On Shutter Island, there’s a lighthouse where patients are supposedly taken to be lobotomized. The movie has about thirty-five shots of this lighthouse against a gloomy sky, so many that you begin to wonder if director Martin Scorsese has had…
Posted on: February 21st, 2010 | Comments (40)
For a good time, call Robert Downey Jr. Of course, some people don’t want to have a good time. That’s one of the mysterious facts of our modern lives, and that’s why there’s a market for films like Precious: Based…
Posted on: December 30th, 2009 | Comments (15)
What are the best movies of the decade? How the hell should I know? To hear the critics tell it, it’s Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, plus a lot of other solemn bummers I didn’t see. However,…
Posted on: December 28th, 2009 | Comments (68)
Avatar turns out to be the one about the white guy who gets mixed up with Noble Savages and likes them so much he goes native, right before the big battle. So no surprises about the plot. But what about…
Posted on: December 21st, 2009 | Comments (33)
Sometimes you just want to see a lot of people die, but if you did anything about it in real life, you’d get entangled in a lot of red tape. So you head off to the cinema instead and watch…
Posted on: November 15th, 2009 | Comments (21)
I’m morbidly devoted to the works of Charles Dickens. It’s a childhood aberration. At a young age I started reading whatever books were on the family shelves and bonded with Dickens and Twain before I had a fully formed cranium,…
Posted on: November 9th, 2009 | Comments (8)
I finally got around to seeing Paranormal Activity, the low-budget ghost movie that’s making so much money. It’s spinning through the predictable cycle already charted by The Blair Witch Project ten years ago: 1) early fan buzz and glowing reviews,…
Posted on: October 25th, 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.
Yo ho ho ho time in Somalia! What’s the bestest present kids dream of in faraway Puntland, where piracy is more than a Disney marketing gimmick? A supertanker, that’s what. A Saudi supertanker is the ultimate in stuffed stockings: 100…
Today I’ll finally keep my promise and tell you about my favorite book on the Horn of Africa. Remember a couple columns back, I promised to tell you about a great book on the Ethiopian/Somali wars? Of course I promised…
What George W. Bush loved best about his job was being a war president. Playing war, that is, as opposed to making war like a grown-up. Remember him strutting onto that carrier in his little flight jacket? You never saw…
Laurent Nkunda: War Nerd Hero If you ever want to find a real hero, here’s one way to recognize him: the TV news will be making him into a monster 24/7. Today’s monster hero is the Tutsi general Laurent Nkunda,…
Can I time these articles or what? The day after I put up my article on Ethiopia’s troubles in Somalia, 5 car bombs go off in two Somali cities targeting the Ethiopian consulate in Hargeisa, the Presidential Palace (such as…
A couple of years ago I mentioned that Ethiopian troops were occupying Mogadishu and said it was the perfect experimental setup for us. Now we could find out if anybody could pacify that place. Well, the answer’s in, because the…
Zia ul-Haq: the Pakistani Dracula with the dead raccoon eyes. Well, time to ease out of my chair and get back to work, because people have been yelling at me to finish off that “Islamablog” series I started about the…
