MUBI

I’m not sure what this is supposed to be considering it being a Kubrick film (hey I just answered my own question [jk, my question is rhetorical]). The first half is just mindless yelling and a bunch of kids training at the marine corps narrated by a lifeless white guy (it’s alright, but lacks any memorable substance). The background skies were nice though, it’s as if Kubrick has total control over the clouds and winds. The second half seems like a typical dispensable war film, but I’m thankful for it not being completely draggy. Some of it just felt unrealistic like soldiers sitting on their beds not doing anything as if they know their being filmed, or how commanders speak to the soldiers (never joined the army, but cummon), the cameraman who films the soldiers lying down and they magically know what to say on the spot… some of it felt realistic like when the Vietnamese Army attacked their base and Private Whoever (notice how forgettable the characters are) said: “I hope they just messing with us. I ain’t ready for this stuff,” I totally got a sense of how he felt facing such a foreign scary moment he’s been preparing for for a while, or when those two soldiers were getting shot by the sniper (their facial expressions are kinda terrifying).

The thing I loved outta all this was the exchange between Joker and Animal Mother (yes, I used an external source to find their names)… they throw each other insults that don’t really seem like insults to me but it was really fun to watch their confidence and their friends ooo’ing and laughing. Things don’t have to make sense to be amusing.

Certainement pas le meilleur Kubrick mais il reste tout de même un bon film. La première partie, composée de l’entraînement donc, est pour moi la meilleure avec l’endoctrinement réalisé petit à petit envers les futurs marines. La seconde partie, celle au Vietnam, est un peu plus classique mais Kubrick n’oublie néanmoins pas d’être subversif, comme il peut l’être, en impliquant le rôle du journaliste de guerre sur le terrain et la perte de l’innocence de tous ces jeunes gens. Deux problèmes toutefois, si j’adore le personnage de Baleine, je ne comprends pas cet acharnement à vouloir ne montrer que les effets de l’instruction envers un seul des personnages alors qu’on est face à un groupe. Kubrick insiste trop sur le fait que l’armée ne fait que ridiculiser des gens, ne fait qu’endoctriner, elle n’est pas uniquement cela pour d’autres personnes. Le second problème réside toutefois par le côté trop classique des séquences au Vietnam. J’entends par là que Kubrick évoque des choses qui ont déjà été faites auparavant et qu’il se démarque en fin de compte assez peu. Mais pas d’inquiétudes, la BO, les acteurs et la mise en scène sont très bien en plus des qualités énoncées ci-dessus.

I just watched Full Metal Jacket for the first time in months. I have seen it five or so times before, but there were so many nuances that I noticed this time through. For instance, in no shot do you see a clear sky. In the outdoor scenes of the basic training section, very seldom is blue sky noticeable, and when it is there are always plenty of clouds, getting darker and grayer as the horizon deepens. Also, on rear Pvt. Joker’s sweatshirt, this can be seen, “DAVIS I T”. It would seem that ‘Davis’ is his last name, but “I T” seems to exemplify how the recruits are seen as objects, not people. That idea is enforced by the opening hair cutting montage, followed by Gunnery Sergeant Hartman replacing their real names with monickers, both instances being prime moments of the recruits being stripped of personality and identity, which I believe is part of the film’s underlying ‘message’.

Full Metal Jacket was probably the only Kubrick movie I wasn’t completely sold on (well, besides Spartacus, but that hardly counts). I thought the first half was genius, but the second half dropped the ball. I had only seen the movie once, and I decided I should give it another go since a lot of my favorite movies didn’t sell me the first time around, and I can say I liked it a lot more this time. I already love the first half, R. Lee Ermey’s ad infinitum skull-fucking, Vincent D’Onofrio’s toilet madness, and Matthew Modine’s John Wayne impression certainly hold up. There is beauty in its simplicity. The second half is more complex, which threw me off, and I suspect throws off other people who share my previous attitude towards this movie. Knowing the curve was coming made it much easier to adjust. A great character that had slipped my memory was Adam Baldwin was Animal Mother, the group’s gung-ho Rambo type who steamrolls buildings with his light machine gun, but never seems to kill much, or much that we see anyway. The movie’s final act truly feels like you’re watching a group of lost souls descending slowly into the fires of Hell, until they finally reach the heart of darkness while marching to the tune of the Mickey Mouse Club. So I can now say I’m sold on this movie, I’m glad I gave it another shot.

I think everyone should see Stanley Kubrick’s later films in the proper aspect ratio they were intended.

That would be nice. I mean, I guess it wouldn’t mean much to some people. A box is still a box. What goes on is all that matters. I guess…

But if you think about it, why would Kubrick choose to make his films, in color, in a full-frame ratio, instead of widescreen or cinemascope? Sure, they are cropped to make it look like widescreen….except it isnt?

Well, moving on….Full Metal Jacket.

It’s not really funny.

Seriously, it isn’t really funny. I’m not sure I find the humiliation of Private Pyle to be funny. Or the DI’s intense barrage of insults and ‘motivations’. Or Pyle shooting the DI in the heart and then blowing his brains out all over the white bathroom walls. Or the group beating of Pyle in his bed with soap blocks wrapped in towels. Or the crassness of the soldiers as they attempt to deal with the death and destruction that is casual and random.

Nope, can’t say that I find the movie….‘funny’….

But you will laugh. Out of nervousness.

The film has two parts. The first part is boot-camp in the marines.

Our narrator, ‘Joker’, as he is called (due to his ‘humorous’ impersonations of John Wayne and sarcastic remarks…) details what happens…sometimes.

It is an intense first part. R. Lee Ermey, a real DI, essentially recreates his role, to stunning perfection. Did I say it’s intense?
His job is to break them and re-mold them into killing machines. That’s his job. Nothing more, nothing less.

Vincent D’Onofrio has a small part in the film, but a big part in the first half, as ‘Pyle’, an overweight and insecure man-child. Not being able to take it, he eventually snaps after rigorous amounts of training. It didn’t help that through some cruel psychology, the dorm mates, angry at the trouble he’s caused them, decide to ‘punish’ him. They tie a gag around his mouth at night as every man in the dorm takes a bar of soap wrapped in a toal and use them as bludgeons as they swiftly beat him. Joker hesitates but is urged on to do so anyway. He complies. Ironically, he graduates and makes it through training. What they didn’t cound on was him going completely nuts. He kills the drill instructor one night in the bathroom, Joker a witness, and the Pyle kills himself.

Then the second half comes around. The second half is incomplete without the first half. Joker has changed considerably, as have most of the soldiers…or have they?

The relative blandness of the characters in the first part is circumvented in the sequences in Vietnam. Joker has become sarcastic. Cowboy, his friend, is a leader though certainly more friendly than his earlier incarnation. Joker’s photographer friend is seemingly timid, though he too is entirely capable of killing. Then there’s Animal-mother, a certifiable gun crazy who almost ruins them all by being reckless, though he sees it as being loyal to the other soldiers. Then again, this is Kubrick, and he truly SUCKS the glory and introspection out from war. The film is clinical. The film is sterile. Despite the people getting shot up and the explosions, Kubrick deliberately adopts the most detached eye possible.

No one is singled out. not really…sure there’s joker, but he’s just a narrator. Really, the characters are vaccuous and cynical, made hard by the absurd Amercian war machine. Surreal scenes further detach the viewer: a man gives a strange speech about his friend, a dead Viet-cong soldie who is sitting beside him; Joker is chastised by a pompous Colonel for wearing a peace button while a trench filled with dozens of innocent dead Vietnamese are all covered in lye. Oddly enough, this is the funnies scene in the movie. Hmm…

Sometimes, when a person gets shot, the film suddenly goes into an intense slow-motion shot, as if to further pull the viewer out of the grittiness and alienate us with the beauty of motion and glassiness of death.
The center-piece of the film is a conflict with a hidden sniper in a ruined building. Two men are gunned down, each bullet followed by a wonderful liquid motion moment, where time slows down the bodies flail about in the air in gracefull slow movements. Of course, it’s horrible, but it’s beautiful. This is a crux…

The soldiers aren’t sypathetic, but they aren’t horrible either. They just are…as Joker says, “alive…”. Just alive. That’s it.

Kubrick is not concerned with the whys or the wherefores. All that matters to him is the result; the consequences. He doesn’t waste too much time explaining why this is happening, or the impetus for any of it.

It is not even ‘documentary’ or ‘verite’ in its style. It’s like adopting a God’s eye, where the viewer is un-affected by it all and totally safe from the events on-screen, so Kubrick doesn’t bother with pleasantries.

In that way, it is a brutal movie. It is so brutal and tense, I can’t quite believe that people find it remotely amusing.

Kubrick is dead serious here. It only draws laughter because it is too real. Hyper-real to be honest.

Realistic reality is un-realistic. But…there are men dying. There are wars….

The ending is so absurd and beautiful in its view on nihilistic tendencies that you don’t know whether to laugh or cry….

“M I C-K E Y-M-O-U-S-E…MICKEY MOUSE! (MICKEY MOUSE!)…..”