Day: April 18, 2011

New 12-minute Battlefield 3 Trailer Shows Marines Fighting Iran-backed Insurgents in Iraq

By Jason Apuzzo. EA has released a new 12-minute trailer (featuring extensive game play) for Battlefield 3, depicting U.S. Marines involved in intense urban warfare in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq against Iranian-backed insurgents along the Iran/Iraq border (the game is set in 2014). See the full 12-minute trailer above. The trailer is gripping and intense, and astonishingly realistic in its imagery. NOTE: THIS NSFW TRAILER FEATURES VIOLENCE AND STRONG LANGUAGE. The trailer was posted at YouTube on Thursday, and as of the writing of this post already has over 1.3 millions views.

Screen grab from "Battlefield 3."

Battlefield 3 is a first-person shooter game, and a follow-up to EA’s popular Battlefield series. The game is set to debut on November 2nd, and will apparently feature battlefields in Sulaymaniyah, Tehran, Paris and New York.

Watching the trailer, I’m left with the usual questions: namely, why can’t Hollywood do something like this? I mean, fighting space aliens in downtown Los Angeles is great, but why must stories about these real world, epochal military conflicts of ours be relegated to the (admittedly large) ghetto of video gaming? The imagery in this trailer is astonishing in its detail and subtlety, and thoroughly ‘cinematic’ in its execution – to the point that I actually felt like I was watching a war documentary for much of it. And yet a full eight years after the invasion of Iraq, we’re still waiting on any sort of large-scale Hollywood effort to depict the war, while the gaming industry proves each year that there is a massive market for this kind of material.

Does EA have a movie division? They might want to consider starting one.

Posted on April 18th, 2011 at 11:55am.

The Cure for Malaise? LFM Reviews Square Grouper

By Joe Bendel. The late 1970’s were a time of stagflation and economic malaise (sound familiar?). However, there was one booming business that offered a chance for any idiot to make serious coin: pot smuggling. Director Billy Corben explores the diversity and eccentricity of the South Florida smuggling scene in its heyday with profiles of three very different sets of co-conspirators in Square Grouper: The Godfathers of Ganja (trailer here), which opened Friday in New York.

Those who were in or around the 1970’s smuggling economy will recognize “Square Grouper” as the term for the bales of marijuana periodically found bobbing in the waters off Florida’s shores. As for the rest of us, well now we know. Needless to say, everyone Corben interviews knows what it means.

The Ethiopian Zion Coptic Church did not have to chase after stray bales. They were probably the most powerful and successful syndicate profiled in Grouper. They were also an officially recognized church, combining the hippie lifestyle with aspects of evangelical Christianity, namely rather judgmental attitudes regarding homosexuality and sexual relations in general. Weed, on the other hand, was a sacred sacrament. With connections running deep into the Jamaican government, the Ethiopian Zions had a professional operation and extensive property holdings. Yet their evangelical zeal proved to be their undoing, when media footage of underage kids toking it up in their compound turned the public against them.

Perhaps Grouper’s middle story is its saddest. Robert Platshorn was a working-class salesman from Philadelphia’s South Street who fast talked his way into a profitable drug-running gig, at least for a little while. However, he became infamous as the leader of the media-dubbed “Black Tuna Gang.” Corben clearly suggests Platshorn was a small fish victimized by an overzealous prosecution and grandstanding in the press by Griffin Bell, Carter’s Attorney General. Perhaps, but even if it is not an outright crime, Platshorn is clearly guilty of some big league stupidity. Continue reading The Cure for Malaise? LFM Reviews Square Grouper