As I see commercials for all sorts of 1st-person fighting video games, how long will it be before someone makes a “Strike Back” Wii game?As I see commercials for all sorts of 1st-person fighting video games, how long will it be before someone makes a “Strike Back” Wii game?

– Jeremy, via email.

Wait, is it possible that there isn’t a “Strike Back” video game yet? I guess I just assumed the entire series was based on a video game, perhaps because its plot shares a hell of a lot with Double Dragon and Contra and countless other video games in which two nearly invincible badass dudes run around kicking an outrageous amount of ass and blowing stuff up.

Actually, the episodes of the show feel a bit like levels in video games, since there are always individual goals accomplished in pursuit of the larger one stringing them all together — catching Latif (in the second season, at least), a terrorist mastermind (standing in for Bowser).

That might sell the show a little bit short, though: It’s pretty awesome. I didn’t see the first season, but the second one aired this summer on Cinemax and hooked me pretty good. It’s over-the-top violent and the action is obviously exaggerated — sometimes dudes make full-extension diving catches of falling bombs to prevent them from exploding. But even despite that Strike Back somehow does a pretty good job selling its accuracy in depicting the most intense moments of contemporary guerrilla warfare — thankfully I have no real-life basis for comparison — so it seems like a good take on the action genre for this era.

Also, the main characters, Stonebridge and Scott, are obscenely badass. And everyone in the show is incredibly hot and has lots of sex. Even the characters that probably aren’t supposed to be hot are still pretty hot. I don’t think war is really like that. Video games, though, yeah.

Actor Bradley Cooper was named People magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive,” which serves as proof that the distinction is a complete flavor-of-the-month sham never meant to reward the real sexiest man alive.

Because Bradley Cooper? C’mon. I could probably argue he wasn’t even the sexiest man in The Hangover 2 if only I were willing to watch The Hangover 2. He’s weasel-y looking, and he doesn’t even have a strong jawline. Unless he’s got some Gerard Depardieu thing about him that defies all objective standards of handsomeness and randomly appeals to women/the editors of People magazine, I fail to see how there’s any way he’s anywhere close to the Sexiest Man Alive.

Hell, I could name you fifteen men right now off the top of my head that are decidedly better looking than Bradley Cooper. First, Christian Bale. Then there’s a big gap, then, I don’t know, George Clooney, Hugh Jackman, Mark Sanchez, the guy from the Old Spice commercials, Brad Pitt, Josh Brolin, almost the entire male cast of X-Men First Class besides Oliver Platt, Idris Elba, and… how many is that? Hell, I can practically guarantee there’s a shirtless dude outside Hollister on 5th Avenue right now making passersby feel uncomfortable that’s better looking than Bradley Cooper.

And people will be like, “well you should be proud of Bradley Cooper, as a fellow Georgetown man.” Incorrect. It’s called “Sexiest Man Alive,” not “Vaguely Attractive Man Who’s Currently En Vogue” or, in this case, “Smarmy-Looking Fella You Should Endorse as Handsome Because He Went to Your College.” Plus it’s not like Bradley Cooper and I would’ve hung out if we overlapped at college.

People Magazine needs to either end the charade and change the name or just be honest about it and give the distinction to Bale every single year. Enough is enough with this.

Now, private industry is beginning to take over what NASA once did. For $200,000 you can book a flight to the edge of space aboard SpaceShipTwo, the spaceplane being developed by Richard Branson’s company.

Sooner or later — in the year 2030, it says here — humans will return to that gray, airless landscape. “Just a three-day trip from Earth by spacecraft, the luminous Moon beckons,” the show notes in travel-brochure language….

Getting there is also going to be interesting. By then, Dr. Shara figures, we will have had enough of the violence of rockets and will descend and ascend from the lunar surface on a lunar elevator, “a skinny cable rising thousands of miles from the Moon into the sky,” anchored at the far end by the gravity of the Earth. In time, Dr. Shara said, the cable could be extended almost all the way to Earth.

– Dennis Overbye, N.Y. Times.

OK, this space-exploration exhibit at the Museum of Natural History sounds pretty awesome and in truth I’ll probably go check it out, but don’t buy that 2030 space-tourism stuff. The space museum-industrial complex has been selling that for at least 20 years, if not longer, and as far as I know we’re not really any closer to hanging out on the moon than we were in 1990 the first time it was promised to me.

You know what’s a lot cooler than a museum exhibit about human space travel? Actual human space travel. You’re killing me, science.

In Jack and Jill, Sandler looks at sibling rivalry without that acrid love of dysfunction now so popular on TV and Broadway. It’s obvious that Los Angeles ad exec Jack and his hefty, homely, still unmarried sister Jill who visits from New York will mend their rift but the fun is in watching the healing process. The film’s comedy (as in adult petulance and coach potato behavior) shows the depths of kinship—similarities siblings can’t help sharing but learn to accept in themselves. And Sandler’s always protective—as when Jack insults Jill but warns “I can say that because I’m her twin.”

All Sandler’s best comedies (Grown Ups, Bedtime Stories, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry and the great Spanglish) are really love stories. He explores affection without the class and gender guilt Judd Apatow hides behind (such distraction scuttled Apatow’s grandiose Funny People). Sandler’s willingness to appear “dumb” is what makes his films so cathartic. He thrives on being unembarrassed—the key to classic comedy going back to the Greeks.

– Armond White, CityArts.

White takes exactly the right approach to a Jack and Jill review, baffling the crap out of the CityArts commenters.