Horizon

I think Full Metal Jacket suffers from being essentially two different movies stuck together, and not very smoothly.

I can't agree. Kubrick, I think, wanted to highlight the jarring shift from boot camp to Vietnam and I think it works as intended.

Roger Ebert says this:

Stanley Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket" is more like a book of short stories than a novel. Many of the passages seem self-contained, some of them are masterful and others look like they came out of the bottom drawer. This is a strangely shapeless film from the man whose work usually imposes a ferociously consistent vision on his material.

Sigh. Nevermind.

Then again, Vincent Canby said this:

Kubrick's harrowing, beautiful and characteristically eccentric new film about Vietnam, is going to puzzle, anger and (I hope) fascinate audiences as much as any film he has made to date... A film of immense and very rare imagination.

That review goes on to make a similar point to the one I had in mind.

No, it's just too pompous and Doorsy for me and affadavits of realism will only take you so far: you only have to look at Saving Private Ryan to see that. Platoon is awful, I agree- I never liked it and I think I've pretty much grown out of Oliver Stone films though I should think Salvador might still give me a belly laugh. Full Metal Jacket is, as Alan Allport says, two films together though it has that mysterious Kubrick quality of having moments of eye-watering tedium that you are still compelled to gaze at- see his ludicrous Eyes Wide Shut (In fact if I hadn't been sent to Coventry on this blog I would start a thread saying Kubrick: How Many Years Does His High Reputation Have Left?)
The best Vietman films I think are the ones that allegorized (?) the war from other vantage points; there were several westerns but Tony Richardson's Charge of the Light Brigade comes out on top.
Best Vietnam *song*? Does Hendrix's reading of the Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock count? Other than that, it has to be Randy Newman's Yellow Man.

Once in a while, when great filmmakers get old, they seem to stop worrying how much people will like their films and things can get very weird. It's a sort of weirdness not like ordinary weirdness; ordinary weirdness comes from a conscious and direct transgression of some specific norm or generic rule--it may seem weird, but the audience, knowing these norms and rules as well as the filmmaker does, knows exactly what's happening, even if on one level they feel baffled. This kind of weirdness also, as a consequence of this, is obvious and draws a lot of attention to itself.

Then there's this other weirdness in the mature work of some of the greater filmmakers. You can see it in Kubrick and also Polanski. I think the difference is that a young filmmaker will tend to want to rebel, in some sense, against restrictions, whereas someone of Kubrick's level comes to a point where these restrictions are simply no longer necessary. They just set them aside and work largely without reference to them.

That is what makes Eyes Wide Shut perplexing. I can sympathize with anyone who doesn't like it, but to me these rare films are really fascinating. Whatever you think of the product, you don't get to see such mastery very often. (Yes, I think it's possible for something to be masterful and suck at the same time, in some ways.)

Now that I've gone back and read a few reviews for Full Metal Jacket, I think maybe that film was one of his first that began to exhibit some symptoms of this, and I think Canby described it well.

As for Apocalypse Now, I think it's a flawed film, but I can only stand by my original observation that in spite of its flaws it captured something very true about that war, and Coppola deserves a lot of credit for that.

Two cheers for Coppola, then, if you look at the film as a sort of long-winded conceptual joke best summed up by Coppola's speech at Cannes: 'Just like the US Army, we had access to too much money, too much equipment and we got stuck in the jungle and slowly went insane.'
I would have thought you lefties would have seen the exploitation of local labour--I do believe quite a few local shit shovelling crew died in the making: see Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls--and cultural imperialism to lampoon actual imperialism as a source of sardonicism about The Kids With The Beards. I will say that if I see it on the tv I'll hang around for Dennis Hopper- I like 'I'm and American, and you got the cigarettes and that's what I been waiting for.' Hell, I wrote a song about it.

Do you know I still haven't seen Apocalypse Now? Somehow I've managed to avoid it all these years. Not intentionally either.

I'm sure there are people here who will say they always hated Platoon since 1987 but I do think the film has simply dated badly. It genuinely seemed to have an impact back in the eighties when I think there was a yearning for a movie to say that sort of thing. I personally prefer Born on the Fourth of July, which I know makes me profoundly rare but there you go.

I would have thought The Deer Hunter would have been on your list though, Alan.

Kubrick's one of those directors I can't stop watching but I have little or no emotional connection. His films are all incredibly gorgeous to look at but there's no heart.

Believe me I could watch Barry Lyndon and Eyes Wide Shut again and again...but aside from The Shining and Dr. Strangelove I've only felt awe, never love.

The Quiet American is probably the best Vietnam movie, anyway ... BTW, on the subject of war movies, how about From Here to Eternity and The Best Years of Their Lives as the two films best summarizing the American WWII experience?

Best Years of Their Lives is a good film.

Any opinions on Mel Gibson's We Were Soldiers? I made the mistake of watching it after losing a friend, and ended up bawling my eyes out at the telegraph scenes.

Any opinions on Mel Gibson's We Were Soldiers?

Many, all unprintable in a family blog.

I would have thought The Deer Hunter would have been on your list though, Alan.

That's right. The Deer Hunter is a great movie, but it's been many years since I've seen it.

Still haven't seen Born on the Fourth of July. By the time it came out I'd developed an aversion to Oliver Stone.

His films are all incredibly gorgeous to look at but there's no heart.

This is a common opinion about Kubrick, but I've never understood it myself. Kubrick does have a tendency, I suppose, to treat his characters more as interesting specimens than, well, whatever it is filmmakers normally treat characters like. But to me that's never translated into an emotionally numb or empty experience on any of his films except Killer's Kiss,which is pretty awful, and Lolita, also pretty awful. I find Spartacus, the only movie he ever did for hire, to be far less emotionally effective than most of the movies that were really his.

The Quiet American is probably the best Vietnam movie, anyway

Please tell me you are thinking of the Mankiewicz movie and not that wretched thing with Michael Caine that came out a few years ago. The old one isn't on DVD, it seems.

Speaking of Michael Caine, I would nominate Get Carter as his best film.

Please tell me you are thinking of the Mankiewicz movie

Yes, although I didn't think the remake was all that bad actually.

Lolita, also pretty awful.

Really? I think it's Peter Sellers' best role - even better than Strangelove.

The Noyce Quiet American worked for me. Thought it was nicely textured and caught the tone of the novel well.

The Noyce Quiet American worked for me.

Well, what can I say? I'm surprised to hear it.

Perhaps you could explain why the recent (and faithful) Quiet American was "wretched."

I've looked at some reviews and I obviously didn't realize what a controversial thing I was saying.

Maybe this is an eccentric idea, but I don't think faithfulness in an movie has much to do with its quality. In any case, I have to admit that I've pretty much forgotten it by now. It had a lot to do with Brendan Fraser, though.

I agree that faithfulness in a movie doesn't make it good. Probably a good many movies are improved by a little infidelity(?), and there is no worse criticism of a well made film than that it didn't stay true to the book. The fidelity of Quiet American was a bonus for someone unnaturally fond of the novel.

I agree, all that matters is that film is good and that any innovations, excisions or conflations *work*, sadly they often don't.

Get Carter is a great film and Caine is amusing to watch in it.

The Quiet American was fairly faithful to the book EXCEPT that it entirely omits the struggle of Fowler as he ventures toward his "story" and finds the ravine filled with dead bodies. The interaction between Fowler and Pyle at the cathedral(?) is also severely lacking. The remainder, however, was done well.

I have to defend Platoon here, although everyone has bashed it...the veterans of Vietnam claim that this is the most realistic of all of the Vietnam films. Apocalypse Now will always reign supreme, but there are quite a few excellent films out there. Go Tell the Spartans is very good, and Full Metal Jacket is excellent. A lot of people I have talked to think it should have ended with the end of boot camp, but really that is when the true Vietnam experience begins...so I have to disagree and say it stands as is as a successful portrayal of what it takes to "switch" a person into the killer mentality, and the persistence of humanity in the face of war.