Come Anticipate Jarhead With Me

Alas, American Beauty just gets more embarassing the older you are and Road to Perdition was ass, so I expect this to be just as bad.

xpost so it's abt the first one? huh.

http://www.csufresno.edu/journal/vol7/05/news/ULSswofford.jpg

Why is donnie darko HOTT?

it was such a weird movie. there are moments that are pretty great, and then there are like 1,000,000 more that could be in any shitty war movie ever.

then she's probably very excited about his gay cowboy movie

God, why do hollywood bitches all have such weird mutant boobs

Yeah, that sounds like Sam Mendes! Jams, I warned you...

>apparently donnie darko got a bowflex for xmas or some shit cuz dude is ripped!<

Once you graduate to studio movies, they buy you one, as comedians are the only male 'actors' allowed to star on multiplex screens without six-packs.

http://us.movies1.yimg.com/movies.yahoo.com/images/hv/photo/movie_pix/universal_pictures/jarhead/_group_photos/peter_sarsgaard1.jpg

There is no rule. Men basically can do whatever the hell they want and get away with it, especially if they've already had a bit of fame. I mean do you want me to keep naming people? Russell Crowe has a fantastic gut! Hell, name some non-exceptions of actors who entered the studio system (Gyllenhall has been making studio pix for years, BTW) and suddenly became ripped. Brad Pitt? Yes. You got me there!

No one would ever argue with you if you weren't consistently coming up with giant sweeping rules that make no sense.

Modifying your appearance for one role =/ A RULE ABOUT ANYTHING EVER IN THE WORLD. Fuck weren't you the idiot who brought up Charlize Theron uglying herself up out of the blue on one of the 8 billion other film threads that have degenerated into people yelling at either you or Shakey Mo?

ethan I will have you know I have a dick.

a) joining the marines is for suckers, it'll fuck you up fersure
b) war is awesome, we get to hang out in the desert and be bored but hey we get this cool gear and get to listen to bangin tunes!

the movie wants to be option a -- and apparently this is a lot of what the book is about; i have not read it, but a friend of mine at work is friends with the dude and says he is very much of the option a variety -- but opts for option b. maybe -- MAYBE -- you could argue that the quick cuts/jock jams soundtrack are ironic (there is a meta-scene toward the beginning that seems to set this theme*) but that message is so couched in a pervasive soundtrack (it never ever ever ever stops, including the one mendes-feeling scene which uses nirvana's "something in the way" thereby killing any and all mood) that it's rendered completely moot.

*that meta-scene, which is written about in the new harper's, is about how all war movies -- even anti-war movies -- can pump up a group of marines. the scene involves the duvall helicopter scene from apocolypse now and how the marine dudes watch it and get the opposite of the intended effect. deer hunter is referenced in the same way. that one scene is actually a great one -- it is completely pornographic and over the top in a wonderful way. but then the movie goes on to feel like every other movie ever. is this a meta-criticism of war movies? maybe on some really disguised level...

the movie starts off GREAT, but then 15 minutes in there's the first musical montage, and it's of boot camp. the guys are learning about the cool shit they'll be doing, etc, etc, and it's RIGHT THEN that the heart of the film gets completely lost. those first 15 minutes set it up to be one thing, and then it contradicts it the rest of the way. a VERY strange film in its ordinariness.

Fuck that in the ear.

No no Dan it is "Catch-22" with naked hunk-butt instead of jokes

I bet my wife will make me see this anyway.

Then we send a few guys downtown to rent all of the war movies they can get their hands on. They also buy a hell of a lot of beer. For three days we sit in our rec room and drink all of the beer and watch all of those damn movies, and we yell Semper fi and we head-butt and beat the crap out of each other and we get off on the various visions of carnage and violence and deceit, the raping and killing and pillaging. We concentrate on the Vietnam films because it's the most recent war, and the successes and failures of that war helped write our training manuals. We rewind and review famous scenes, such as Robert Duvall and his helicopter gunships during Apocalypse Now, and in the same film Martin Sheen floating up the fake Vietnamese Congo; we watch Willem Dafoe get shot by a friendly and left on the battlefield in Platoon; and we listen closely as Matthew Modine talks trash to a streetwalker in Full Metal Jacket. We watch again the ragged, tired, burnt-out fighters walking through the villes and the pretty native women smiling because if they don't smile, the fighters might kill their pigs or burn their cache of rice. We rewind the rape scenes when American soldiers return from the bush after killing many VC to sip cool beers in a thatch bar while whores sit on their laps for a song or two (a song from the fifties when America was still sweet) before they retire to rooms and fuck the whores sweetly. The American boys, brutal, young farm boys or tough city boys, sweetly fuck the whores. Yes, somehow the films convince us that these boys are sweet, even though we know we are much like these boys and that we are no longer sweet.

There is talk that many Vietnam films are antiwar, that the message is war is inhumane and look what happens when you train young American men to fight and kill, they turn their fighting and killing everywhere, they ignore their targets and desecrate the entire country, shooting fully automatic, forgetting they were trained to aim. But actually, Vietnam war films are all pro-war, no matter what the supposed message, what Kubrick or Coppola or Stone intended. Mr. and Mrs. Johnson in Omaha or San Francisco or Manhattan will watch the films and weep and decide once and for all that war is inhumane and terrible, and they will tell their friends at church and their family this, but Corporal Johnson at Camp Pendleton and Sergeant Johnson at Travis Air Force Base and Seaman Johnson at Coronado Naval Station and Spec 4 Johnson at Fort Bragg and Lance Corporal Swofford at Twentynine Palms Marine Corps Base watch the same films and are excited by them, because the magic brutality of the films celebrates the terrible and despicable beauty of their fighting skills. Fight, rape, war, pillage, burn. Filmic images of death and carnage are pornography for the military man; with film you are stroking his cock, tickling his balls with the pink feather of history, getting him ready for his real First Fuck. It doesn't matter how many Mr. and Mrs. Johnsons are antiwar - the actual killers who know how to use the weapons are not.

We watch our films and drink our beer and occasionally someone begins weeping and exits the room to stand on the catwalk and stare at the Bullion Mountains, the treacherous, craggy range that borders our barracks. Once, this person is me. It's nearly midnight, the temperature still in the upper nineties, and the sky is wracked with stars. Moonlight spreads across the desert like a white fire. The door behind me remains open, and on the TV screen an ambush erupts on one of the famous murderous hills of Vietnam.

I reenter the room and look at the faces of my fellows. We are all afraid, but show this in various ways - violent indifference, fake ease, standard-issue bravura. We are afraid, but that doesn't mean we don't want to fight. It occurs to me that we will never be young again. I take my seat and return to the raging battle. The supposedly antiwar films have failed. Now is my time to step into the newest combat zone. And as a young man raised on the films of the Vietnam War, I want ammunition and alcohol and dope, I want to screw some whores and kill some Iraqi motherfuckers.

Two places where I thought it could have been great:
- the Texan starts talking shit about old white men and how we gave Saddam all his weapons, Saarsgard cuts him off with 'Fuck politics, we're here.' But Mendes never bothers to choose a viewpoint, or explore either one, it's just dropped.

- the last sniper scenario with Saarsgard and Gyllenahl. They both sell their desire for the kill, it's a pretty great scene in the pacing and acting (maybe the only one after Ride of the Valkyries that's directed and edited well) - but other than constant references to wanting a kill from everyone in the platoon, we're never sold on why they want the kill so bad. JG is picked essentially at random, their training is brief and irrelevant. Why did it mean so much to him? The movie desperately needed to get inside his head more.

http://www.fmforums.co.uk/forums/index.php?showtopic=41392

Do Marines (or SEALs for that matter) masturbate without ceasing on deployment? Yes, but they don’t engage in homoerotic sexual simulations and naked revelries.

So surely he speaks!

Call me crazy, but I thought this was one of the few great scenes thanks to Saarsgard's performance. From where they leave until they meet up with the final camp was the best extended sequence of the film by far.

Meanwhile, screenwriter Broyles embroyled in plagiarism charge...

'Jarhead': Whose Stories Are They?
By DAVID CARR

Joel Turnipseed, a former marine who wrote "Baghdad Express," a memoir of the first gulf war, was sitting in Minneapolis watching "Monday Night Football" with his wife last week when a commercial for the film "Jarhead" came on the television.

"Jarhead" was directed by Sam Mendes and is based on Anthony Swofford's memoir of the first gulf war. The commercial showed marines in the desert hurrying to don their chemical protection gear. One of the characters, Troy, played by Peter Sarsgaard, put on his hood and turned to another, Swoff, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, and in his best Darth Vader voice invited him to "come to the dark side."

Mr. Turnipseed said he was shocked. "I turned to my wife and said, 'Honey, there is something funny about that,' " he said in a phone interview. "That scene is in my book, not Tony's," he added, referring to Mr. Swofford.

A little later on in the game there was another commercial for the film, this one depicting a scene in which a marine colonel gives a motivational speech to soldiers under his command. Much of the scene and some of the dialogue, Mr. Turnipseed recalled, seemed to come directly from the opening pages of "Baghdad Express."

The next day, Mr. Turnipseed went to see an advance screening of the movie. He says he saw enough to convince him that his book had been used for at least part of the movie without credit.

"I turned to my friend during the movie and said, 'I have always wanted to see my book on the big screen and there it is; I just didn't get credit for it,' " said Mr. Turnipseed, who served as a truck driver with the Marine Corps for about 90 days in 1991.

William Broyles Jr., the screenwriter and former marine who adapted Mr. Swofford's book for the movie, said that Mr. Turnipseed was confusing his own experience with the received wisdom of being a marine.

"The joke about the gas mask has been told 10,000 times," Mr. Broyles said by phone. "It is not his joke or mine."

Mr. Broyles admits that there are coincidences. But he says they are just that.

In Mr. Turnipseed's book, a colonel "burst onto the stage, grabbing the microphone from its stand while still in stride, like Wayne Newton doing Patton."

In the shooting script for "Jarhead," stage directions command that "Lieutenant Colonel Kazickis mounts a makeshift stage, grabbing a microphone in mid-stride like a Vegas M.C." What follows is a profanity-laced scene of call and response that is remarkably similar in both plot and language to the scene that follows in Mr. Turnipseed's book.

Mr. Turnipseed said he was loath to raise questions about a film and a screenwriter he holds in high regard.

"There is no way that I am going to come out ahead on this," he said. "The guy who says 'you stole my stuff' is always the jerk, but this is not something that is based on a scene I did; it is verbatim dialogue."

Mr. Broyles, the screenwriter, said he was sympathetic to Mr. Turnipseed's concerns, but he was equally firm in defending the integrity of the work he did on "Jarhead."

"I feel bad that he feels bad," Mr. Broyles said, adding that he had read and admired "Baghdad Express." "Maybe some of it stuck in my mind or maybe it was already there," he said.

"I don't have any conscious memory of using anything out of his book," Mr. Broyles said. "I can remember reading it and thinking, this guy really has it down. It was one of those unintentional coincidences that is frustrating for him, but there has been no effort to take anything from him."

Stephen Sheppard, a lawyer retained by Mr. Turnipseed to look into the matter, said, "We have been engaged by Joel, and it is a case that we are taking sufficiently seriously to explore alternative approaches to resolving this."

For his part, Mr. Swofford said that there was a similar scene in his book and that many of the elements of the speech in question are common to experiences in the Marine Corps. "The speech that Bill wrote for the script is part of the great officer's opera that has gone on for generations," he said. "The repetition and variation and appropriation are part of commander-speak. Bill heard it prior to fighting in Vietnam, and I heard it numerous times fighting for the Corps."

Mr. Broyles said that in truth the scene belongs to no one and to everyone who has ever served.

"These are not my stories, not Tony Swofford's stories or Joel Turnipseed's stories," he said. "These are stories that are held in common by all marines."

Steven McElroy contributed reporting for this article.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

The movie, however, is pointless. I mean, why was it made? It lacks Swofford's sensibility, without which the book is another chronicle of boredom and griding drudgery in the armed forces. For the first hour, there's at most two minutes of conversation between the principles. We don't get a sense as to why they give a shit about teach other.

The actors are fine. Jamie Foxx plays the black drill sergeant as if Lou Gossett, Jr. had never won an Oscar. I remain astonished by Peter Starsgaard, who creates a character out scant material, hobbled by that affectless John Malkovich-esque voice. Gyllenhaal, shorn of hair so that his eyes and fingers are mannered and comically exaggerated like the subject of a mannerist painting, has it in him to suggest the Camus-reading smart-ass of Swofford's book but is hobbled by Sam Mendes' pedantic direction.

saarsgard though, is really interesting, b/c of the same reasons he was interesting in almost everything in, his quietiude, his exactness, and his subtlety...

The most annoying thing about all of it, however, is the music, the interminable, referential, wink-wink music, and then when Swoff complains "this is vietnam music! can't we get our own music?!" over The Doors, the curtain goes up, Mendes & Broyles are standing there giggling incessantly at their own cleverness and any sincerity the audience might have wanted to squeeze out of this parade of one contextless moment after another is stirred right in with the diesel and set on fire.

I mean fuck it, King Arthur has more meaningful things to say about volunteering to go off and fight in foreign countries.

you've got to be joking. not only for me - i'm rofling all over the HOUSE - but also for your sake. i mean, that's the lesson you learned from the film?

i thght it was a great movie. maybe not as GR34T as full metal jacket, but very moving.

this thread >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> this movie