged all of my bets by originally predicting that none of my predictions would come true, should negate everything that I have congratulated myself on :). And I will return back to my humble self and say with all sincere humility that it is just luck that I gave an accurate read on this stuff. To truly test my clairvoyance, I will have to accurately predict social, political, and international trends for at least two years in a row. And then if that happens, I will proudly take on Professor Larry Sabato's recently relinquished mantle of the "most accurate political prognosticator" :).

Not Making This One Up...

Are you wondering why we have to spend $700 billion dollars of tax money to bail out private companies and save the entire global economy? Read THIS ARTICLE, from the New York Times written all the way back in 1999. Kind of a self-fulfilling prophesy, looking back, isn't it? And just think - the more agencies and private companies that the government involves itself in, the more times this exact same scenario will be played out...

Chaos on Wall Street?

What is going on with the financial markets? Is it really bad? And how did we get here? And is it over?

I wish I knew - but the problem of a free market economy and capitalism is that these downward spirals happen and sometimes take a while to get out of. This is not the Great Depression - we don't have breadlines for the majority of the nation yet.

This article is one of the best that I have read while trying to sift through the various news media outlets to find out the truth about what is going on. It details why we are in the mess that we are in, and why this is not going to be over anytime soon unfortunately. And also why no politician is going to be able to fix this problem, despite their promises of "regulation" (because Sarbanes-Oxley works soooo well...riiightt). No, unfortunately, the way that this problem is going to be fixed is banks need to start giving out loans again (but only to those who are fiscally responsible - ie, buy and pay what they truly can afford!), commodity prices and inflation need to go down, the dollar needs to strengthen, and the drop in pricing for houses needs to bottom out.

And while we are blaming the housing industry/market, let's also throw some of that blame onto Alan Greenspan during his reign at the Fed that allowed these interest rates to increase inflation above the average American's wage, and make borrowing money (ie, "credit") easier than it should have been for that American. So those people buying the McMansions (that are now foreclosing in droves), 4 luxury cars, and sending their kids to private school were overextending themselves after all, and now can't pay their bills and thus are sending Wall Street into turmoil, because they can't pay back the amount of debt they owe and have to foreclose and the banks have to write down that debt. Coupled with the fact that someone decided it would be great to make some money off of the amount of debt that someone else owes, we find ourselves in a "credit crisis". Yeah, that was a brilliant idea - make money off of negative money - that'll work! Because eventually that money will be paid off right, and since it is accumulating interest, that lump sum will be worth even more? Turns out nope - they actually couldn't pay back the loan, because they never had the money in the first place - and YET someone approved them for a loan. And then it gets all technical with the types of loans given out - adjustable interest percentage rates mortgages or interest only loans, where none of the principal was being paid down, and the loan money kept going up and up - and Wall Street placed bets on that, never foreseeing that the assets that people were banking on (their homes) were NEVER WORTH THAT MUCH!

Now that the housing bubble has burst and continues to plunge, and continues to be exasperated by Wall Street's lack of foresight, we the consumer will continue to suffer, because the commodities that we need to go down (energy, inflation, agriculture) continue to the do the opposite - they go up, weakening our dollar and deflate the purchasing power of the average American because companies have to raise their prices in order to account for the cost of commodities going up.

It is making me nervous that the government continues to bail out these companies on Wall Street (at least some of my money is being used to save some people's jobs and livelihoods though), because the government has moved into uncharted waters in terms of involvement on Wall Street. I am not a fan of "big" government, but in this era of socialist democracy, I guess there is not a way to avoid it. But when I hear stories of how two government workers had to be hired in order to do another government worker's job because she was such a mess and yet was never fired - it brings a sick feeling to my stomach (and that is a true story).

And while people continue to buy IPods, Blackberries, and Rock Band 2, you can't say that we have reached Great Depression levels - sure, we are in a recession, but while people continue to buy "stuff" that is, in the end, non-essential to their existence, there is still some faith to be had in our economy. And there doesn't seem to be a shortage of work (just go to Monster.com, or careerbuilder.com) just yet, so again, there are reasons to remain confident and not hide in the bunker yet - or stuff all your cash under your mattress.