Whisky Tango Foxtrot

Afghanistan unsurprisingly has been 'done' a fair bit on screen over the decade or more, but this movie doesn't do the big badda boom badge of honour action, but focuses on the lives, interactions, and mindsets of war correspondents and the people around them, within a context of light drama with (for me at least) laugh out loud moments, and does it rather well, despite the director team of  Glen Ficarra and John Requa having previously given us the soul numbing ‘Bad Grandpa’ There is a sensitive balance in tension between the seriousness and ridiculousness of reporting on armed conflict without it turning into Boo Ra!  or ‘War Inc’ pastiche, and it has something serious to say about major news services treating conflicts as fashionable commodity. It also shows, and I know ‘cos I’ve met a couple, what an utterly bonkers lot conflict journo’s are.

The storyline? Well jaundiced copy editor chucks herself into the void to escape the walls closing in, wonders briefly what the fuck she’s done, and then chases the big story. Big story nailed, she hangs in and racks up some scare miles until eventually realizing that no one in the big comfy news media offices gives a flying Taliban anymore unless it’s a biiii………iiiiiiiiiiig story. Throw in a bit of romance, some mad soldiery, droolly politicians, and warlordiness… and that’s your Kofta’s served.
Tina Fey? Well I've seen her in a few light comedies that have not exactly set my synapses on fire, but .with her particular brand of wide eyed neurosis she carries the lead in this one well enough. Margo Robbie is solid. Billy Bob Thornton continues his 'second wind' as a serious actor and gives superb sarky military in this one, and

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Martin Freeman surprises in a relatively un-type loose limbed performance, even if his Scots accent was a bit…erm…odd. The stand out for me though is Christopher Abbott (who I must confess I know little about) as Afghan guide/security man Fahim, in a remarkably nuanced performance. An actor to watch out for I reckon. The only casting blip is the choice of Alfred Molina as an Afghan minister. Seen him do some fine work previously but so miscast here it almost seems he is in a different movie to everyone else.
Where this movie really wins out is scripting and pace. There is no fat here, and I found myself engaged throughout. All in all maybe not a must see, but if you do come across it? It’s worth a punt 

Red Dawn

"I think at some point every bloke in this office has been up at the crack of Red Dawn," says David Brent early on.

Of course he doesn't. He's not even in the 2013 remake, let alone the original from 1984. Ricky Gervais was too busy looking like an Islington rent boy at the time so they cast Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen as two young brothers who lead a troupe of resistance fighters against an occupying communist force (Russians, Cubans, Nicaraguans).

Yes, I'm ploughing through guerrilla survivalist movies at the moment. They may provide handy tips for when capitalism dies somewhere during the Trump presidency.

Isn't it funny how if the guerrillas are Americans then they are heroes? The non-heroic guerrillas these days are the likes of IS but Red Dawn took its inspiration from the Afghan rebels battling against Soviet invaders. Ironic, given that those rebels would have been Mujahideen, literally jihadists.

Swayze's gang do not yell that God is great when they gun down enemy soldiers but they do shout "Wolverines!" the name of the high school football team now re-appropriated as a name for their fighting unit. It's not all boys, though. Jennifer Grey, like Swayze and Sheen, would use this movie as a springboard to even bigger starring roles in iconic 80s films.

We get some insight into the human side of one of the invading commanders, a Nicaraguan I believe,  whose past experiences as a freedom fighter in his own country allow him a more sympathetic opinion of the troublesome Wolverines than his Russian overseers.

A small band of kids against the might of combined communist forces isn't likely to get you great odds in a betting office and slowly their numbers dwindle as raids, the occasional betrayal and sometimes just youthful inexperience begin to pick them off. It's left to the two brothers to make one final assault into their occupied home town to exact as much vengeance as they can while the two other survivors head for 'Free America' to spread the news that guerrilla warfare is having some effect down south.

When it was released smack bang in the middle of the paranoid Reagan era, Red Dawn stirred and shocked audiences. It doesn't stand up quite so well in the early twenty-first century when small cells of attackers gun down civilians in city centres across Europe in the name of a distorted vision of religion. And America itself probably has more issues with white supremacists and crazed loners than coordinated terrorists, something successive governments since Reagan's time have been reluctant to acknowledge.

As a testament to the early promise of Patrick Swayze and as proof that Sheen never developed deeper aspects to his acting skills, Red Dawn is an interesting document of a more politically naive if just as polarised time.