Permanent War sidewalk sale

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 22:11:00 +0000

I thought I had stumbled into a movie set about martial law in America. The beige wide-body Humvee parked right outside the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill Wednesday featured a roof-mounted machine gun that seemed to be aimed at staffers headed to work, healthcare reform protesters headed to the Supreme Court, and the occasional wandering tourist. I went for a closer look, and a friendly public relations man set me straight.

Actually the vehicle was called the Crow, and this was the 10,000th such vehicle built by Kongsberg Defense Corp., a Pennsylvania-based subsidiary of a Norweigian company. The friendly P.R. man introduced me to Rune Johannessen, the company's vice president for business development in North America, who shooed three little boys out of the gunner's seat and showed me its virtues.

In the Crow, the gunner sits in an armored compartment behind the driver and fires the machine gun remotely. The cross hairs on the video screen indicated that, if the gun had been loaded, I could have squeezed the joystick and terminated with extreme prejudice a couple of terrorists walking out of Union Station, located three blocks away. "It has a range of more than 1,000 meters," Johannessen explained

Todd Solondz, patron saint of pessimism

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 19:01:00 +0000

If one made a list of films that seemed surefire candidates for a sequel, writer-director Todd Solondz’s 1998 black comedy "Happiness" probably wouldn’t be on it. Twelve years later, here it is: "Life During Wartime," a movie that revisits the characters and situations from "Happiness" with an entirely new cast and in a different U.S. state. The original took place in New Jersey, the filmmaker’s home; the follow-up is set in Florida. Both chronicle the misadventures and tragedies of the suburban, upper-middle-class Maplewood family, mingling naive yearning, social satire, sexual dysfunction and shocking violence in a way that enthralled some viewers and disgusted others.

Salon.com > Life During Wartime

Permanent War sidewalk sale

Todd Solondz, patron saint of pessimism