15 Minutes Into The Future Department

Some of our more popular reviews and posts from this past winter have a little extra-added significance this week.

First up is our March 22nd review of Downfall, a brilliant movie on the fall of the Third Reich, due out on DVD tomorrow. Apparently, it’s the first dramatic German production to have an actor playing Hitler. (Bruno Ganz, who does an eerily realistic job of it, demonstrating Hitler’s absolute evil, without becoming a parody. As does Corinna Harfouch as the sinister Magda Goebbels.)

On a much lighter note, The Dukes of Hazzard makes its big-screen debut this week. Oddly enough, a post we quickly dashed off on Christmas Eve regarding the controversy over the “General Lee” (the ’69 Dodge Charger that’s the real star of the franchise) and its rebel flag-painted rooftop has garnered an amazing amount of traffic over the past seven months.

And in the mail today was a copy of Marvel Comics’ Combat Zone on our troops in Iraq. Its text was written by Karl Zinsmeister, the editor of The American Enterprise magazine, who served as an embedded journalist with the 82nd Airborne in Iraq. Our December inter-blog debate with Power Line and other bloggers over the role of the modern left in the comic book industry was another surprise hit with readers. Amazon says that Combat Zone is due out in print on August 10th; we’ll try to post more after we’ve perused it properly.