Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 07/18/19

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Thursday, July 18, 2019

Full Metal Jacket (Stanley Kubrick, 1987)

Vincent D'Onofrio in Full Metal Jacket

Cast: Matthew Modine, Vincent D'Onofrio, R. Lee Ermey, Adam Baldwin, Dorian Harewood, Kevyn Major Howard, Arliss Howard, Ngoc Lee, Papillon Soo. Screenplay: Stanley Kubrick, Michael Herr, Gustav Hosford, based on a novel by Gustav Hosford. Cinematography: Douglas Milsome. Production design: Anton Furst. Film editing: Martin Hunter. Music: Vivian Kubrick.

Is Full Metal Jacket one movie or two? That debate continues to rage, with a lot of us preferring the first half of the film, about the Marine boot camp, to the second, which follows some of the trainees into combat in Vietnam. Certainly the first half is dominated by the two most memorable performances in the movie, R. Lee Ermey as the drill sergeant and Vincent D'Onofrio as the private driven to madness by the former's training techniques. That inevitably leads to some dissatisfaction with the more conventional nature of the combat sequences, which, though often shot thrillingly, making use of various locations in, of all places, England, sometimes have a war movie familiarity that even a director like Stanley Kubrick can't overcome.