This thread makes me feel like this:
Bisexual: Most of what I'm going to say here is going to echo what I said to you in your
Barry Lyndon thread. At the top, I'll say: Give
Full Metal Jacket time and repeat viewings. As most people have found with most Kubrick movies, it'll grow on you. You may never hail it as a masterpiece, but you'll probably like it more in five more years and three more viewings.
Speaking for myself, and admitting the fact that I'm a massive Kubrick fan and find it difficult to find fault in anything of his that isn't
The Killing, I'm still finding repeat viewings of
Full Metal Jacket rewarding. I think
@leto1776 is right about the age factor. It certainly applied to me. I first saw
Full Metal Jacket when I was 12 or 13 and I had very little patience for the non-boot camp stuff. Fast-forward to today and I'm 27 and I think the combat section blows the boot camp section off the screen.
Most people - including most of the people in here - break the film into halves (even though it's really a film of thirds - first, boot camp pre-combat; second, post-boot camp pre-combat; third, combat) and then write off the second half. For me, whether we're talking halves or thirds, the combat sequence with the sniper is the most brilliant portion of the film IMO. Kubrick's legendary craftsmanship is just off the fucking charts. The cinematography and the editing are impeccable (that sequence when the sniper shoots Cowboy is fucking incredible) and the sound design and score are extraordinary. And while it'd be insanely difficult to make a list of Kubrick's best individual scenes, if I were to try to do it, Joker deciding what to do with the wounded sniper would definitely be a contender. I've always loved the soap beating and D'Onofrio's suicide, I've always loved the sniper picking them off, but that last portion where they're surrounded by flames (tons of points for Kubrick with the way he managed to pull off the oldest war cliche, "war is hell," in the subtlest and most elegant fashion) and they're all standing there while Joker, trying to hold on to his humanity, argues with Animal Mother, who is as emotionally vacant as a dissociated serial killer, about what to do with the sniper is quintessential Kubrick: Poetic, beautiful, disturbing, and tragic.
With the first half of this film, Kubrick made the definitive movie about bullying.
Please don't turn one of the greatest war movies of all-time made by the greatest filmmaker ever into a PC bromide.
His time in the press office is boring, and allows the more annoying aspects of his character to shine through.
I used to literally
never watch any of the Stars and Stripes shit. Like
never. I've probably seen the movie north of 20 times but I've probably only watched the Stars and Stripes shit three or four times, obviously on my first viewing and then only with my most recent rewatches have I not treated the film like a greatest hits album. Now that I think the whole movie is fantastic, I obviously now think the Stars and Stripes stuff is fantastic, as well. I love Rafterman whining about doing a high school girl's job and wanting to get out in the shit like a real man (which then leads to his excellent arc from puking on the chopper to loving the feeling of shooting the sniper), I love Joker pestering the editor about the Tet talk about which literally nobody else gives a shit and fucking with him after getting his silly notes on his article.
Once he's in the field, it was obvious that it wasn't shot in Vietnam or anything like it. It looked like some deserted British cement factory
You posted this fresh from your visit to Wikipedia, I see.
It didn't have the feel of Vietnam at all, and I was surprised a perfectionist like Kubrick would fail in presenting his setting, given how masterfully he has done that in the past.
http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0030.html
Geoffrey Alexander: To me, it's another example of Kubrick shying clear of the cliche in order to find the more specific realism, I think. Anybody can take a scene of jungle combat and slather over a few bars of Pink Floyd or Hendrix and have themselves an instantly recognisable 'Viet Nam film'. For that matter, the fact that Kubrick and Herr portray urban warfare, instead of the kind of jungle warfare we associate with that time, tells an incredible lot about how serious a representation of the war they were after -- and the details of Kubrick's recreation of Hue absolutely seal the deal.....
Bilge Ebiri: I noted the bizzareness of the architecture of where Cowboy's group was camped outside of Hue -- specifically, the setting of the scene where Joker first meets them and they show them the dead Vietnamese lounging in a chair. The place seemed to be made up of circular entrances. I was in Vietnam last year and I tried to think if I had seen any architecture resembling this. Then it hit me -- I saw this kind of architecture at one of the Imperial tombs, on the outskirts of -- you guessed it -- Hue, the ancient capital. It's a wonderfully subtle move from someone who was working primarily from photographs.
Geoffrey Alexander: It wasn't just photographs he had -- one of the (Western) architects of Hue City was the very architect who had built the London gasworks where Kubrick filmed; I'm sure many details were added, but there was a versimilitude available to Kubrick that would have otherwise been hard to come by except at great expense.
Gordon Dahlquist: My father spent two tours in Vietnam, including some time in Hue, and he feels that the film was extremely accurate, extremely realistic -- but more than anything in the frankness in presenting details less welcome in today's view of the war (the prostitution, the corruption of the ARVN troops, the drugs, the gung-ho "born to kill" mentality, the distance between troops engaged in actual battle and the mass of "pogue" brass and support troops that were both very close and impossible separated from what was "really" happening ... as for the often- heard criticism of filming in London, I can't understand it -- it does look like Hue, if you do some research and check it out.
People expect films made in other locations all the time, but have such a narrow sense of what Vietnam "actually" looks like, based primarily on films made in the Philipines or maybe Thailand, with a lot of generic grass hut villages. I agree -- making the climactic battle of the film not to be in the jungle (the book, The Short-Timers, contains several sustained actions in the jungle as well, not in the film, so it was definately a choice made...) puts the film, and the film's conception of war, and our sense of what war in Vietnam meant, in direct contrast with countless WWII films of GI's slogging through Italy or France, fighting house to house in that glorious struggle. The helplessness and confusion that hits the squad in FMJ seems as much because the situation doesn't match these earlier films as the immediate hell of sniper -- it strikes me as simply brilliant and wonderfully subtle.
The portion with the interviews of the platoon where they are talking to the camera...it's terrible. It's filler. It's the worst few minutes of any Kubrick film ever, hands down.
There's no such thing as filler in a Kubrick movie. The primary purpose served by that sequence is realism:
Vietnam was famously the first war fought on TV. People were seeing footage from the war and listening to people in the war for the whole duration. Kubrick made sure to include that as an element in his film.
Past that, it fleshes out those characters more. Animal Mother editing himself - twice, and sadistically smiling to himself while running through his many word options - when describing the Vietnamese, Rafterman playing the role, Joker amusing himself at the expense of others. We get to both learn more about the characters more recently introduced like Animal Mother and we get to enjoy seeing the characters we already know like Joker and Cowboy.
Well, you don't get to enjoy it. Hopefully you will someday.
I never liked the first half - all the actors stink it up except Ermey.
I get why so many people write the later portions off given how incredible the beginning is. I don't get not liking the beginning. If you don't like the boot camp sequence, you should choke yourself.
I always thought they screwed up by having pile kill the drill sergeant and himself. After all that suffering and work he was showing improvement and he threw it all away. Would have been so much better if he'd have went to war with them. Maybe play a part similar to the white dude with the m60.
Saying he "threw it all away" implies calculated decision-making on his part. It implies he was weighing the pros-and-cons of sticking it out and heading off to war with his newfound skill-set versus murder-suicide.
Calculated decision-making was no longer something he was capable of. He was made of such weak stuff that his mind and soul were warped beyond all repair. Hence the "major malfunction" question. He was quite clearly a malfunctioning human being, and had he toughed it out and gone to war as a perfect killing machine, then Kubrick's point - that, when you try to turn human beings into robots, there are bound to be some glitches - would've been lost.
So, too, would we have lost one of the best scenes in the history of film.
Kubricks 1st film might just be my favorite of his
The Killing was Kubrick's third narrative feature film (after
Fear and Desire in 1953 and
Killer's Kiss in 1955) and, including his documentary work, his sixth film overall.
It's also IMO by far his worst film.
How Modine's career never took off is completely non-mysterious.
I thought the acting was great, and other than D'Onofrio, who quite clearly stole the show acting-wise, I thought Modine's performance was the best of the bunch. Especially in that final sequence with the sniper.
As for hating on Modine beyond
Full Metal Jacket: He was phenomenal in both
Birdy and
Vision Quest and his work in the
Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode
Rage is some of the best acting I've ever seen on TV.
I don't remember, like I said it's been 20 years since I last watched it. I did say my comments should be taken with a grain of salt, for that reason. I guess you missed the start of the conversation.
