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.
The political establishment’s racist, authoritarian reaction to the 1992 LA riots—blaming broken black families, massing cops and troops, and Ron Paul’s advice to his family on how to kill black “animals” and get away with it…
I love this map of middle-east history converted into blots spilling out along a timeline. It’s like a bunch of different flavors of Hawaiian Punch getting spilled on a rug of the Middle East by drunk ten-year-olds who spiked the…
Just in case you missed this kickass interview with Gary Brecher on Wisconsin Public Radio
War & Drugs: flying while you’re dying Hey, I’m back! For a few weeks there, the War Nerd was unhorsed, pulled over to the side watching life’s rich convoy zoom by. Thanks to the damn ungrateful Russian government, the old…
FRESNO, CA – It’s summer, you’ve got a little more time off, so you can read up on war instead of trying to live in whatever boring suburb you live in. Lawns, neighbors, dogs, kids—it all sucks and the best…
Iraq Police Academy 6: Doin’ The Mosul Shuffle! FRESNO, CA — OK, we’ve just gone through a really exciting time in world military moves, so let’s test your strategic IQ. What’s the relation between these three recent developments: 1. On…
Photographic evidence of Tibet’s military, circa 1950 FRESNO, CA — Writing a column on the military history of Tibet seemed like a good idea in the good old days, a week ago, before I started actually trying to research it….
It was a week for do-it-yourselfers in the war world. A little lesson for us all, that you don’t need a lot of hardware to make war. All you need is the old standbys: hunting rifles, blasting caps, and trucks…
