The decisions we make as individuals define who we are. Using that hypothesis, Cooper Tilson (Dennis Quaid) is an idiot and favored contender for worst parent and husband of the year. Most people see a red flag warning. Cooper must be color blind. How else can you explain the actions of a man who would move his Big Apple family into an old, decrepit country mansion? Read the rest of this entry »

Jarhead (the self-imposed moniker of the Marines) follows “Swoff” (Gyllenhaal), a third-generation enlistee, from a sobering stint in boot camp to active duty, sporting a sniper’s rifle and a hundred-pound ruck on his back through Middle East deserts with no cover from intolerable heat or from Iraqi soldiers, always potentially just over the next horizon. Swoff and his fellow Marines sustain themselves with sardonic humanity and wicked comedy on blazing desert fields in a country they don’t understand against an enemy they can’t see for a cause they don’t fully fathom. Read the rest of this entry »

Jim Davis is an ex-Army Ranger who finds himself slipping back into his old life of petty crime after a job offer from the LAPD evaporates. His best friend is pressured by his girlfriend Sylvia to find a job, but Jim is more interested in hanging out and making cash from small heists, while trying to get a law enforcement job so he can marry his Mexican girlfriend. Read the rest of this entry »