Schlock and Awe

A few weeks after 9/11, director Steven Soderbergh  sent Stephen Gaghan , who’d written the screenplay for Soderbergh’s Traffic, a copy of former CIA officer Robert Baer’s memoir, “See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the C.I.A.’s War on Terrorism.” What followed was a tour d’horizon of the Middle East for Gaghan, led by Baer, and the movie Syriana, which Gaghan wrote and directed. R...

Evan and Jack are joined by Aaron and Carlee from the Hit Factory podcast to discuss Michael Bay's 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, the 2016 film that sent John Krasinski off on an action hero deployment from which he has yet to return. The story of a group of GRS security contractors hired to protect US diplomats and CIA operatives in Benghazi, two of whom were killed in an insurgent at...

Schlock and Awe is back. Evan and Jack are home from the wars (their day jobs) with a look at Ang Lee’s 2016 adaptation of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, a coming-of-age movie set during one heady day at the Dallas Cowboys stadium, as an army unit is pulled out of their deployment to Iraq to do a propaganda tour in order to support a flagging occupation. Joining us is podcaster, writer and Army...

The boys are joined by writer Séamus Malekafzali, who's too young to remember 9/11 but old enough to stand face-to-face with director Peter Berg and challenge him to a blinking contest. Séamus, Evan and Jack take on Lone Survivor, Berg's 2013 sufferpalooza, which heavily fictionalizes a real-life and extremely unsuccessful Navy SEAL counterterrorism raid in Afghanistan in 2005. The boys examine Be...

The boys swoop in on Zero Dark Thirty like modified Black Hawk helicopters with guest Spencer Ackerman, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author of Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump. Kathryn Bigelow's 2013 torture fest earned major critical plaudits for its unflinching view of the GWOT's dark side, but was it all in service of an enormous lie — that tortur...

We tackle the biggest totem in the War on Terror's cinematic canon — American Sniper. Clint Eastwood's surprise blockbuster brought out the masses for a post-9/11 war movie by fictionalizing the already mythological autobiography of Chris Kyle, one of the deadliest snipers in history. We talk American Sniper's dehumanization of Iraqis, its deliberate mischaracterizations of the Iraq War, its super...