Center for a New American Security

I have not seen the Hurt Locker. My only opinion of the director, Katherine Bigelow, is based on Point Break, which we can all agree is the greatest movie ever featuring Keanu Reeves shooting a gun up in the air while screaming. But I do not understand my fellow Iraq veterans complaining the Hurt Locker isn't realistic enough. When did war movies suddenly have to be realistic?

I have not been posting much recently, enjoying my retirement from daily blogging, but Richard Fontaine and I got name-checked in the lead editorial from today's Washington Post on Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on account of this policy paper we wrote on Yemen for CNAS, so if you have not read it, do. I re-read it today to make sure I still agree with what we wrote and ... yup, I still do.

Well, as we discussed yesterday, there are great books doomed to become (potentially) awful movies starring Matt Damon.

Well, this looks ... awful.

One of the world's brighter young Afghanistan scholars sent me an email asking if this was a movie about Pashtuns. Because all us mountain people fight over the same three things: land, women, honor. Often the three are related.

My cousin, a Marine Corps officer in Iraq doing whatever it is Marines do in Iraq these days (milking cows? wishing they were in Helmand?), writes in:

I saw two movies this weekend, actually: Inglourious Basterds and In The Loop. The latter is really funny political satire that will hit home for many of this blog's readers, and the two Scotsmen in the cast almost make one forget l'Ecosse's nasty habit of releasing mass-murdering terrorists. Enjoy.

Consider this the antidote to watching Foust and Cohen (see below) debate Afghanistan for an hour on your computer monitors. I have often considered the Renée French scene in Coffee and Cigarettes to be the gold standard by which "women looking impossibly good while smoking a cigarette in a café" scenes have been measured. After watching Mélanie Laurent in Inglourious Basterds, I am now not so sure. So here they are, readers, head-to-head. You make the call.

Yesterday, I went to see Waltz with Bashir. It was, as expected, pretty amazing. The entire audience stayed in their seats at the end to watch the credits. I myself had trouble, in church later, not thinking about the film. It was that haunting. (The film, that is.)