Full Metal Jacket

Full Metal Jacket (1987) is an astonishing, hard-t0-shake Vietnam movie, one that’s essentially two separate stories smashed together. Director Stanley Kubrick, working from Gustav Hasford’s autobiographical novel The Short-Timers, turns in one of his most effective films. Full Metal Jacket is mesmerizing, sick, terrifying, and funny. It lingers in the brain like a sickness, or a joke that you understand more fully with the passage of time.

I should point out that I’ve never expected to like the films of Stanley Kubrick. It’s probably my hero worship of Pauline Kael, who panned every Kubrick film after Lolita. But ever since watching Barry Lyndon last year, I’ve discovered a real love of Kubrick’s work that makes me feel slightly shameful, perhaps because he seems like a pretentious person’s filmmaker. Barry Lyndon was surprisingly hard to shake off, as was Eyes Wide Shut, and Full Metal Jacket joins them as one of my personal favorite Kubrick films.

The movie opens with a montage of boys—young and dumb, about to be sent to basic training—getting their hair buzzed off by clippers. Then the film cuts to a basic training facility where we’re pummeled by the craftily vulgar screams of relentless drill sergeant Lee Ermey, whose performance is the prototype for the kind of asshole-power-monsters we see in movies like Whiplash (the one where J.K. Simmons plays an asshole of a music teacher, who delights in the aggressive humiliation of his students). I felt more than a little sadistic laughing at the horrifying jeers of Ermey’s character: he berates his grunts with such unmitigated, tenacious fervor that it’s hard not to laugh, until you realize the chilling effect his torment as on one particular young man, the incompetent “Pyle” (Vincet D’Onofrio), who can’t seem to do anything right, and who becomes the pariah of the group when Ermey starts punishing the other guys for his blunders. Watching Pyle lose it is truly one of the most terrifying things I’ve ever seen in a movie.

When people talk about Vietnam movies, they often obsess over the authenticity of it. Every time I turn around, someone’s telling me about the 2002 film We Were Soldiers, and how that film is the most authentic of all the Vietnam movies, according to the men who actually put their boots to the ground. That may be the case. (I wouldn’t begin to know.) But Full Metal Jacket, whether it perfectly nails an authentic depiction of the war or not, is one of the most jarring, powerful movies about war that I’ve ever seen. Kubrick of course criticizes the politics of the war, as is to be expected, but his criticism transcends the political in showing us just how much the war dehumanizes people.

Of course, the most powerful example of dehumanization happens in basic training, not in combat. It’s D’Onofrio’s transition to madness which stays with us most. The second act, which offers a well-staged descent into a war-torn town where a handful of soldiers face off against a hidden sniper, is tense and extremely well-made, even though it lacks the emotional weight of the first half. It’s still powerful, and when you consider both halves of the film together, you can sense the layers of the war as they happened to the individual soldiers, for whom basic training was a world unto itself, a place where a new identity—the identity of a nationally-vindicated killer—was forged under the auspices of protecting the American way of life.

With Matthew Modine, Arliss Howard, Adam Baldwin, Dorian Harewood, and Kevyn Major Howard. Written by Kubrick, Michael Herr, and Gustav Hasford. 

THE FASCINATING PROPAGANDA OF OLIVER STONE

I was in the tenth grade when the World Trade Center fell. I remember being in Mr. Kuhrt’s World History class. Someone rushed in and told him to turn on the television. The first tower had been hit, but no one knew what was going on, the gravity of the situation that would forever change things for us. We knew that the building was on fire, on one of the higher stories. We didn’t know that someone had flown an airplane into it, or that a second airplane was minutes away from colliding into the other tower.

Every September 11^th I dig up the footage from Youtube and show it to my students. For them, the event is on its way to being as distant as the Kennedy assassination is from me. Not quite yet, but soon, it will be long enough ago in history that children will cease to be emotionally affected by it in the same way that we who saw it unfold were so affected. Most of my middle school students weren’t even born yet. Students who graduated from high school in 2015 were about four or five when it happened. Being aware of it was terrifying, not knowing what was going to happen was terrifying. That day is a reminder that history was once real time, the present, unfolding before us, and the “we” of that former present did not, in the moment, have the benefit of recollection. Staring down at historical events, relegated to the page, gives us a false sense of superiority over them, as though we somehow authored them. We know the ending. In a sense, we don’t experience them as real events. It seems so simple, yet it’s so easy to forget that an historical event was once a real moment in time, all possibilities, pulsating and vibrant and brutal yet somehow naïve, each one graduated second being converted into the past.

The assassination of President Kennedy was the 9/11 of its generation. Or rather, the reverse of that. My generation’s experience of 9/11 happening in real time is comparable to what it must have been like to be alive on November 22, 1963, watching the motorcade make its way through downtown Dallas. When I see the President slump over after being hit, and I see Jackie Kennedy, frantically climbing onto the back of the open car in absolute terror, I’m brought to a stony silence. What must it have been like?

Oliver Stone’s JFK reminds us that movies are a vital, urgent, necessary art form. Those of us who are too young to remember the assassination of President Kennedy are met with the tragic reality of it only through such compelling re-enactments as this film, which puts the actual footage to effective use. Movies can awaken history to us even though most of them are historically inaccurate, and whether or not Oliver Stone’s depiction of the conspiracy theories behind the assassination of JFK are totally bonkers or totally onto something, this film captures the absolute chaos into which we were thrown on that horrible day in Dallas. Stone’s film pulsates with the blood and the synapses of real time, turning “dead historical fact” into an urgent, provocative, spine-tingling, terrifying mystery. At the very least, JFK reminds us that the government’s reaction to Kennedy’s death was wholly inadequate, allowing for the perpetual development of numerous conspiracy theories.

Once you get past Kevin Costner’s bad Louisiana accent (he plays New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison), it’s hard not to be affected by the sincerity of his performance, especially during the compelling courtroom speech he makes at the end. Atticus Finch has become some kind of Messiah in the pop culture for his conscientious liberalism in To Kill a Mockingbird. But the Garrison character as depicted in JFK reaches further, challenging our complacency about government, awakening a deeper obligation to pay attention, to question, to use our own minds rather than accept with docile, childish ignorance, the happy lie that government is always honest, always seeking justice, always promoting truth. That’s our job just as much as it is theirs, and when we turn away from our own duties, we do so at our own peril.

I suppose this is less a movie review than a preachy treatise on the effects of a Hollywood movie. Or maybe, to put it in a better light, it’s an honest outpouring of the impression Stone’s film left on me. JFK is a magnificently entertaining, incredibly well-put-together piece of film. Stone’s ability to weave together archive footage with re-enactments makes him probably one of our greatest propagandists, and even if Stone’s theories about the assassination are false, his style is something to study. He knows how to make an arresting, spine-tingling, deliciously paranoid political thriller. And moreover, his quest for truth doesn’t ring false. The speech made by Garrison in the film’s denouement is as much a direct line of communication from Oliver Stone as anything.

The movie met with considerable criticism upon its release in 1991, and yet it was at least partly responsible for a new policy of transparency regarding official government documents about the Kennedy assassination. Stone’s film gives credence to the dubiousness of certain elements of the esteemed Warren Commission, namely the so-called “magic bullet,” which traveled with more finesse and effect than one of those talking cartoon bullets in Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

The only bad scene occurs after Garrison learns of Robert Kennedy’s assassination. When he wakes up his wife (played by Sissy Spacek) to tell her the news, she’s confronted with the reality that her husband, plagued for years with public skepticism that has affected her own feelings about his work, was right after all. Their feels of validation turn into passionate kissing, and it is more than a little off-putting to think that an assassination serves them as an aphrodisiac. (Spacek, I should note, offers a stunning performance in an ultimately thankless role as the classic worrying wife, one of Hollywood’s favorite stock roles.)

Stone has gathered an impressive array of actors to fill his cast of strange, fascinating characters: Tommy Lee Jones, Laurie Metcalf, Joe Pesci, Michael Rooker, Wayne Knight, Kevin Bacon, Gary Oldman, Jay O. Sanders, Ed Asner, Jack Lemon, Donald Sutherland, Sally Kirkland, John Candy, Vincent D’Onofrio, Walter Matthau, and Brian Doyle Murray.

Jurassic World

Jurassic World delivers exactly what you’d expect. If you want dinosaurs munching on terrified humans, if you’re dying to see a showdown between a T-Rex and a new, hybrid, more-terrifying-than-the-T-Rex monster-dinosaur, you’ve come to the right place. Jurassic World will take care of your needs. Jurassic World isn’t the revelation you might have hoped for (or maybe you didn’t hope for), but it does have some things going for it. It’s easy to like Chris Pratt, and, for those of us who adore the show Parks and Recreation, it’s pretty gratifying to see him suddenly become a movie star. Also, he’s just movie star material. He’s totally sincere, genuinely likable, and projects equal parts toughness and charm. As I was watching him in Jurassic World, playing a raptor wrangler who can communicate on some primeval level with his fearsome, predatory creatures, I thought: “He’s our next Harrison Ford!” And maybe our next John Wayne. Who knows. But he’s also distinct enough to be accepted on his own terms as a legitimate emerging movie star.

Chris Pratt’s likability is enough to carry a mediocre monster movie like Jurassic World. Pratt good-naturedly undercuts the uptight Claire, the executive (played by Bryce Dallas Howard) who runs Jurassic World but, predictably, doesn’t see the dinosaurs as real living things and lacks the proper respect for them. Claire is a woman who’s too dedicated to her work, which means she’s scheduled for a cinematic come-uppance. Her nephews, Zach and Gray (Nick Robinson and Ty Simpkins) are sent to the park ostensibly to teach Claire a lesson about the value of family. Fortunately, there’s quite a good bit of humor written into her character, and she and Pratt have good chemistry together. They’re both good actors making the most out of not-so-good material. As for the movie’s attempts to preach to us about things like family values or the need to respect nature (important lessons no doubt, but hardly credible in a movie that revels in the exploitation of animals and the sadistic slaughter of random humans), the movie only half-heartedly pursues its tired sermonizing, for which I was grateful.

In fact, I think the best thing about Jurassic World is the way it lacks conviction for all those treacly, feel-good moralisms that blockbuster movies push on audiences. One of the coming attractions shown before the movie was that of the adventure film Everest, in which a group of climbers presumably must battle the elements as they descend Mount Everest. Flashing across the screen were BIG THEMES: Love, Family, Passion, Survival. “Never let go” the narrator reminded us, as if we ever had a chance to forget one of Hollywood’s favorite admonitions. Jurassic World plays along with these almost obligatory BIG THEMES, but it never buys into them that much. That’s not because Jurassic World is smart, even though it wants to be. It may simply be a case of lazy writing. Regardless of the reason, in this particular instance, I liked the movie more because it failed to fully endorse those convictions. You get the feeling that someone making this movie—perhaps one or more of the film’s four credited screenwriters, or the director, Colin Trevorrow—wanted to ditch all the standard family schmaltz and just make a sick, depraved monster movie: an ecstasy of Id.

We probably won’t get anything that depraved from a Steven Spielberg-produced blockbuster, since this stuff is always marketed to children. (Not sure I would take a young child to see this one, parents.) However, I will say this about the adolescent characters in Jurassic World: They’re surprisingly not annoying. Nick Robinson is an incredibly likable actor. (If you haven’t seen it, go back and watch 2013’s The Way, Way Back, in which he starred.) And Ty Simpkins is one of the few boys in recent movies to not be either a smart-ass or a completely selfish little monster. He’s believably worried about his parents’ impending divorce, and yet he’s also thrilled/fascinated by the theme park and has obviously read up on dinosaurs before arriving there. In the original Jurassic Park, the kids are incredibly irritating (as they are in most movies of this sort). But you can never feel invested in their well-being, because you know Spielberg won’t actually kill one of them off. They’re safe, and their peril is always just a plot device for the adults to either get killed themselves or “learn something” about the importance of “something.”

One of the things that surprised me about Jurassic World was its blatant theft from James Cameron’s Aliens. Remember the scene in Aliens when the Marines first go into the complex, and we see their vital signs—right next to their names—lapsing on the screen as they’re being bombarded by aliens? Jurassic World duplicates this, twice. Aliens was a much savvier film politically, though. It was easy to see connections to Vietnam, for example. But in Jurassic World, all the talk about “completing missions” and references to the military feels thin. These quasi-political observations have been thrown in for good measure; nobody’s tried to work them into the movie in a thoughtful way.

But I’ll settle for the lightness of tone that we get in Jurassic World. I never felt pummeled or beaten down by it, and the showdown between the two big dinosaurs will deliver for fans of the series. Those of us who could go either way can sit back and enjoy the performances of Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard, both of whom are far better than their material.  

With Vincent D’Onofrio, Irrfan Khan, Omar Sy, B.D. Wong, Jake Johnson, Lauren Lapkus, Katie McGrath, Judy Greer, and Andy Buckley.