Much-Decorated Marine Vet Takes Aim at Iraq War Movies

Former Marine sergeant Eric Kocher served in a battalion in the vanguard of the Iraq invasion -- and later as a consultant for a new HBO series about the war, "Generation Kill" -- so he seemed like the ideal person to ask the question that's bedeviled Hollywood lately:

Why have so many critically acclaimed movies about Iraq failed so miserably at the box office?

Kocher, the darkly handsome recipient of two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star for valor during an enemy ambush near Fallujah, didn't hesitate.

"Because they kind of suck," he told us. "In 'Stop-Loss,' the whole platoon grew up in the same town, which never happens. Or in 'Jarhead,' which wasn't that bad, but at the end where everyone shoots up in the air . . . they throw so much fallacy into these movies that nobody believes them, and they lose the whole thread of the plot."

Hard to argue with that! We met Kocher at an HBO/Brookings screening at the National Press Club Tuesday, packed with journalists, foreign policy experts and other such types who peppered co-creators/Baltimore homeboys David Simon and Ed Burns ("The Wire") with variations on the "well, in my experience" non-question during the panel discussion. Simon said he didn't really care what these folks thought of the series, debuting next month -- he'd already vetted it with the toughest audience possible, the Recon Marines depicted in the show.

"None of us were beaten up," Simon joked. "No heavy weapons were used against our domiciles."

Buchwald Joked, but Hoover Wasn't Laughing

Yet more evidence J. Edgar Hoover had zero sense of humor: The former FBI director kept a thick dossier on Art Buchwald, calling the late Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist a "sick, alleged humorist." CBSNews.com obtained the 239-page file that the FBI began in 1956, when Buchwald attended an air show in the Soviet Union, and continued until 1975, three years after Hoover's death.

The file contains mostly columns that mentioned the bureau. Hoover was especially peeved by a 1964 piece saying he was a fictional character named after a vacuum cleaner. Readers wrote the FBI asking if Hoover actually existed; he responded to many with personal notes.

Buchwald seemed to enjoy tweaking the G-men. In 1965, he told Playboy: "They never get upset when you make fun of them. You may get a call from two FBI agents the morning after a column appears, at 3 a.m. in the morning, but it is always a friendly call."

Follieri Needs to Cough Up $21 Million for Bail

More trouble for Anne Hathaway's skeezy ex-boyfriend, Raffaello Follieri, arrested for allegedly fleecing investors in a bogus real estate scheme: A New York federal judge set bail at $21 million Tuesday and ordered home detention. (At his Trump Tower pad? Nice.) Follieri, who bickered with his lawyer through the hearing, was then rushed to a hospital after suffering "some sort of attack," his rep told the AP; she later told People it was a "sinus infection," hence the opiates prosecutors claim were in his system -- cough meds.

UPDATE

· Break out the pink! Baby Fenty is going to be a girl, Michelle Fenty told us yesterday. The mayor and his wife have 8-year-old twin boys, Andrew and Matthew; their third child, due this fall, will be the first female born into the Fenty family for three generations.

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" Michael, I've created a Facebook profile as a communication tool in my department at Marriott. I won't look at your friends' communiques. Don't worry, I'm not spying. Thomas and Caroline didn't accept me as a friend. Love, Mom."

-- Kathleen Matthews, the WJLA anchor turned Marriott PR honcho, in a posting on her 20-something son's Facebook page that any Net-savvy parent can relate to. Michael, at least, did accept her "friend" request.