After a long hiatus, we’re back! This time with an absolute banger of an episode featuring writer and critic Séamus Malekafzali on director Peter Berg’s pinnacle of Mark Wahlberg-ness, Lone Survivor. Séamus may be too young to remember 9/11, but he’s more than old enough to stand face-to-face with Berg and challenge him to a blinking contest.
Berg's extended montage of suffering, released in 2013, heavily fictionalizes a real-life and extremely unsuccessful Navy SEAL raid in Afghanistan in 2005. On the pod, the boys discuss how Berg’s Americana fetish turns combat into a version of extreme sports — once again featuring Tim Riggins from Friday Night Lights — and employs the same trick used by so many GWOT films when it lies about what really happened to create false stakes for its American protagonists.
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Lone Survivor (8/6/23)