Finally, fa-HINE-ally, someone has made a proper comedy. Armando Iannucci, to be exact, with In the Loop, his annihilating satire of recent Anglo-American misadventures in the Middle East. It’s getting fantastic reviews and it deserves every one of them. It’s…
Posted on: July 26th, 2009 | Comments (13)
So Harry Potter, the latest one. Making a lot of money. Yep. How many more to go? Ten? Oh, only two? Well, good, that means they’ll finish up before the kids turn thirty.
Posted on: July 19th, 2009 | Comments (28)
Public Enemies is an oddly soft, slow, elegiac film, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Some of my best friends are elegiac films. But it seems a regrettable approach to its main subject, John Dillinger, if you know anything at…
Posted on: July 7th, 2009 | Comments (14)
Washington acting like a person Director Tony Scott ought to put up a statue to Denzel Washington in his sculpture garden, then pray to it at least three times a day to express his gratitude for the way the actor…
Posted on: June 14th, 2009 | Comments (9)
I’m supposed to be reviewing The Hangover here, but the problem is I saw it when hung over and can’t remember much of it. That’s what you call “irony.” (Manhattans and red wine, if you must know.) I’d heard that…
Posted on: June 7th, 2009 | Comments (13)
The latest Pixar film Up is being received as if it were better than the Second Coming. It represents the Pixar team’s effort to be even more lugubrious than in their last animated film—more lugubrious than in their last five…
Posted on: June 2nd, 2009 | Comments (50)
I seriously thought my eardrums had burst a couple of times during Terminator Salvation. The movie sounds like jets crashing into a junkyard, one after another, with intervals of loud pompous narration delivered via public address system between the screeching…
Posted on: May 24th, 2009 | Comments (20)
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.
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…
Let’s see how well you know your military history. Give the date and place of this comminique: “Our Victorious Forces Liberate Zalambessa!! Our victorious and heroic air and ground forces have liberated the town of Zalambessa after completely annihilating the…
They asked me to think about how war would change over the next 150 years for the eXile’s anniversary issue. Weird to think about it: wars going on when you’re dead. My doctor told me it’s maybe 15 more years…
Last column I asked readers to suggest wars that’d be more fun for the US to get involved in than Colombia. I got some great answers — and thanks everybody who wrote in — but when I looked into the…
Every day America gets deeper into the shit in Colombia. We’re dumping planeloads of cash on the Colombian army — $1.5 billion is what Rumsfeld’ll admit, so you gotta assume it’s more like ten billion with the rest squeezed through…
This year’s Oscar for best military comedy has to go to the island-claiming “war” between those great military powers, Spain and Morocco. It was a sidesplitter from beginning to end. Just imagine the battle of Iwo Jima turned into a…
