{"id":1222,"date":"2003-05-26T15:13:48","date_gmt":"2003-05-27T05:13:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/2003\/05\/26\/black-hawk-down\/"},"modified":"2019-12-05T09:13:06","modified_gmt":"2019-12-05T17:13:06","slug":"black-hawk-down","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/2003\/05\/26\/black-hawk-down\/","title":{"rendered":"Black Hawk Down"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Wow &#8212; excellent, powerful, and frightening film. When <strong>Black Hawk Down<\/strong> first came out, I avoided seeing it &#8212; while I heard from many people that it was good, I was a bit overly cynical as to whether it was getting good reviews because it was actually a good movie, or because the US was in the process of bombing Afghanistan, and a patriotic &#8220;rah rah&#8221; movie was reaping the rewards of jingoistic fervor.<\/p>\n<p>Let me be the first to say that I sorely underestimated the film, the reasons for its good reviews, and the reviews themselves. Overall, I think a healthy dose of cynicism is a good thing, but this time I seem to have taken it a bit far. Ah, well, everyone makes mistakes occasionally. <strong>BHD<\/strong> is actually a gut-wrenching account of a disastrous mission in Somalia that stretched from a planned hour-long insertion and retrieval into around seventeen hours of hell. Not at all pleasant to watch, but excellently done, and very powerful.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s what looks to be an excellent newspaper series on the events portrayed in <strong>BHD<\/strong> from the Philadelphia Inquirer&#8217;s Mark Bowden: <a href=\"http:\/\/inquirer.philly.com\/packages\/somalia\/\" title=\"Black Hawk Down\">Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Overall, I think a healthy dose of cynicism is a good thing, but this time I seem to have taken it a bit far.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2037],"tags":[23],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1222"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1222"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1222\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}