It's not fake! This really happened: "On Friday, Palestinians in the West Bank took the analogy to heart, dressing up as the blue natives of the planet Pandora for their weekly protests against the Israeli occupation and the ongoing construction of a barrier in the town of Bilin." The video:

As I pointed out yesterday, Avatar is better film than The Hurt Locker primarily because it's politically more meaningful and useful to the masses. The Hurt Locker hides the fact that it is just an action film. No matter how many critics love the movie, it's not a work of art; it's not challenging in any way, it is simply designed to entertain as wide an audience as possible. Old Partner is an art film precisely because it is not easy to watch—the opposite is the case for The Hurt Locker. You can watch all of it—even the "tense" parts—with no effort or difficulty. And it is difficulty that separates a work of art from a work of pop.


At least Avatar has no such pretensions—it knows that it is a work of pop. But unlike most works of pop, its fiction contains a politics that can be translated into real terms, in the real world, in the real Palestine. With The Hurt Locker, things happen the other way around:

(CNN) — A U.S. soldier who defused roadside bombs in Iraq wants credit for inspiring the main character in "The Hurt Locker," a movie up for nine Oscars this weekend.

Master Sgt. Jeffrey Sarver filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday claiming writer Mark Boal — a journalist embedded with his Army unit in Iraq — based the film's main character on his life.

"They literally transposed his life in the film and then claimed it was a work of fiction," said lawyer Geoffrey Fieger. "The only fiction was the claim it was a work of fiction…"

"The screenplay says he is a blonde, blue-eyed trailer trash from Tennessee, but he's blonde, blue-eyed and grew up in a trailer in West Virginia."

This movement is from the real to fiction, and the fiction, as the producers make so clear, was emptied of any real (useful, political) content.
Without directly denying Sarver's claim, the production company said it was "a fictional account of what brave men and women do on the battlefield."
Recall, this is the kind of thinking ("what brave men and women do on the battlefield") that led to the vapid/valueless/dangerous patriotism of "Support Our Troops." The Hurt Locker is bad politics and bad pop.