Brüno proved that Borat’s amazing fake documentary trick was only really going to work one time, so The Dictator returns to a format that’s more like the traditional romantic comedies that Sacha Baron Cohen parodied in his first movie Ali G Indahouse.
That doesn’t mean that The Dictator won’t profoundly disturb anyone who’s offended by terrorism jokes or the near-endless stream of sexist and racist comments that pour from the mouth of Cohen’s Admiral General Aladeen. Since that group includes almost no one who reads UTR, it’s pretty safe to say that our readers will find this hilarious. It’s much funnier than Brüno and strongly suggests that Cohen has a lot more movies in him as a kind of dirtbag Jerry Lewis. +Continue Reading
Writer Kelly Roman and illustrator Michael DeWeese’s upcoming graphic novel The Art of War uses the Sun Tzu classic as the basis for a “mind-bending thriller set 20 years in the future when Wall Street is militarized and China is the world’s dominant economy.” +Continue Reading
A departure from the original, Kennedy-era warfare, maybe the article would mention a few things about the more nightmarish aspects of the battlefields future war fighters will face in this century: nanotech, smart weapons – not just bombs and aircraft but now projectiles fired from rifles – UAVs, and that really creepy dog thing I keep seeing everywhere. However, before the very first sentence is finished the piece is derailed by the author, Professor Paolo Pedercini, bitching about how “the gaming press diligently started to operate as an extension of Activision’s PR department.” +Continue Reading
The Smithsonian American Art Museum in DC is currently hosting an exhibit called “The Art of Video Games” and hosted a panel last week called “Video Games at Work” that featured Navy Capt. Russell Shilling. Shilling, who works as a consultant at the Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury, served as an advisor on the America’s Army video game developed by the Army as a recruiting tool. +Continue Reading
Ed. note: We’ve been talking about revisiting classic but forgotten military books and movies here at UTR and Mike’s taking the lead. Originally, we wanted to limit our coverage to things that were available on Kindle or Netflix so readers could immediately go check out the things we recommended. Unfortunately, all of our best ideas have been things that are tough to find. We decided to go ahead and write about some of them anyway, in hopes that we can inspire some reissues. If any of our readers have favorites they want to share, let us know.
When a little book called Tiger the Lurp Dog by former U.S. Army and LRRP team leader Sergeant Kenn E. Miller hit the shelves in 1983, chances are the average American had never heard of the term LRRP, pronounced “lurp,” short for Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol.
Tiger is just a mutt, a “dust dog” according to the Vietnamese, but he’s the mascot of LRRP Team Two-Four. His ‘main man’ is Mopar, a 19-year old SP4 who talks of his girlfriend Sybill Street and dreams of surviving long enough to buy beer in a supermarket. Marvel Kim is a luck-obsessed Korean who grew up in Hawaii and is the conscience of the story. Rounding out the team is Communist hating Cuban refugee Gonzales and Staff Sergeant Wolverine, former Special Forces, replacement team leader, and a man determined to outrun his past no matter how far he has to go to do it. +Continue Reading
Attention Ft. Riley, Kansas! Four comedians who provide the voices for Action Figure Therapy will be performing stand up and meeting with the troops and other fans this Friday and Saturday (11 May and 12 May).
Friday they will be at The Warrior Zone, show beginning 2000, Saturday they will at Rally Point Bingo. The comedians would like us to reiterate that they will be hanging round after the show expressly to meet everyone and express their gratitude and appreciation for what they call the most awesome fan base in the world. +Continue Reading
Obviously, in a culture tasked with making life-and-death decisions about the fate of the free world, making decisions about Pentagon support of Hollywood movies doesn’t qualify as the most critical task on the national agenda. However, that doesn’t mean it’s not incredibly difficult. How can someone look at a few typed pages and maybe some concept drawings and decide which movies will reflect well on the men and women who serve our country?
When things turn out well, you get Act of Valor. It may not win a truckload of Oscars next spring, but the filmmakers did a great job of putting at a part of the Navy SEAL culture onscreen for regular Americans (and foreigners) to see.
And then you have Battleship and The Avengers. The Navy went all-in on one and the Pentagon passed on the other. Why? +Continue Reading
Pretty much every trailer released so far makes it look like Liam Neeson gets vaporized by aliens in the first reel and Liam’s already given his definitive Naval performance (as the Soviet submarine captain in K-19: The Widowmaker), but Universal wants all the grownups to know they’ve cast a real actor in this one. None of us has seen the movie yet, but it seems like Taylor Kitsch is playing the Ben Affleck role from Pearl Harbor and he’ll have to mature on the battlefield if the Earth has any prayer of repelling alien attack. +Continue Reading
NASCAR driver Kurt Busch found himself without a sponsor going into this season and, determined to fight his way back to the top, decided that Talladega Nights’ Ricky Bobby should be his new role model. Busch partnered with the Armed Forces Foundation to promote PTSD awareness and used that charitable connection to convince Will Ferrell and the Sony Pictures to allow him to drive a copy Ricky’s comeback car from the comedy classic at Talladega’s Aaron’s 499 race. +Continue Reading
One reason so many big-budget studio movies are so terrible is that the executives in charge think that flashy special effects can distract the audience from boneheaded plots, awful dialogue and nonexistent character development. The Avengers proves that Hollywood can throw tons of money at a project and come up with something spectacular. The movie plays like a cross between Transformers and The West Wing, with frenetic action scenes connected by a complicated plot that manages to both make sense and give every one of the six Avengers something interesting to do. +Continue Reading
Under the Radar is commentary. We don’t report the news; we offer our take on what happened.
