By now the Coen brothers are so great at filmmaking they’re actually scary. They started out twenty-five years ago with massive cinematic talent and the finest sensibilities in the modern world, and they’ve worked and worked till now they can…
Posted on: October 11th, 2009 | Comments (19)
Capitalism: A Love Story is a fantastic slap-upside-the-head film, just what we need right now. It’s been playing a week in New York and Los Angeles, and just opened wide. The reviews are “mixed.” Critics say it’s just Michael Moore…
Posted on: October 4th, 2009 | Comments (68)
If you think our culture is totally, horribly, permanently screwed up, go see The Informant! Because it’s a gallows-humor study of how/why we are totally, horribly, permanently screwed up, so it gives you an opportunity to consider the question. But…
Posted on: September 20th, 2009 | Comments (32)
Extract is so bad its rottenness becomes a source of fascination, which is a good thing, because there’s nothing else to sustain your interest while the 89 minute dud drags by. It’s all Mike Judge’s fault, that much is clear….
Posted on: September 6th, 2009 | Comments (10)
So I finally saw Inglourious Basterds the other night. I’ll admit, I was more than ready to avoid Tarantino’s new film, even after reading Eileen’s enticing review. The film sounded wrong on every level–what could possibly be good about another…
Posted on: August 30th, 2009 | Comments (50)
When I heard Quentin Tarantino was making a Dirty Dozen-like action film set in WWII, I groaned in spirit. With all the amazing eras and dazzling historical figures and slaughterhouse horrors not yet represented in cinema, we’re going to visit…
Posted on: August 23rd, 2009 | Comments (36)
There are a couple of strokes of genius in District 9 that renew one’s hopes for the future of genre film. One is casting Sharlto Copley, who’s not a trained actor, as protagonist Wikus van der Merwe, a dweeby South…
Posted on: August 16th, 2009 | Comments (23)
Listen to the Radio War Nerd podcast [subscribe here] with guest Gunnar Hrafn Jonsson of Iceland Public Radio on the massacre in Orlando and how online Islamic State jihadis are dealing with battlefield defeats and the shrinking caliphate. Subscribe to Radio War Nerd through the show’s Patreon page.
Here’s some more cool combat vids for you desk casualties. This time it’s Georgian troops shooting the Hell out of the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali, on the day they rolled in to retake the province after Bush and Cheney promised…
There are three basic facts to keep in mind about the smokin’ little war in Ossetia: 1. The Georgians started it. 2. They lost. 3. What a beautiful little war! For me, the most important is #3, the sheer beauty…
In honor of today’s coup in Mauritania, EXILED ONLINE is reprinting a War Nerd classic about a previous Mauritanian coup in 2005, one of scores of coups that this War Nerd-friendly nation has been churning out since independence.
A few years ago I wrote a column on how the Iran-Iraq War was the war nobody watched. Well, thank God I was wrong. Maybe the US networks ignored that war but it turns out there were a lot of…
One of the best things about war is that it’s a huge IQ booster. The only people who use their brains in peacetime are the suits: salesmen, real-estate agents. The rest of us just slog along for the paycheck, get…
Here’s another great war graphic, courtesy of Yasha Levine at eXile. This one shows every coalition casualty as a red drop, so like Yasha wrote me, you see this blood rain falling on a map of Iraq as the days…
The hills are alive with the sound of RPGs After six years of ignoring Afghanistan, things have gotten bad enough to force American officials to pay attention. For the past two months, U.S. casualties in Afghanistan have been higher than…
