First of all, in case you’re not familiar with the film — which shares honors with Dear Zachary as the most sobering and angering documentary I’ve seen in recent memory — here is the trailer:

Sometimes I write about stories that fall through the cracks that are important to me despite being utterly off-topic. So while I wish everyone would go see The Tillman Story, and I hope it does better at the box office than Avatar, there’s another side to the Tillman story that I think is worth pondering. For anyone who’s seen the documentary, or for anyone who’s familiar with the story of Tillman (whose death at the hands of his squad mates was covered up at the highest levels of the American military and government), I’d like to address an angle to the story that the Tillmans themselves have often alluded to but is not tackled by the documentary head-on.

If you read between the lines of the film, and if you watch, for example, the Tillman parents’ appearance on Larry King (part of which is embedded below), there is a more sinister suggestion at the margins of the story: that Pat Tillman was murdered. Intentionally, as opposed to “shot by accident.” I’m not a conspiracy theorist, and I’m not one to jump to that conclusion, though you’ll find many on the internet who claim it to be true. But in the words of Tillman’s father, “it was probably an accident.” Can you imagine being a parent who’s not sure that your son’s death was an accident, though? It’s certainly an issue worth looking into, given all of the murky factors surrounding Tillman’s death.

At 40 yards away, from an elevated position, you’d think your fellow soldiers could hear you. This is why Tillman’s last words — yelled in an attempt to halt the incoming friendly fire — were reportedly, “I’m Pat Tillman. I’m Pat Fucking Tillman!” The Tillman Story, originally titled I’m Pat ______ Tillman, only touches briefly on the possibility of foul — as opposed to simply incompetent — play. But it’s a possibility that will haunt me for a long time, especially when director Bar-Lev ruminates in an interview that Tillman is “worth more to America dead than alive.”

Tillman was shot three times in the forehead. Not just the head — the forehead. If you’re close enough to shoot a man three times in the forehead — someone who is not returning fire and is yelling at you in English, repeatedly — shouldn’t you be able to identify him as a friendly? Briefly, some other suspicious factors:

The reason Tillman was in such a position at all was because his squad was split, despite this action going against military Standard Operating Procedures; no evidence of enemy fire was ever found at the scene, which was the justification given for the other Rangers opening fire on Tillman’s position — no people or vehicles were struck even once by enemy fire; the medical examiner, upon inspecting Tillman’s corpse, asked for a criminal investigation (which was denied); Pat’s clothes and body armor were burned despite protocol calling for their preservation as evidence; his diary was either lost or burned, depending on the account; and, of course, there was the resulting cover-up that led the American people (and the family) to believe that Tillman was killed leading a heroic offensive against Taliban forces, when instead he was shot repeatedly by American forces at close range.

Why would it matter that Tillman’s diary was burned? Because, as The Tillman Story does a great job of elucidating, Pat Tillman wasn’t the man he was assumed to be. Despite his all-American appearance and a pro football career to match, Tillman was a rare character, not just a professional athlete who joined the military, but also a book-reading atheist with a subscription to The Economist who wanted to meet with antiwar author Noam Chomsky when he concluded his military service. In short: the Bush administration’s lone celebrity soldier, who sacrificed a lucrative pro sports career to patriotically serve his country in response to 9/11 — was going to come home in dramatic fashion. Disillusioned since enlisting, Tillman had privately called the Iraq war “so fucking illegal,” planned on voting for Kerry, and was about to become a hell of a poster boy for the war opposition — with plenty of time to spare before the 2006 reelection campaign. Of course, in death, he could’ve been a powerful figure as well — assuming his diary, which presumably contained his real thoughts on the war, wasn’t “lost.”

Indeed, in reviewing the film, some have wondered if Tillman’s military service was a premeditated first step into a post-football career in politics. But if Tillman was interested in creating a politically tenable public narrative for himself, why was he so private about his reasons for enlisting, and why did he refuse to be lionized (in life, at least) as a hero for doing so? Regardless of his private nature, however, it’s hard to believe that Tillman would come out of the experience without anything to say. As Pat’s brother, Kevin (who is conspicuously absent from the film, but apparently worked with Bar-Lev behind-the-scenes) remembered in 2006:

[Pat and I] spoke about the risks with signing the [military] papers. How once we committed, we were at the mercy of the American leadership and the American people. How we could be thrown in a direction not of our volition. How fighting as a soldier would leave us without a voice… until we got out.

This is one of many things that makes the film so excruciating to watch. “Until we got out.” What would Pat say today, had he lived through three years of military service — during a time when he could’ve been living the American dream, playing pro football for millions of dollars? He could’ve been a powerful figure in America, but we’ll never know. Instead, his death was initially used by the U.S. military to feed the pro-war propaganda machine in a way that would make Goebbels proud. So for those that robbed us of the truth behind Pat Tillman’s death — and more importantly, for those that robbed us of all the things Tillman would have said and done with what should’ve been his remaining years — I’ll quote Tillman’s father, whose letter to the military draws the following conclusion:

In sum: Fuck you… and yours.

I’m not saying The Tillman Story should’ve gone the agitprop route and posited in certain terms that the American government assassinated Tillman. But it’s clear from comments made by Tillman’s parents that there is some level of suspicion about the level of incompetence, the number of coincidences, and the amount of gross negligence that had to come together just right in order to lead to their son’s death. Not to mention the cover-up. As a result, when The Tillman Story was over, I found myself wishing Bar-Lev would’ve viewed Tillman’s death in a more suspicious light. Perhaps the darker possibilities aren’t fully explored by the film. Or perhaps what happened is just what we should expect when we take a bunch of 19 year-olds, transplant them from America to Afghanistan, replace their Xbox controllers with real guns, and ask them to do a nation’s dirty work.

The Tillman Story is now playing in NY and LA and opens wide September 3rd.

MacHeist is a website that sells a lot of Mac applications in a bundle for less than the normal price of one of the individual apps. In the case of the currently running “nanoBundle2″ promotion, it’s seven applications that would retail for $266, on sale together for a total of $19.95. These aren’t trial versions or crippled licenses; they are the full monty.

How can MacHeist do this? Well, the involved app developers get a lot less money for their app, but they’re getting less money from a lot more people. Plus they gain a larger userbase and get broad exposure from the promotion. The current bundle contains a number of handy-looking creative applications and is live until March 9th, so I thought I’d review the software contained therein from the perspective of a writer/designer/filmmaker/blogger. To get your money’s worth you’ve really only gotta find one of the seven applications useful; is the nanoBundle2 worth a Jackson?

Impressions upon visiting the MacHeist website:

1. Man, this is some nerdy shit.
2. Wait, why wouldn’t I buy this? The entire bundle costs less than the even the cheapest application. As a multi-hyphenate who uses an embarrassing number of Mac apps over the course of an average day, surely I’ll find one of these useful.
3. They’re raising a lot of money for charity; 25% of all purchases go to a worthy cause. At the time I’m posting this, the ticker’s up to $131,000 raised from nanoBundle2 and over $2 million in the site’s history. Cheap apps and you’re helping save the world (you can choose which charity your 25% goes to, or distribute it evenly among the 11 options)!

I pull the trigger.

The seven bundled applications are MacJournal, RipIt, Clips, CoverScout, Flow, Tales of Monkey Island, and RapidWeaver. The final two apps require a certain number of purchases to be unlocked, so you’re incentivized to tell friends to buy the bundle. I didn’t realize RapidWeaver was included in this “maybe” category — they have a threshold of 50,000 sales to unlock Monkey Island, but don’t explicitly list the number for RapidWeaver, which is either unintentionally bad design or intentional deception. See the image at right — on first glance, is it clear that Flow is included but Rapidweaver isn’t? If you’re going to put a “will be unlocked” dialogue under Monkey Island (which I couldn’t care less about), you should do the same for RapidWeaver. Sorry, but this is Design 101. Anyway, RapidWeaver was the main reasons I was interested (it’s also the most expensive app at $79), but let’s see if any of the first five are useful.

The apps

Clips

This looked pretty handy. I’ve been using Jumpcut as a clipboard manager, which allows you to keep track of dozens of bits of cut/copied text, instead of the default system clipboard, which only allows you to paste the most recently copied item. I was hoping Clips would be a more advanced version of Jumpcut, as right now I only use Jumpcut for temporary copying and pasting; for frequently-used snippets of text like URLs, html code, and canned email responses I use Apple’s built-in Stickies. Clips seemed to offer a unifying solution, but I’m sorry to say: upon initial use, it just didn’t work. It would only remember the most recent thing I copied, which defeats the entire purpose of using it; perhaps I’ll figure Clips out in the future, since I officially own the software now, but first impressions are not good. Plus, Clips tries to do too much — there are three different ways of displaying your clips, two different hotkey options, and two different display options (dock or menu bar) — honestly, guys, the hallmark of Mac is simplicity. I want you to figure out what works best for 90% of your users, and present that to us as the default functionality; don’t make me choose from eight options the first time I start it up. It should “just work,” and it didn’t for me. On its own, Clips retails for $27.

MacJournal

For the past four years I’ve been using Mori to keep track of ideas, organize initial outlines, brainstorm, and keep a journal. It’s not a great program, but its simplicity is its virtue, and I’m used to it. However, Mori hasn’t been updated in ages and it seems development is at a dead-end. Thus my interest in MacJournal; it’s a similar program, but more fully-featured, and has a long history of development and support. First impressions of MacJournal are very good; it has a great full-screen writing mode (up until now I’ve been using an old freeware version of Writeroom for this functionality), it plugs into a number of blog services for posting to the web, and for keeping a journal it really seems like the app to beat on the Mac. If you’re looking for a journaling program — meaning, jotting down your thoughts, making them searchable, and keeping track of when you wrote what — MacJournal makes the nanoBundle worth it alone. However, I’m looking for more of a brainstorming/outlining program, so my search for a Mori replacement continues — more on this another time. Normally $40.

RipIt

RipIt bills itself as “effortless DVD importing.” It does what it says — you pop in a DVD, hit “Rip,” and it takes care of the job for you, automatically ripping the main feature and excising the menus and extras. For a lot of people, this fits the bill and will be a valuable cog in the MacHeist machine. However, by default RipIt generates .dvdmedia files, which play fine in Apple’s built-in DVD Player software but don’t afford you the greatest flexibility (in preferences, you can switch it to generate VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS folders). I prefer the free and open-source Handbrake, which allows you to customize file format, compression, and subtitling options; I pretty much knew going in that I wasn’t going to use RipIt because of the Handbrake elephant in the room. For grandma, however, RipIt might find a home. Normally $20, although it looks like the free version lets your rip 58 DVDs before you’d have to register.

Coverscout

Coverscout is an application that, uh, scouts covers. Covers for your albums, that is — its goal is to get rid of as many of those blank placeholder images you see when that “totally legitimate album you paid money for” shows up in iTunes without any pretty artwork. The registration is kind of a pain — you have to create a login and jump through some other hoops, which wasn’t the case with any of the other apps. While the program works — it correctly pulls your library from iTunes, logs into various online databases to find missing album art and assigns them automatically — as you’d expect with multiple sources, album art sizes tend to vary and the accuracy isn’t anywhere near 100%. This can make for comical discrepancies between genre of music and the resulting album cover (“Ain’t no Half Steppin” by Big Daddy Kane pulled a cover for “Christ is Come” by a Christian band named Big Daddy Weave). If you want to go through your albums one by one — my library yielded over 1,000 coverless albums — you have a chance at ending up with accurate covers… but do you really care enough to do that? Either way, don’t expect to “select all” and hit the “magic” button (you’ll probably break your internet connection if you do, as Coverscout doesn’t seem to have a queuing system, instead hitting the servers for all of your selected albums all at once). I got tired of waiting and quit the program, resigned to my placeholder-filled music library. Coverscout is normally $40, which seems overpriced given iTunes is free and includes basic “Get Album Artwork” functionality. SongGenie, a different program from the same company that fills in missing metadata like album title, year, and track number — which would probably ensure more accurate covers — is another $30. Seriously guys, you want someone to spend $70 on software that does nothing more than dress up already-existing music files? Bundle the two together for $30 and then we can talk.

Flow

Flow is a file-transfer program which works with FTP/SFTP as well as other protocols like Amazon S3 and MobileMe. This had appeal to me, as I’ve used the free FTP program Cyberduck for years — encountering a host of bugs along the way — and eventually paid $30 for Transmit when Cyberduck became unreliable. Flow intergrates with the Mac OS much more nicely than either of the aforementioned apps and promises URL copying (meaning, you can upload a file to an FTP server and automatically copy the file’s URL for sharing). This is handy for sending clients links to files — but as soon as I got Flow’s URL copying working, I realized Transmit offers the same feature. I will say this — Flow has a chance at becoming my default FTP program, and I would use it over Cyberduck if I hadn’t already bought Transmit.

As for the “unlockable” apps — Tales of Monkey Island and RapidWeaver — the former is an adventure game and the latter is a template-based website construction tool. I don’t have much to say about the former as I’m not much of a gamer, and I was a Senior Designer at MTV for three years so you wouldn’t think RapidWeaver would be of any interest to me, but it’s the “rapid” part of the latter that is appealing — I have some upcoming transmedia projects for which I’ll need to launch a lot of sites very quickly, and in the quantity-over-quality department I’m interested in comparing one-off RapidWeaver sites to those based on WordPress themes. If MacHeist makes their goal — whatever it is — and RapidWeaver is unlocked, I’ll put it to use and add a review later.

Conclusion

Overall, I had no problems getting the apps installed or registering them; they are indeed what they promise, 100% full and legal applications for a fraction of the price. MacHeist is on their A-game with this stuff; they’ve done a great job offering appealing applications at a very enticing price, and the concept of “unlocking” apps at a certain number of sales is brilliant marketing — free Tweets all around! Not to mention, in a world of so much pirated software, it’s nice to support smaller application developer. Additionally, MacHeist raises a lot of money for charity with each promotion, which is the icing on the cake.

Normally I consider $30 to be the reasonable price point for a single desktop Mac application — I’ve paid $30 for several useful apps in the past couple of years — so $20 for seven apps is a no-brainer. For my own needs, however, I’m not sure that I’ll regularly use any of the first five (I do hope to find RapidWeaver useful, though). Clips is a nice idea, but it’s not there yet. RipIt would make a nice gift for the computer illiterate in your family, but if you’re reading this you’ll probably be happier with Handbrake. Coverscout is only handy if you’re a constant iTunes gardener. However, I do feel MacJournal and Flow are solid apps worth the price of admission on their own if you’re looking for a journal or FTP program. After all, you’ve only got to use one app to make the bundle worth your while; I hope this review was helpful in determining whether you’ll find use for one — or more — of the nanBundle2 apps.

The deal is live until March 9 at MacHeist, and now features three more throw-in apps if you tweet.