This deftly contrasts the stubborn and sometimes venomous defenses we've heard from the likes of our current Vice President and his band of neoconservative "yes-men" who publicly swear — to this day — that evil terrorists lunched in Prague, plotted with, and had connection to Saddam Hussein. All of this in the absence of credible evidence from any serious journalistic source and an actual recent acknowledgement of no connection made by the President himself. As unfortunate as the current real-life situation in Iraq is, the Bush Administration's reliance upon such extremely horrible intelligence in a rush to war in Iraq has provided a wonderful — albeit unspoken — backdrop to Mr. Kutzera's witty spoof.
A love interest for Major Reed spices up the instruction film. She goes by the name of Lt. Monica Tasty (Elizabeth Bennett), currently the girlfriend of Major Dunning, who'd had a heated affair with Nick Reed before he changed and took on the cold, hard job as a Central Command Major. (Reed's self-description: "I'm am an empty hollow shell devoid of emotion.") Lt. Tasty had joined the Army when she'd begun to feel shopping wasn't quite enough to satisfy her prescribed patriotic duty to her country. Major Reed delivers an unforgettable line, "If we stop buying things, then ... well ... then I guess they really have won."
Lt. Tasty is the little angel on Major Reed's shoulder he generally ignores while he lusts for her womanly form. She's a patriotic lady, as we can see in the conversation with Major Dunning when Lt. Tasty questions how anyone can hate Americans, the good guys. Major Dunning has a bit of patriotic myopia himself and has resigned himself to go against his own better nature; accepting, by rationalization, what he feels in his heart is wrong.
Captain Jack Smith is an expert intelligence photography analyst who knows that any speculation on his part could lead the U.S. to attack a harmless target - "and we wouldn't want that, would we?" asks the narrator.
A running gag in the film features Major Reed waxing poetic about the many ways war affects a man and just as he gets to the core of the emotional message, he is cut off by his radio operator Corporal Skip Andrews (Eric Jungmann) who breaks in to announce some major development. Major Reed expresses a bit of self-centered regret for having sacrificed the capability of being "warm and cuddly" because he's had to send soldiers to what all too often turns out to be their unfortunate deaths because of bad intelligence.
Article comments
1 - chancelucky
Jude,
this sounds hilarious. Thanks for letting me know about the movie and I'll have to keep an eye out for it