Pun Salad

I will requote something that I wrote after reading Bossypants: I love Tina Fey. And when I say "love", I mean in a way that's completely inappropriate, given our age difference, our respective marital statuses, our incompatible social circles, geographical separation, and a host of additional irreconcilable differences.

OK, not so much that I'll be watching her movie Sisters any time soon. But I watched this, and it's good. Unfortunately, it didn't do well in theaters. Ms. Fey shows that she can do more than smart/comic stuff. There are some snappy one-liners, and a couple funny scenes, but it's a realistic look at the war in Afghanistan, and you ain't gonna make a laff riot out of it.

She plays "Kim Baker" (the movie is based on the non-fiction memoir of Kim Barker), an off-air TV newsperson who decides to step up when her network looks for a volunteer to cover the war. She's brave, intelligent, and earns the Grudging Respect of the soldiers with which she's embedded. A Strained Relationship develops with her boyfriend. She has Interesting Interactions with her fellow pressmates, and the locals.

I found it watchable all the way through. And even moving at the end.

It is dedicated to her late father, Donald Fey, a Korea vet and a Goldwater Republican. This is what she wrote about him in Bossypants:

If you're Don Fey, you can't look at Joe Biden and be like, yes, I want to be led by this gentleman with the capped teeth. You're not going to listen to John Kerry pretending to empathize with you about the rising cost of your medications. You certainly aren't interested in the "unresolved father issues" that rendered Bill Clinton unable to keep his fly closed. Don Fey is a grown-ass man! Black people find him stylish!

I think Mr. Fey would be proud of his daughter for this movie. For everything else, too, of course. But also this movie.