Neill Blomkamp's "Elysium" packs a punch for an action sci-fi film even if its punches don't land. So yeah ... Jodie Foster doesn't give her best performance and the other roles for women in the film are completely lame. Â A beefy Matt Damon, bless his heart, is poorly...
Last night PBS' POV program aired the Danish documentary film "Armadillo" (filmed 2009; released 2010) about a Danish-British Forward Operating Base in Helmand Province, Afghanistan.Although much of...
Earlier this week, Tufts professor Dan Drezner tweeted that his Theory of International Politics and Zombies book has now sold more than 10,000 copies. That's a huge total by academic standards and...
Cross-posted from my personal blog, by suggestion of a Vikash Yadav tweet.I've now watched the first two parts of "Carlos," a three-part French-produced television miniseries that was broadcast on...
Up front, I'll admit that Michael Moore movies appeal to me. My politics lean left, I embrace populist sensibilities on many issues, and I strongly believe that humor can be employed to levy an effective critique of politics."Roger and Me," which told the dismal story of the relationship between General Motors and Flint, Michigan, was a personal story for Moore since it concerned his hometown and was a strong beginning for his career as a documentary film maker."Bowling for Columbine," which used the infamous Colorado high school shootings by two teenage boys to examine America's love affair...
Duck of Minerva bloggers have already written quite a bit about "The Hurt Locker," which won the Best Picture prize at this week's Academy Awards ceremony. I saw the movie on DVD a few weeks ago and have been digesting some of the reactions to the film. Like many critics of this film, Michael Kamber of the NY Times offers a list of serious errors in "The Hurt Locker." Viewers see the bomb disposal team leave on missions without much other military support. The team members clear buildings by themselves, become skilled snipers and spotters when they stumble upon some British mercenaries, and...
Last time I taught "World Politics" as a GenEd class, I had my first-years write their midterm on their choice of Lord of the Rings, Independence Day or Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith. I want to use the same concept this year but not the same films two years in a row. The assignment is to use the film as a hook to discuss four schools of thought in IR - realism, liberalism, constructivism, feminism; and make an argument about which one is best reflected in the film and why.One of my TAs suggested BSG: Razor. I worry that Razor, and BSG in general, is too complex a story for such an...
If you need a little stomach-turning yet intellectually provocative weekend fun, go watch District 9 while it's still in theatres. Only check your disbelief at the door. (I mean seriously. If two of your teeth fall casually out of your rotting mouth in the space of ten seconds, you're not about to get through storming a fortified secret biolab with the rest of them intact, are you now? And since when can humans and aliens understand one another's languages without a universal translator?)If you've not seen it (and chances you have, I'm usually late to these things since my typical night out...
Tantalized by Eric Randolph's glowing review, I watched The Hurt Locker this past week. I can see what Eric means by the film being almost in its own genre - a film about the everyday work of soldiering during an occupation, with no grand narrative about the rightness or wrongness of the war. But in my view, that is it's own grand narrative: a study in what soldiering is becoming, and the implications for soldiers and for society. So I viewed this film as an artifact of an emerging era in civil-military relations, an indicator of the kind of war stories we are currently telling ourselves as...
Eric Randolph tells us why at Complex Terrain Lab in a post entitled "A New Kind of War Movie" : "The Hurt Locker has already garnered the epithet of ‘first great Iraq war movie’ since its US release back in June, but that might actually be an underestimation. For a start, it has an intensity that will leave your bowels twisted and your nails bleeding; and it’s made a star of a nobody in James Renner. But, more importantly, by side-stepping the question of the war’s founding morality and justification, director Kathryn Bigelow has achieved something quite new for the war genre. Her resolute...