Author: Jim McLennan

Girls With Guns Calendars 2021

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Welcome to our eleventh annual round-up of girls with guns calendars. This one almost slipped my mind until I suddenly realized it was November 30! Still, given the all-round awfulness of the year, what better way to pass the time, then to look forward to 2021? The sooner it gets here, the better, I’d say… We do bid farewell to one of the icons of the genre, with Hot Shots having retired after their 2020 edition – maybe they knew what was coming this year! And sadly, it seems the pandemic and resulting shutdown has taken its toll, with definitely a smaller number available this time round.  Still, below, you’ll find prices (generally excluding shipping), sample images and links to purchase for all the calendars we could find. We’ll add more if we see them, feel free to email us if you know of any others

TAC GIRLS

TacGirls.com – $18.95

“The Tactical Girls® 2021 Bikini Gun Calendar is our Best of the Best Edition, with 13 months of the best photos from our 13 year history. Many of these shots were originally our cover photos or hugely popular fan favorites. For example, June 2021 is our 2010 cover model, Erin Banks with an M249 SAW, Vanessa Swainston, the 2013 cover with an Surgeon .338LM is January 2022 and our cover is Robin Raider from October 2019 with a DRD Paratus with a shoutout to the Marines. Every 2021 Best of the Best Tactical Girls Calendar comes with a 12X24 mini Poster insert with the cover girl Robin Raider on the front and a collection of other great shots on the reverse. It slides out of the calendar, no tearing or staples to pull. The remaining memorable shots bring you 13 months the best photos with some of the world’s most exotic weaponry in realistic tactical settings. The 2021 Tactical Girls Calendar Best of the Best Calendar includes the KRISS Vector SMG, the Cadex CDX-30 Guardian Precision Rifle and the Kel-Tec KSG Tactical Short bullpup Shotgun. All of these, along with a variety of carbines, battle rifles, machine guns, pistols and sniper rifles, all with gorgeous models in realistic settings.”

LIBERTY BELLES

LibertyBellesUSA.com – $14.49

:It’s the year 1777 and King George III has lost control of his naughty children. Even Captain America’s ass can’t compare to these Belles of the Revolution.  Get ready for another year as they pose for liberty and the right to bear arms, shoulders, and legs. Each month, the ladies portray important female figures (both famous and obscure) who nonetheless fought along side the men during the war that birthed our nation. The designs for this 2021 calendar is inspired by Benjamin Franklin’s “Poor Richard’s Alminac.” It features a Lunar calendar, a measurement tool on the side, and a bit of important wisdom from our second president & founder, John Adams, and —of course as always— girls with firearms.  This calendar also showcases the dates for some of the most infamous battles of the revolution. Only Federally observed  holidays are included in this calendar. The calendar also includes a 12″ x 18″ centerfold pull out poster.”

GUNS AND GIRLS

GunsAndGirlsCalendar.com – available through Amazon, $13.92

The website doesn’t seem to have been updated, but there does appear to be a new edition of this one available. Though maybe “Guns N Girls” is different from ‘Guns % Girls”? “The 2021 GUNS AND GIRLS wall calendar is packed with beautiful pin up models and many of today’s most popular weapons, everything from handguns to AR15s. This 16 month large format calendar is 17″x 28″ when hung up and a perfect gift for any Armed Service Member, Police Officer or Shooting Enthusiast. Also includes a bonus 12 month poster inside giving you two calendars in one package!”

ZAHAL GIRLS

zahal.org – $25.90

“We are proud to present our new ZAHAL Girls Calendar which combines the best of both sexy models and the tactical gear world. No gun bunnies! Only IDF veterans. Size is Approx A3. No gun bunnies! Only IDF veterans.”

WEAPON OUTFITTERS

WeaponOutfitters.com

In a cunning marketing plot, this one is available in two versions. Safe For Work ($19,95): “The safe for work version, features classic Weapon Outfitters landscape and portrait photography with a variety of models. Featuring:  Alex Zedra, fan-favorite Eva, Silvia Kitsune, KC, with special appearances from the Tacticats, Vanellope Von Floof, and more!”

Not Safe For Work ($29.95): “Twelve months of Weapon Outfitters After Dark (WOAD) spice! Not compliant with HR departments, nor endorsed by jealous girlfriends and wives. Featuring a published models including but not limited to: Casey, Calypso, Tabi, and Aurora! The 2021 NSFW calendar is a mix of studio and landscape photography. ”

DILLON PRECISION

DillonPrecision.com – $14.99

“The Dillon Precision 2020 Calendar is in stock and ready for your reloading room, office, or wherever you want to display the World’s Finest Models and Firearms.”

ALPHA GUN ANGELS

aga-guns.com – $14.99

“The traditional “Alpha Gun Angels” Calendar has arrived! This time we took our Calendar’s photםshoot to the next level! We gathered our BADASS squad to a crazy photoshoot in a CHOPPER! Every month will feature one of our GORGEOUS and BADASS girls with our sponsored products!”

WILD DAKOTA GIRLS

wilddakotagirls.com – $14.95

Not strictly a GWG calendar, but I think there’s enough overlap – as well as going by the pic of the bonus poster below – that it may be of interest. :) This is a fairly long-running charity effort, with the proceeds going to fight breast cancer since 2017.

Night Witches in the Sky

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★★★
“Spirits in the sky.”

kinopoisk.ru

This was made in the early eighties, when the Soviet Union and United States were making loud, growling sounds at each other. Being a product of that era perhaps explains the way this feels almost like a propaganda film, made to inspire the population to be prepared to fight in defense of the motherland. Its closest cousin on this site is therefore the similar Chinese film, The Red Detachment of Women. The topic here is one we’ve covered before: the renowned “Night Witches”, the all-female air force squadron, who carried out reconnaissance and bombing missions against the Germans on the Eastern front, during the second half of World War II.

The two central characters are Galya Polikarpova (Druz) and Oksana Zakharchenko (Grushina). The former is recuperating from injury in hospital, but sneaks out against doctor’s orders in order to rejoin her colleagues on the front lines. The pair are hauled over the coals for this by their long-suffering commanding officer (Menshikova), but are able to escape punishment due to the shortage of fliers making operational needs more important. Thereafter… Well, to be perfectly honest, not a great deal happens, and the film comes in at less than 80 minutes.  At points, it almost feels like an edited-down version of a longer feature.

For instance, there’s one point where they are being harried by a Messerschmitt – then, suddenly, they’re landing in a field to sweep up an orphaned boy, Fyodor (Zamulin), who becomes an unofficial mascot of the squadron, despite efforts by the higher-ups to send him away. There’s also a long-distance romance between Galya and another soldier that didn’t do much for me.

However, one point about this production is particularly worth noting. Director Yevgeniya Zhigulenko was actually a “night witch” herself, having been a member of the 588th Night Bomber Regiment. Initially a navigator in May 1942, she became a pilot and eventually a flight commander. By the end of the war, she had flown close to a thousand sorties, and been awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. There can’t be many films from any country set in World War II, which were directed by someone who took part in the events depicted.

This was one of two features she made, and seems more functional than particularly artistic, though may have been constrained by its budget. Some of the flying sequences are… let’s say, not particularly convincing. But perhaps due to the director’s background, it does have a down-to-earth (pun not intended) approach which does occasionally work in the film’s favour. One example would be when the women are struggling to get their planes launched out of the mud, after heavy rain. But generally, the tempo is kept upbeat and patriotically optimistic, with only occasional nods to the heavy toll of life taken by the conflict. All told, a decent effort; I’d just give the edge to the TV series Night Swallows, whose greater length allows for more depth in its characterizations.

Dir: Yevgeniya Zhigulenko
Star: Yana Druz, Valentina Grushina, Dima Zamulin, Nina Menshikova
a.k.a. V nebe ‘Nochnye vedmy’

Marie

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★½
“A not-so fair cop”

After an incident where she shoots dead a woman armed only with a toy gun, Marie (DeCianni) quite the police force to become a housewife. However, her husband, Barry (Spadaro), has some dodgy friends, in particular, Nadi (Regina, who also co-wrote this), a man with ties to organized crime. Barry falls behind on payments, and an unfortunate car “accident” befalls him: a recent large life-insurance policy named Nadi as the beneficiary. It’s all very shady, as Marie’s old police captain (Session) admits. However, there is just not enough evidence for the authorities to take action. That’s not an issue for Marie, however, who decides to take revenge for the loss of her husband, against Nadi and his associates.

This is almost entirely terrible, to the point that I have to wonder whether it was actually some bizarre project by actual organized crime to launder money. If so, I’m just hoping that enough years have elapsed since its release, that the statute of limitations has passed, and so me mentioning this won’t send them round to make me an offer I can’t refuse. It’s mostly a scripting issue, with far too many scenes that serve no purpose, and a heroine whose actions make little or no logical sense. Such as storming a mob birthday party, complete with gratuitous strippers (really, right from the opening, it feels like every bad boob-job in the Tri-State area got a callback for a role somewhere in this), and taking her shirt off in order to blend in, so she can whack one of them.

If DeCianni isn’t terrible, Marie seems to take a delight in announcing her moves, in a way which would, in the real world, simply make it painfully easy for her targets to take her out. Well, if they were halfway competent, at least. And the Captain seems perfectly happy for her to continue on her vigilante ways, showing absolutely no regard for law and order. About the only moment of interest sees her going above Nadi’s head to his boss, in order to suggest a partnership that would be to both of their advantages. However, this is rapidly discarded, in favour of a climactic “surprise” that a) is entirely unsurprising, and b) makes as little overall sense as anything else in this dog.

In lieu of writing anything more about this painful experience, I will instead note that a decade later, Carpenter and Regina would make Jesse, in which “Police detective Jesse turns vigilante as she investigates her brother’s murder and enters into a world of crime, corruption, and shocking deception.” Save swapping husband for brother, that seems perilously close to what we got here, not least because an IMDb review says the brother “got involved with a mafia loan shark and couldn’t repay the thousands that he owed.” Another review hints at the same twist we get here. Hmm… Maybe they did better second time around? I’m not inclined to bet on it.

Dir: Fred Carpenter
Star: Donna DeCianni, Paul Regina, Charles Sessions, John Spadaro

Rogue

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★★★
“Because females are the true killers.”

Megan Fox may not exactly be the first name which comes to mind when you think “battle-hardened mercenary leader.” But if you can get past your preconceptions, she’s definitely not the worst thing about this. We’ll get to what is, a little later. She plays Samantha O’Hara, leader of a group or mercs who have been hired by the governor of an African province to rescue his daughter from the Muslim group who kidnapped her. The mission initially goes well, but problems arise. First, the daughter isn’t the only woman kidnapped, forcing Sam to take along multiple civilians. Then, their evac chopper is shot down. Finally, the abandoned house in which they hole up while awaiting extraction turns out to be home to some large, toothy predators of the feline variety, leading to the quote above. Between fending off them and the pursuing kidnappers, Sam and her crew have their work cut out to survive the night until rescue arrives.

I was reminded of the series Strike Back in a number of ways, and it’s no coincidence. Director Bassett worked on the show and Winchester was one of the stars. But there’s also a similarly frantic pace and exotic location, as well as a love of giant fireballs. I’m down with all of those, even if the characterizations here are definitely on the shallow side; the film clearly feels this would be time wasted, which could be better spent on those giant fireballs. Fox is fine, though I’d say definitely should have been made to look less glamorous. There’s barely a shot here, where she doesn’t look as if she wandered onto the African veldt, right off a fashion runway: perfect hair and make-up, with not evern a smudge of dirt on those cheek-bones. However, she hurls herself about with some abandon, and I can’t fault her willingness to go outside the comfort zone of her usual roles.

No, a far bigger problem here is the CGI used for the lions, which is flat-out terrible. I don’t know what the hell happened, but any time it’s properly seen, the flaws are glaringly obvious, and severely detract from proceedings. Which is a shame, because they’re used quite well. We get an attack seen through night-vision goggles that is genuinely chilling, and there’s also the best “out of nowhere” moment since Samuel L. Jackson got sharked in Deep Blue Sea. I suggest looking at the big cats out of the corner of the eye, and they might pass muster. The film ends with an explicit pro-conservation message from the director, which seems a bit odd, given they’ve spent the previous hour and three-quarters showing us what terrifying beasts lions are. But it’s apparently okay, because they had reasons. I don’t see many people sticking around for the morality show: you’re here for Fox in khaki and the maulings. Providing you can get past the ropey CGI, this delivers adequately enough on both counts.

Dir: M.J. Bassett
Star: Megan Fox, Philip Winchester, Greg Kriek, Brandon Auret

Ravage

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★★½
“Harper’s bizarre.”

Wildlife photographer Harper Sykes (Dexter-Jones) is out in the wilderness of the “Watchatoomy Valley” [fictitious, but apparently located somewhere in the Virginias], when she stumbles across a group of men brutally attacking a victim. She snaps a few pics before fleeing the scene, but her attempts to report the incident to the authorities backfire immediately, and she quickly finds herself at the mercy of their leader, the appropriately-named Ravener (Longstreet). He explains the victim was a scout for big business, whose predations would destroy the natural environment, and so had to be stopped. Now, Harper is next in line. However, she is not the innocent and helpless victim they think. Even when she has the chance to escape, Harper decides to stay in the valley, and take vengeance on Ravener and the rest of his clan.

It is an interesting idea. Frequently in the horror genre, the character arc is of the “final girl”, who only resorts to violence when finally pushed too far. That certainly isn’t the case here: indeed, Harper actually fires first, gunning down one of Ravener’s henchmen as soon as she steps from her truck. Yet there’s a reason the trope of the final girl exists, because it pulls the audience along with her. Here, Harper’s actions are unexpected enough they could well disengage much of the audience, coming as they do before we’ve established much sympathy for her. Another problem is her decision to stay and actively look for her revenge isn’t well-enough defined: I was left wondering for quite some time, why she didn’t leave. Some explanation of why she’s so skilled might have been nice: not much, just a quick reference to time in the military, or a survivalist Dad, would have been fine.

The structure is also a tad problematic, with the film being told in flashback, a heavily-bandaged Harper recounting her story to a disbelieving state trooper from her hospital bed. So, we know she will survive, and the early explanations also remove much other tension from subsequent proceedings. If you’ve seen more than, roughly, two of this kind of movie, you’ll also fail to be surprised that the kindly individual to whom the heroine turns for help, ends up being anything but. I could perhaps have done without the lengthy digression into medieval torture techniques and bovine anatomy. Though both do prove at least tangentially necessary to the plot, and the latter in particular, leads to a grisly payoff.

Dexter-Jones does a good job of selling her role, and Harper generally has no compunction about acting, e.g. blowing one of her target’s brains out at point-blank range. Yet, this is at odds with some of her other actions. She literally throws up after watching the initial savagery, and the sight of a dead body later makes her shriek like a little girl. It’s all maddeningly inconsistent, and left me rather annoyed, with too much the potential here wasted through sloppy execution.

Dir: Teddy Grennan
Star: Annabelle Dexter-Jones, Robert Longstreet, Michael Weaver, Bruce Dern
a.k.a. Swing Low

Kat, by K.L. McRae

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Literary rating: ★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆

Firstly, I’m still trying to figure out the relevance of the cover (right). With a heroine named Kat, why is there a dog pictured? It’s not as if she even owns one at any point. The “size of the fight” line… well, tenuous at best. I should probably have listened to my instincts and skipped this frankly implausible tale, about a teenage girl who is smart, attractive and a black-belt martial artist with 34E breasts. Yet she ends up having to get work as a stripper, a job at which she is naturally brilliant (thanks to adopting a pseudo-Xena persona), in order to keep her alcoholic mother out of debt. She breaks the arm of a particularly unpleasant customer, Alex, an act which gets her the attention of Alex’s business partner. He runs McKenzie Personal Security, and offers Kat a job as a trainee bodyguard.

She and the boss, a black Scotsman who is terminally ill, end up falling in love, while Alex, who had been set to inherit the business until Kat showed up, plots against her with his cronies. This ends in a nightmare gang-rape, setting up Kat to take vengeance. Oh, and the all-powerful MPS has a “black” division, which kills pedophiles and the like for money. If you are not going, “Wait, what?” at multiple points during the above synopsis, you’re a more tolerant reader than I. So much of this sounded like dubious sexual fantasy, I was genuinely surprised to discover the author is a woman. I mean, it could still be dubious sexual fantasy; I just tend to expect that kind of thing more from male writers.

The structure is all over the place. After she is attacked, Kat’s actions seem completely bizarre and pointless, and the book fast-forwards through a couple of years, until a later explanation that falls some way short of convincing. Meanwhile, neither Alex nor his allies come over as any kind of credible threat: in particular, their assault on her rural farmhouse is portrayed as painfully inept. Which, I concede, may be part of the point. As the book says, “vile bullies…might have some skills but put them up against someone who really knows their stuff and the only chance they had was blind luck.” During this, Kat sits back in her stronghold and lets her allies take care of the threat, bringing the villains to her like a Christmas present for her amusement. She certainly spends more time training in martial arts, than actually putting her skills into practice. In fact, she probably spends more time attending karaoke nights than being an action heroine. I was somewhat surprised Kat did not turn out to be a classically-trained opera singer, while she was at it.

All told, sadly, this book turned out to be a bit of a dog. I guess the cover was representative enough, after all.

Author: K.L. McRae
Publisher: Little Silver Publishing Ltd, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
1 of 2 in the Kat series.

Grand Theft Auto Girls

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★★
“Preferred this when it was called Counterfeiting in Suburbia.”

Turns out that The Asylum are not the only company who makes mockbusters. As its alternate name makes clear, this Lifetime TVM is clearly a knock-off of the title mentioned above, down to the same, basic plot. Two teenage girls begin doing crime, largely for the excitement. A teacher becomes aware of their exploits and decides to blackmail them for his own benefit, by making them escalate their activities. This brings them increasingly under the scrutiny of both authorities and criminal elements, not to mention parental disapproval, eventually leading to a climax where all these aspects cross paths. As my review of Counterfeiting mentioned, it wasn’t even a particularly original idea there. As you can imagine, a second-generation copy is not an improvement, even if the idea of a knock-off of a movie about forgery possesses a certain irony. 

The main twist here is that instead of counterfeiting, the crime in question is car theft. Emily (Belkin) is being brought up by her mother, after her father died in a car accident, and is working to restore her late dad’s muscle car, a task which has helped give her certain car skills, including hot-wiring them. She has teamed up with classmate Max (Helt), to boost cars, purely for joy-riding purposes, but the pair decided to make a commercial endeavour out of it, and sell the vehicles to a local chop-shop they know. Their shop teacher, Mr. Curnow (Hynes) finds out about their work, and decides to use them to start stealing high-end cars, to provide seed money for his own business involving exotic sports vehicles. This doesn’t sit well with the chop-shop owner, the cops are beginning to close in, and worst of all, Emily’s Mom is growing increasingly suspicious. When she pays Curnow a visit at his home, she is held hostage to ensure Emily completes one final task, stealing a Hummer belonging to a well-connected local club owner.

This is so painfully bland, it should have been called Barbie and Friends Do Crimes. Admittedly, I was hoping for something like a female version of a Fast and the Furious movies. As I soon as I realized this was a Lifetime TVM, all hopes of that evaporated, but it could still have avoided having less edge than a rusty butter-knife. It shoehorns in a hot teenage boy delinquent (Manley) on whom Emily can crush, largely as a means of filling time, since he serves no real plot purpose. Even the car-stealing scenes, which could have generated tension, are feeble: witness in particular the example which consists largely of one girl starting intently into her handbag, waiting for a light to go green. Hitchcock is turning in his grave. It did manage to leave me yearning nostalgically for a film which only got 2½ stars, so that’s a new experience.

While I have already written more about this than it deserves, I just discovered there is still another TVM going down the same furrow: Smuggling in Suburbia. I’ll just leave its synopsis here. mostly as a warning that the possibilities appear, sadly, endless: “Joanie gets recruited to travel with other girls to exciting cities delivering camera lenses to photographers–and falls in love with Tucker, a partner in the courier business. When she searches the camera case she’s carrying and finds diamonds hidden inside a lens, Joanie realizes she is part of an illegal smuggling ring! She just needs to pay for her brother’s cancer surgery that would otherwise bankrupt the family.” Yeah, I’m good, thanks.

Dir: Jason Bourque
Star: Zoë Belkin, Samantha Helt, Tyler Hynes, Jake Manley
a.k.a. Hotwired in Suburbia

Riddle Story of Devil

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★★★
“This class is a killer…”

Another example which illustrates the difference between Western and Japanese approaches to education. For here we have “Class Black”, a group containing a baker’s dozen of female pupils, eleven of whom have been tasked by a mysterious group to assassinate the twelfth, with the person who does it being given absolutely anything they want by the organizers. Yeah, it’s not quite Beverley Hills 90210, is it? Of course, nor is it quite that simple. One of the candidates, Tokaku Azuma (Suwa), is the daughter of a legendary and long-standing family of assassins, but has had enough of her enforced role. Inspired by her mother, she has decided to rebel, and so switches sides. Instead of targeting the intended victim, Haru Ichinose (Kanemoto), she vows to protect her from the other students.

Of course, it is a ridiculously contrived scenario, even given the rules which are laid down at an early “orientation”. The series (twelve x 25-minute eps, plus a bonus one) seems occasionally to be aware of this. It shows up in elements such as the class’s teacher (Sakurai), who is depicted as barely noticing three-quarters of his class has “transferred out” in about a week. But these are strictly assassins who act as necessary to the plot. For example, one attempt consists of strapping a bomb around Haru’s neck… but then giving Tokaku 24 hours to find the four-digit code necessary to disarm it. If I had the promise of whatever I wished, I’d not be as generous. I’m just sayin’…

Admittedly, when the truth is finally revealed over the final couple of episodes, it turns out things aren’t quite as they initially appeared. There are clearly far larger forces at play, pulling the strings from behind the scenes, which help explain some (though not all) of the machinations. I also like the slow reveal of information over the course of the series. We gradually learn about both Tokaku’s own background, and those of her ‘competitors’, which range from professionals to your average or garden psycho killers. Their styles of attack are equally varied: as well as the explosive devices mentioned above, there’s poison and even scissors attempted as methods of dispatch.

I was, frankly, a bit uncomfortable with the depictions of these fifteen-year-old girls. While there’s no actual nudity, the makers seem intent on coming as close as possible. That’s especially true of the bonus episode, in which the class is stranded on a desert island for a Battle Royale-style (though non-lethal) contest. Swimsuits-a-go-go. I’m on happier ground with the action – there’s some of that in just about every episode after the first – and the lack of romance (in part no doubt related to the lack of male characters) is also a plus. In the end, it’s a light enough entry to merit viewing, though I’m less sure about repeat value. It’s perhaps telling that I only finished watching it yesterday, and I already had to look up the heroine’s name.

Dir: Keizō Kusakawa
Star (voice): Ayaka Suwa, Hisako Kanemoto, Yoshino Nanjō, Takahiro Sakurai

The Huntress: Rune of the Dead

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★★
“Can’t see the wood for the trees. SO. Many. Trees…”

In 9th-century Scandinavia, teenage girl Runa (Stefansdotter) lives deep in the woods, with her mother, Magnhild (Idah), blind grandfather Ragnvald (Beck) and younger sister Bothild (Lyngbrant). Father Joar is notable by his absence, having gone off on a Viking raid to seek fortune for the family, and is now well overdue. However, he did at least train Runa to be a markswoman with the bow. Problems start when she finds a wounded warrior, Torulf, lying in the forest, and brings him back to their cabin, much against Magnhild’s wishes.

Torulf turns out to be a colleague of Joar’s, who tells a tale of the raiders looting a burial site – only to find vengeance coming out of the grave after them. He and Joar are the only two survivors. And when Joar returns shortly afterward, his arrival puts the whole group in peril, because of what’s inexorably following him. It’s only really at this point – two-thirds of the way in – that the film remotely begins to entertain. Up until this point, there has been a lot of sitting around the woods, and the director appears never to have heard of the maxim “Show, don’t tell.” Witness Torulf’s lengthy and frankly, boring, description of the situation, which would fit better into a Nordic saga recital than any cinematic retelling.

If the makers had gone for a siege type of film from the beginning, with the family barricaded in their cabin, and trying to fend off an unstoppable horde of barrow wights, this might have worked. It’s what I was expecting going in, and what I was waiting to see. And waiting. And waiting, while slow-moving coming of age family drama unfolded instead. I actually liked Stefansdotter in the lead role. Indeed, most of the performances are solid enough, and the same goes for the technical aspects. There was clearly some effort put in – the score, for example, is nicely done – and the forest provides a lushly appropriate backdrop against which any number of entertaining things might have unfolded. In a different, more interesting movie, anyway.

We finally do get the hand-to-hand (and hand-to-bow) battles for which we have been waiting. But only after a point by which the end credits would already be rolling on better-paced features. Even there, it is a bit on the dark side – though after my issues with Immortal Wars, the bar of what qualifies as “a bit on the dark side” has been raised considerably. This is nowhere near as bad, and you still can tell what’s going on, with a bit of peering. There’s a rough energy here which works, although the main impact is to make you wonder where the hell it has been for the rest of the movie. The makers should have sat down to watch the not-dissimilar Flukt, and built on what worked there, such as its steady flow of tension, instead of offering us 90 minutes of meandering around the woods.

Dir: Rasmus Tirzitis
Star: Moa Enqvist Stefansdotter, Yohanna Idha, Viva Östervall Lyngbrant, Ralf Beck

A Private War

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★★★
“You’re never going to get to where you’re going if you acknowledge fear.”

The profession of journalist is not exactly well-regarded by many people these days. So it’s nice occasionally to be reminded that they can still potentially be action heroes, risking their own lives in pursuit of the truth. In this case, it’s Marie Colvin (Pike), a foreign correspondent for London’s Sunday Times newspaper, who lost an eye while covering the civil strife in Sri Lanka, leading to a piratical eye-patch for the rest of her career. Most people would treat that as a sign from the universe to look into a change of profession. But Colvin was made of sterner stuff, despite a hellacious case of post-traumatic stress disorder, with which she largely coped by drinking heavily. So she and photographer sidekick Paul Conroy (Dornan) continue to venture into the world’s hot-spots, whether it’s Iraq, Libya or Syria. There, they expose the terrible human cost that the conflicts have on the local population, without apparent concern for their own safety.

It’s not a spoiler to say this doesn’t end well, for Colvin was indeed killed in Homs, Syria in a January 2012 explosion. And that’s kinda the thing which both drives the narrative and irritates the heck out of me. The film opens and closes with the quote from its subject at the top. However, to counter-quote her with Arthur Conan Doyle, “It is stupidity rather than courage to refuse to recognize danger when it is close upon you.” As depicted here, it seems as if the journalist almost had a death-wish, spitting in the face of danger long past what was prudent or even had much purpose. There’s little or no acknowledgement by Colvin that a dead writer won’t be able to achieve much. If you don’t get out safely to tell the stories you have gathered, what’s the point? You can argue, to some extent, it’s this and her other flaws which render its heroine human.

On the other hand, I found it extraordinarily hard to relate to Marie, with her choices and subsequent actions being so entirely alien to me. She insists on getting right to the core of suffering, even if this means asking its subjects brutal questions. Is this laudable journalism? Or a close cousin to the reporters who shove microphones at victims of tragedy and ask, “How do you feel?” Director Heinemann was responsible for the very good documentary Cartel Land, but seems to struggle a bit when he has to generate the narrative, rather than just recording it. We get only fragments that hint at Colvin’s character, such as a habit of wearing expensive bras, because she declares, “If anyone’s gonna pull my corpse from a trench, I want them to be impressed.” While there’s no denying the bravery of her chosen profession, or her qualifications for this site (albeit in the unorthodox wing!), and former Bond-girl Pike is excellent, I wasn’t left with any deeper appreciation of the why, rather than the how, of her life.

Dir: Matthew Heineman
Star: Rosamund Pike, Jamie Dornan, Tom Hollander, Stanley Tucci