Archive for: featured

Jane Fonda Learned ‘Empathy is Revolutionary’ From Vietnam Vets

Jane Fonda tells Oprah that thing she did in North Vietnam was an “unforgivable mistake” and talks about what she learned when she apologized to a group of Vietnam Veterans in an episode of Oprah’s Master Class. The clip surfaced because Oprah’s running a followup interview with Fonda on Sunday April 7th at 9pm on Oprah’s Next Chapter. +Continue Reading

Go ‘Inside Combat Rescue’

Inside Combat Rescue is a six-part series premiering on the National Geographic Channel next Monday February 18th at 10PM. The show chronicles an Afghanistan deployment for the Pararescuemen (a/k/a Para Jumpers a/k/a PJs), an elite Air Force Combat Rescue unit whose mission it is to extract and provide medical assistance to U.S. forces and our allies who are injured in combat.

The show’s producers have outfitted the PJs with cutting edge micro cameras attached to their chests, helmets and also strategically placed the flash drive cameras in locations the helicopters that fly the unit on its missions. What they’ve captured are detailed and realistic visions of combat missions that far surpass anything the public has seen before. +Continue Reading

Skyfall: Human Intelligence in a Digital World

Let’s be upfront about the magnitude of the accomplishment here: Skyfall manages to be a deadly serious film about espionage and the contemporary threats to Western democracy and still incorporate the glamor and sly humor that made James Bond a movie icon. It might be the best Bond film ever and certainly stands up to anyone’s favorite movies from any Bond era over the last 50 years.

If you care about James Bond, you should definitely see Skyfall as soon as it opens to get as unfiltered an experience as possible. It was a real privilege to see this movie with absolutely zero spoilers. There’s nothing in this piece that will give away any major plot points but I wouldn’t trust anyone on Twitter or Facebook to keep their mouth shut, either. +Continue Reading

Hitchcock Arrives on Blu-ray

Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection is a massive Blu-ray upgrade to the 2005 DVD box set. This new release adds North by Northwest to the original package’s fourteen films and features Blu-ray premieres of all but two of the films included in this collection. As with any project of this size and ambition, the quality of the movies and the restoration results vary but the overall project is a spectacular gift for any Hitchcock fan with a state-of-the-art home theater setup. +Continue Reading

‘Nazi Collaborators’ Comes to DVD

If anyone thinks that Hitler and his Nazi inner circle managed to take over most of Europe by themselves, let us recommend the Military Channel’s Nazi Collaborators. The 13-part series ran last year on the network and has just come out on DVD. +Continue Reading

Getting a Handle on ‘Zero Dark Thirty’

How factual does a movie have to be when it’s inspired by real events? Can a filmmaker really tell a story without filtering it through a hardline political perspective? We’ve finally got a trailer for Zero Dark Thirty that gives some idea of how director Kathryn Bigelow decided to tell the story of the hunt for Osama bin Laden, so let’s check it out.

Let’s get some facts out of the way here: none of us here at Military​.com has a security clearance that gives us access to the classified files that would allow us to come up with any kind of informed opinion about the technical accuracy of this movie. But it’s also true that anyone who’s ever had access to truly classified material of any kind would probably admit that it’s often (read: always) full of conflicting information. An objective retelling of any true life event is pretty much impossible. +Continue Reading

Universal Classic Monsters Come to Blu-ray

Anyone who grew up watching TV in the 50s, 60s or 70s has strong memories of late-night creature features that recycled the classic monster movies from the 1930s & 40s. In an era before cable and VHS tapes, those movies featuring Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolf Man and the Mummy became as much a part of a generation’s shared culture as the Beatles or

The problem was we saw those original movies broadcast from worn-out prints with noisy, hissing soundtracks, but you’ve got a chance to see eight of those movies restored to their original glory with the Universal Classic Monsters Blu-ray box set. +Continue Reading

The Science of ‘Looper’

Looper isn’t one of those movies where you turn your mind off and sit blankly through a couple of hours of explosions and chase scenes. You’ve got to pay attention to keep up with the plot and you’re going to be thinking about what you saw for days (or weeks or months or maybe even years) to come.

Looper is set 30 years in the future. Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis star as younger and older versions of the same looper, a hitman whose job it is to knock off victims sent back through a time-travel portal. Jeff Daniels plays a crime boss from the future who pays off the killers and runs the show. Apparently, his boss (who lives 30 years even later in the future) is tying up loose ends and sending back older versions of his loopers so their younger versions can kill them and “close the loop.”

The screenplay was written by director Rian Johnson and it plays like an homage to Philip K. Dick that’s a lot truer to Dick’s cracked vision than most of the movies based on his books. Johnson doesn’t think the audience is dumb and he’s asking us to expend a little brain power to keep up with his movie.

Since time travel is treated as a serious topic in the movie, we got the people over at Zoomwerks to introduce us to a physicist who actually understands the subject. Dr. Ronald Mallett is a professor of physics at the University of Connecticut whose own work investigates the possibility of time travel. He was kind enough to explain things in a way that made sense. +Continue Reading

Keeping It Real With ‘End of Watch’

If you’re someone who complains about how movies don’t understand what it’s like to be a cop, you should see End of Watch. Writer/director David Ayer’s manages to convey a lot about the day-to-day existence that goes with the job: how the men and women who serve deal with each other, how they work their way through the bureaucratic crap that goes with the gig, how unusual and surprising the violence actually is when it breaks up the routine of the job. +Continue Reading

Gina Elise’s Pin-Ups for Vets

We get a lot of press releases from showbiz folks who want us to let you all know about whatever project they’re launching to raise money “for the troops.” The celebrity commitment usually involves some kind of drive-by photo op at a base or a VA hospital and a press release written in the kind of PR-speak that no real human uses in normal conversation. Or it’s some band you’ve never heard of that wants us to offer a free download of their terrible song with military-themed lyrics when it’s hard to fathom how a free download is going to do anything except promote the band.

Gina Elise’s Pin-Ups for Vets project is a rare exception and one worth your attention. She’s putting out WWII-style pinup calendars of herself since 2006 and donating all the proceeds to help purchase state-of the-art rehabilitation equipment for physical, occupational, and cognitive therapy programs in hospitals serving America’s Veterans. She’s raised $50,000 so far selling calendars at $10 a pop. +Continue Reading