Thursday, December 24, 2009
Weapons: M41-A Pulse Rifle From the Movie ‘Aliens’, Shoots Real Ammunition!
Monday, December 21, 2009
Film: Avatar is CGI Cool, But PMC’s Are Once Again The Bad Guys
Thanks to Christian Lowe for the review. This movie sounds impressive, but yet again, Holly-weird has decided to portray private industry as the bad guy. Pffft. For that, I will more than likely watch this movie as a rental or at the cheap theater in town when it gets there.
This gets old, and it is a slap in the face of the thousands of contractors currently in the war, who have served in the war at one point or another, and most importantly, have been killed or maimed in this war. Thanks James Cameron for nothing. Next. –Matt
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Avatar Thrills, but Troops Take Hit
Military.com – Christian Lowe
Dec 17, 2009
It’s pretty simple.
Spend a gazillion dollars on computer animators; concoct an entirely new language, throw the whole thing on another planet with ten-foot-tall aliens that ride dragons and plug into their extraterrestrial horses with biological data cables and add some jet-hovering, super-fortress gunships, belt-fed blasters, and latter day V-22s and you’ve got yourself a pretty good action movie formula, right?
Now make it all 3-D.
That’s exactly what writer/director James Cameron (Aliens, Titanic) tried to do with what is reportedly the most expensive film ever produced. His latest movie Avatar — which opens in U.S. theaters today — certainly lives up to its billing as a visceral assault on the senses. Think of the most gut-wrenching roller coaster ride of your life — and stretch it two and a half hours.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Film: Terror in Mumbai
Outstanding. This is the kind of film I like, just because it breaks down what happened and allows the viewing public to see first hand how to combat something like this. Knowing is half the battle, and we have to expect that attacks like this will happen again, and in all corners of the world. Get prepared, and study how these things work I say. Be a ‘hero in waiting’, and foil these attacks by being able to recognize the signs and actions of it, and inserting a monkey wrench into the terror machine. That smart phone in your hand, is your weapon, along with anything else you can think of to cause harm to or stop this kind of attack. Or you can coward away, and expect someone else to save you. –Matt
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Synopsis
TERROR IN MUMBAI features exclusive audio tapes of the intercepted phone calls between the young gunmen and their controllers in Pakistan, and testimony from the sole surviving gunman.
The Mumbai attackers’ targets included the city’s main railway station, a popular cafe, two major hotels and a Jewish center. Leaving the city’s iconic Taj Mahal Hotel in flames, and Mumbai’s woefully unprepared police and security forces paralyzed with fear, the attacks sent an ominous message to governments around the world.
“Much as the 9/11 attacks in the U.S. did in 2001, the events that unfolded last November in Mumbai served as a terrifying wake-up call, not just to India but to the rest of the world,” says narrator Fareed Zakaria, who appears on camera in the opening and closing of the film. “It broadened the spectrum of our enemies and brought attention to the number of different terrorist groups that exist, who may be bigger and better organized than we ever imagined. The fact that a small group of gunmen was able to inflict so much pain, and the government of the second most populous nation on earth was unable to stop them for three days, should change our sense of the dangers out there.”
In the words of one of the operation’s masterminds, who remotely controlled the terrorists’ every deadly move by cell phone from neighboring Pakistan, “This was just the trailer. Just wait till you see the rest of the film.” The assailants belonged to the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba, or “Army of the Righteous,” which aims to “liberate” Muslims living under Indian rule in Kashmir. Their mission: global jihad against the “infidels.”
TERROR IN MUMBAI presents a moment-by-moment account of the horrific attacks through interviews with survivors and Indian police officials, archival news coverage, extensive video surveillance footage of the terrorists in action, and chilling audio excerpts of cell-phone conversations intercepted by security forces. The phone intercepts provide a grotesque running commentary as the controllers, watching events unfold on live TV, direct the gunmen, telling them where the security forces are, which of their hostages should be killed and how to do it. With the killers wounded and asking what to do next, the tapes reveal the controllers calmly urging them to fight to the death and not allow themselves to be taken alive.
Guests from the Taj Mahal and Oberoi hotels tell how the terrorists first staged mass executions, then worked their way through the corridors, killing whenever they managed to enter a room. An elderly couple recounts how they were spared by the terrorists when it was realized they were fellow Muslims, while all around them were mowed down in a hail of bullets. Perhaps the most unsettling testimony comes from Ajmal Amir Kasab, the sole surviving terrorist, who answers his captors’ questions with startling frankness from a gurney soon after being captured.
While the Mumbai attacks differed in many ways from the Al Qaeda assault on the U.S. on September 11, 2001, the personal motives of the Laskar-e-Taiba terrorists bear some of the same hallmarks, notably the belief that there would be material wealth for their families and heavenly glory for themselves if they died for the cause of jihad.
What remains unclear is how this quest for holiness meshed with the indiscriminate nature of the killings, which mowed down Muslims and non-Muslims alike.