Reversible Opinion #01

"The conventional wisdom is that Iraq War films have foundered at the box office because we have no appetite for them, but it might be that our appetite for them has been slight because they offer precious little nutrition. Nearly all of them are telling us pretty familiar war-is-hell narratives, even if those narratives are skillfully rendered in a technical sense. The Hurt Locker gives us not only no context but no hint that the context is missing, since it mines the adrenaline of combat without mussing itself in the viscera of anything as dangerous as ideology. It's a rip-roaring piece of suspense cinema, but decidedly no more than that." — Seth Colter Walls, Newsweek

This is an occasional post devoted to statements that are not just wrong but exact inversions of the truth, such that were you to reverse the statement you would end up with something reasonable. Thus: The Hurt Locker is a great film precisely because it jettisons ideology in favor of adrenaline; it is nothing less than a rip-roaring piece of suspense drama. This one gets extra points for first identifying the true statement and then inverting it ("The conventional wisdom is that..."). A self-aware idiot!