Results tagged “iraqwar”

"If he wasn't an insurgent, he sure as hell is now." So quips Staff Sergeant William James after shooting out a Baghdad cabbie's windshield with his sidearm, and then pressing the muzzle in the center of the man's forehead in an effort to get him to move his car out of a dangerous area. The line is delivered with a wry smirk as the driver is subsequently being hauled roughly from his car by a nearby squad of heavily armed American soldiers. The clever dual-purpose nature of the line — equal parts bravado-fueled action hero witticism and pointed political statement — is at the heart of what makes The Hurt Locker the best film yet made about the Iraq War, and the best American film about war since Platoon.

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.

MONDAY: Atlantic Monthly correspondent Robert D. Kaplan will be at Politics and Prose to discuss his latest book, Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts. According to Kaplan, journalists are too quick to report on the negative aspects of the military. Commence with bickering over the Iraq war ... now. 7 p.m. TUESDAY: Blogger Diane Vadino will be at Olsson's in Dupont Circle to read from her first novel, Smart Girls Like Me. 7 p.m. She'll also...

You may have already heard about the small group of ANSWER Coaltion members who staged a lunchtime event Thursday to protest the District's attempts to get them to stop gluing posters on to utility boxes. Two demonstrators, one an Iraq war veteran and the other the mother of another veteran, were arrested on charges of defacing public property. DCist Tom stumbled on to the scene and snapped these images with his phone -- it's...

Happy first weekend of September - and happy Labor Day weekend, too, for our American cities! Let's take a look at what's been happening around the Ist-a-verse. The deaths of two firefighters shook Bostonist this week. Boston's firefighters bent over backwards all week long - first, they fought flames pouring from the Boston Tea Party museum, and then a restaurant fire killed two and injured many more. Their efforts make everything else - like Tom...

When Open Circle Theater company announced it would be reworking Jason Robert Brown’s Songs For A New World to revolve around the Iraq war, it was hard to squelch images of flag-waving, canons booming, and rewritten lyrics resembling "I’m not afraid of anything/be it religious extremists, guns or sand." Fortunately, Open Circle’s take has much more sincerity, skill and imagination driving their interpretation, though ultimately, the work stands up better unadorned. Songs, which recently was...

MONDAY: A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the wife of Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, Connie Schultz will be at Politics and Prose to discuss her book ... And His Lovely Wife, which is her behind-the-scenes look at Brown's campaign and their marriage. 7 p.m. In Last One In, Nicholas Kulish, who was embedded with a Marine attack-helicopter squadron for the Wall Street Journal, spins a slightly unbelievable tale of a gossip columnist who ends up covering...

MONDAY >> Today's Fort Reno show features local indie poppers Greenland (***) with Statehood and Kitty Hawk. The weather report calls for clear skies, but bring water. 7:15 p.m., free. >> How about another free event? The Black Cat backstage will feature movies about punk rockers Murder City Devils and Anti-Flag. 9 p.m., free. >> This week marks the sixth year of the Hip-Hop Theater Festival, sponsored by the DC Commission on the Arts and...

If you've been to the box suites at RFK Stadium, you may have noticed photos of acts that have played the stadium lining the hallway - U2, New Kids on the Block, the Promise Keepers and so on. But after we finished laughing at the New Kids, one plaque off to the side caught our eye: "Robert F. Kennedy Stadium, site of Olympic football, 19 July-4 August 1996." What? The Olympics were at RFK? There...

Good morning, Washington. Looks like we have two new D.C. Council members this morning: Muriel Bowser, a 34-year-old ANC, took the Ward 4 seat vacated by Mayor Adrian Fenty, and Yvette M. Alexander, a 45-year-old former insurance regulator, took the Ward 7 seat left behind by Council Chair Vincent Gray. Both women ran in extremely crowded fields, but received the endorsements of their predecessors which allowed them to stand out from the pack (and raise...

Instead of donning green and drinking whiskey in the afternoon, many folks in Washington will be spending Saturday speaking out against the war in Iraq. A march on the Pentagon is expected to draw tens of thousands of people, including veterans and soldiers' families. You may have already seen some of the protesters along Constitution Ave. erecting memorials to the fallen and preparing signs.

Throat is one of the most moving reactions to the Iraq war that I've come across. Is it the utterly convincing and devastating performances of its leads, Raul Castillo and Lisa Sauber? Is it its themes, which are less interested in furthering an agenda and more focused on showing us the emotional and psychological impacts of any war situation, awarding a damaged dignity to the soldiers portrayed? Or perhaps its script, peppered with relatable anecdotes...

Congratulations, Alyssa R.! Your thoughtful commentary on this week's Decemberists show won you the gatefold vinyl copy of The Crane Wife and a special, limited edition lithograph signed by the band! We were particularly fond of Alyssa's social and political observations as they related to the show. Here's what she had to say: A couple of thoughts: 1)The material from "The Crane Wife" rocks a lot harder on stage than it does on the album,...

Two years ago, I heard an interesting piece on public radio about a one-woman play that was in the middle of a critically successful run at Manhattan Ensemble Theater. I had missed the introduction of the segment but listened raptly as the author, whose voice sounded very familiar, described how she had come to write a show about the lives of Iraqi women during the American military occupations. My jaw hit the floor at the...

If you love French film, then the festival that opens this week, C'est Chic, is right up your allée. Between October 12 and 28, recent French releases will be given special screenings at three excellent venues, the National Gallery of Art, La Maison Française, and the AFI Silver Theater. You can purchase a pass ($60 for members of La Cinémathèque) through the Web site of La Maison Française, which will get you 13 films for...

Written by DCist contributor Abby Lavin. Last year’s rioting in response to Danish drawings of the prophet Muhammad showed that, in some cases, cartoons are no laughing matter. They don’t just lampoon the political landscape; they have the power to shape it as well. Provisions Library’s current exhibit, Drawing Back: Cartoon Critiques of America, examines the power of cartoons as a means of social protest. Culled from twenty-five different countries, the 80 editorial cartoons are...

The recently flooded National Archives is closed but still active, hosting some neat events on this, our nation's birthday. Earlier this morning, a crowd of sweaty people gathered at the Archives to hear historical figures (or at least their reenactors) read the Declaration of Independence. Announced by a town crier, the historical impersonators of the documents' framers, Thomas Jefferson (suitably fire-haired), Ben Franklin, and John Adams, as well as two injured Iraq war soldiers and...

DCist Editor Emeritus Mike Grass draws our attention to the following blurb on page 40 of today's Express:

October is here, and it's inevitable that local theater companies would try to haunt us with some spookier fare. Here's a look at who's obliging our more macabre sensibilities next month: >> Don't tell Mom, well, anything about the babysitter? Studio Theatre has Marie Ndiaye's Hilda, a horror story about a mother's growing obsession over the woman she hires to care for her kids (Oct 5). >> There's double, double, toil and trouble over at...

Since the death of Visions, the District has been sorely lacking in genuine art house cinema fare. But a brief sweep of the summer film landscape has turned up a much more eclectic and inviting set of mid-week options than we would have guessed, from well chosen special screenings at familiar venues to intriguing, less obvious options. Get it while the gettin's good: art houses everywhere seem to be going the way of the gray wolf.

-- If you haven't had enough fun playing around with the Los Angeles Times' wiki-enabled interactive editorial, take a look at John Daniszewski's dispactch from Tehran about charges of official manipulation in the recent elections ... and saying that "[n]ew doubts and divisions have come into view" regarding the Iraq war, Paul Richter tracks conservative North Carolina Rep. Walter Jones Jr. and his shifting stance on Iraq and how that's playing back home ......

We picked up this little tidbit via Laura Rozen's blog, War and Piece. It seems that folks in a diplomat-heavy neighborhood in Upper Northwest are less than pleased that one of the chief architects -- one Paul Wolfowitz -- of the Iraq war is staging a very different sort of "invasion and occupation" in their neck o' the woods, as the Post mentioned this past week. The reason? A not-so-secret romance with Arab feminist and World Bank communications advisor Shaha Riza. It seems Wolfowitz's comings and goings have set tongues wagging on Riza's block. After all, his guards sit outside in a car until he leaves.

When crunching the numbers on the war in Iraq, what it all adds up to pretty much depends on who's doing the math. In this case, we'll provide the numbers, and leave the you to figure out how it all adds up. The tally in Clarendon, the one this DCist passes by almost every day, now reads a total of 1,520 U.S. casualties in Iraq. It's just a little off the online total, which is now 1,523. Chances are a few more casualties occured by the time the person or persons responsible for the sign got around to updating it from its previous total, 1,503.

Today we already told you about the movement to start planning for an Iraq War memorial. And as we already told you a few weeks ago, there's already a memorial of sorts in Clarendon keeping track of the number of U.S. service members killed in Iraq. And the number has gotten bigger. This morning we noticed the number has gone from 1,411 to 1,462. It doesn't keep pace with the latest number of U.S. dead in Iraq, which was at 1,485 when we checked this morning, but it still serves as a reminder to anyone who happens to pass the corner of North Hudson Street and Wilson Boulevard.

A group calling themselves the "National Iraq War Memorial Foundation" has launched an online design competition we caught thanks to the blog Life Without Buildings. The group concedes designing a war memorial before the war ends is a bit unorthodox, however they say "This is a different kind of memorial, however -- one that incorporates current emotions, memories, and beliefs." Entering designs for their proposed site is simple and free, and after a March 23 deadline a "a blue ribbon panel of judges" will announce a winner on July 2. The group proposes to construct their memorial on the Ellipse, even though the National Capitol Planning Commission declared the mall was full, and a "finished work of civic art."

WUSA reported last week that Iraqi citizens living on the East Coast will have a chance to register and vote in their motherland's elections (taking place at the end of this week) at the Ramada Inn in New Carrollton. To register, prospective voters must prove Iraqi citizenship and show that they were born before Dec. 31, 1986. At first, the suburban location of the center seems slightly illogical; however, the hotel's proximity to New Carrollton's Amtrak services and relative distance from central D.C. seem to satisfy both convenience and safety concerns. The location is one of five in the United States, the others located in Nashville, Detroit, Chicago and Los Angeles.

Is it OK to eat french fries with mayonnaise? According to American cultural norms, ketchup reigns supreme. Mayonnaise is just, well, sort of French. And in a capital whose House of Representatives has officially done away with french fries (renaming them freedom fries after Franco-American relations soured during the run-up to the Iraq war), it seems that the continental custom of eating frites with mayo would have to be practiced in the attic, hidden from tomato-loving condiment fans who dominate fried food culture.

The self-described Million Worker March was today at the Lincoln Memorial. The group's demands included a broad array of progressive issues, focusing in particular on ending the Iraq war, and demanding health care and housing for all.

One of the most powerful demonstrations from the protests in New York City during the 2004 Republican National Convention is coming to Washington D.C. this Saturday. A group calling themselves One Thousand Coffins plans on displaying 1,104 coffins at the Ellipse - 100 draped in U.S. flags, the rest draped in black in order to "to represent and honor each of our fallen soldiers and marines, and make a bold statement that the truth of...