now this is the kinda woman i like, she's badass. no twilight crap for ms bigelow.

I second that, ddurden33. I watched Point Break, Strange Days, K-19, and now this. Whoa!

I've seen the Hurt Locker, finally and I really enjoyed it. So I'm looking forward too her next film.

As for the dumbing down of America, those examples are simple enough, but a lot of people forget because they don't use or talk about them much.

For example, I took Spanish in High School and I still remember some stuff, but I never use it so I'm not as good as I was before.

I think the problem is that they don't apply that stuff to their daily life.

I also wanted to add, two reasons that a lot of the younger moviegoers don't see films like The Hurt Locker (other than it isn't playing near them) is:

1.) They don't read reviews, how many of the average movie-going youth actually read reviews (or the newspapers for that matter)? A lot of them have never even heard of Rottentomatoes.

2.) They've never heard of the film. Friday at work I told my co-workers that I was going to see the Hurt Locker and they asked me what was it. I told them it was one of the highest reviewed movies of the year. They sounded really surprised and now a lot of them are going to see it.

The simple question to all of this would be to ASK them. I would bet you $50 that most of them have never heard of The Hurt Locker.

Hurt Locker's rated R; GI Joe's rated PG-13. PG-13 films gross more than R films. Not to mention Joe's got 45 years of cross platform branding history. I'd loved to sit with the MPAA members and have them point out the exact moments in each film that justify the difference in ratings, but I'm not a big fan of the rating system to begin with.

I don't think anybody has stats to show how many youths bought tickets to GI Joe then walked into Hurt Locker. I used to do that all the time.

Who were the players in the American Revolutionary War? Who cares? Unless you're on a quiz show, I doubt that little piece of knowledge is going to help put food on the table. Besides, even some people that 'know' the US Bill of Rights don't seem to understand it. It's fairly obvious that the second amendment has nothing to do with recreational gun use yet the NRA it still in a position to strong arm the top level officials of your country.

@beautifulm: I completely disagree with your first point. The daily poll is enough evidence to convince me that the majority of IMDB users are still in some level of schooling.

I hate to admit this but I think part of the reason why Hurt Locker isn't making more money migth be caused by politics. People I know who have seen the film have said very negative things about it. Along the lines of it's liberal propoganda about how bad war is and it's not realistic or patriotic enough and it should never have been made. Others I know now have no interest in seeing The Hurt Locker because they've been told that same thing, "it degrades our soldiers in every which way and we shouldn't embrace that."

I have not see this movie. I'm hoping to see it when plays close enough to me or when it is eventually released on DVD. But I do not think that from looking at the trailers there seems to be much biased in how they depict war or the actions of our soldiers. I don't see alot of negativity, I see depictions of men doing very brave things that, like what Bigelow said, most of us would never do. Despite what negative things I've heard this looks like an amazing movie

money issues aside, id still like to see the movie, the director, and jeremy get a nod from the academy. this is one of the best war drama/thriller ive seen in a long time.

@GregM: @GregM:

Which point exactly? Dumbing down of America or They don't read reviews?

No one will watch this. Correction: appreciable numbers of people won't watch this.

Brad, I think you might be interested to hear what some of thefilmexperience readers have to say about all of this. Here's the link.

I still think that if more people knew about films like this, then more people would see them.

@k-dogg
Why is it you think that people will not see this film.? I've listed my reasons for why friends of mine have chosen not to see it, but they don't make up the consensus of the entire film going public. Why is it you think that no one would want to see it? And what to you was the slanted meaning that you wrote about in another post related to this topic not long back.

@BeautifulM: regarding that they don't read reviews. Most people in my life who are older than me (siblings, parents, cousins, grandparents, coworkers) don't know about IMDB, RottenTomatoes, MetaCritic, etc; my younger cousins do, my friends do. I guess I'm just not used to someone suggesting that, in general, youths are less familiar with Internet based resources than people who are older.