Posted on 07/18/2021 2:07:26 PM PDT by Rummyfan
Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket is often remembered as essentially being two movies. Its bravura bootcamp sequence made an unlikely superstar out of the late Lee Ermey and launched Vincent D’Onofrio’s journeyman career. In contrast, most viewers saw the film’s second “half,” (actually the longer of the two parts), as being much more disjointed and difficult to follow. However, I believe Kubrick’s goal in crafting Full Metal Jacket, was to create a “shadow” version of 2001: A Space Odyssey, his epochal 1968 film. All of Kubrick’s post-2001 films make references to 2001 – some obvious, some subtle – and Full Metal Jacket is no exception. Lining up Full Metal Jacket’s structure with 2001 creates some fascinating parallels.
Full Metal Jacket was co-written by Kubrick, Michael Herr, and Gustav Hasford, the author of the novel, The Short-Timers. In his introduction to the illustrated screenplay of Full Metal Jacket, Herr, the author of Dispatches, his acclaimed 1977 “new journalism” look at Vietnam, and the co-screenwriter of Francis Ford Coppola’s epic 1980 Vietnam film Apocalypse Now, wrote that when Kubrick first began his collaboration with Herr in 1980, he asked Herr if he was familiar with Carl Jung’s concept of the “Shadow.” Herr assured Kubrick he was.
(Excerpt) Read more at pjmedia.com ...
“WHAT IS YOUR MAJOR MALFUNCTION, PRIVATE”?
I thought Full Metal Jacket was told in 3 acts, not 2.
Private Joker: How can you shoot women and children?
Door Gunner: Easy, you just don’t lead ‘em so much! Ain’t war hell?
I’ll have to smoke some more weed and think about that for a while Hal.
All of Kubrick is watchable.
Even the ponderous Eyes Wide Shut had some interesting things to say about the reality with which we’re presented and the existence of an economic/political uberclass which is not answerable to the laws and morays of “average” people. Sound familiar?
>> By 2001, it seemed quite reasonable that there would be giant space-stations in orbit round the Earth and — a little later — manned expeditions to the planets.
>>In an ideal world, that would have been possible: the Vietnam War would have paid for everything that Stanley Kubrick showed on the Cinerama screen. Now we realize that it will take a little longer.
With or without the war, the Left was always against spending money on sending Man into Space when they had demographics to spend money on back here on Earth.
Rev. Jamel & Bob Johnson - Walking on the Moon (Men Are Starving) (1971)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HhjFMse8jM
My recall from the release of Full Metal Jacket is that critics didn’t like it much and thought it was a lesser work. They certainly thought Platoon was the much better film.
It was the first Kubrick film I saw on first release in the theater.
Dr. Strangelove was my favorite. I was about 11 years old when it came out. My older brother was a huge Peter Sellers fan. Initially my mother would not let us go to the movie because of the movie’s title. We talked her into going to the movie with us and we gave her the option of taking us home if the movie was about sex. She laughed as hard as we laughed and stayed until the end when Slim Pickens rode the H-bomb with his cowboy hat on.
>>Dr. Strangelove was my favorite. <<
“There is no fighting in the War Room!”
Classic!
I remember a growing media drumbeat that Apollo, space travel, etc was immoral spending and a waste of money. We should be shoveling it into urban America. That spending was moral. I remember Ralph Abernathy driving (supposedly!) some covered wagon down to the Cape to protest during one of the last Apollo launches. It got almost as much if not more coverage then the Apollo launch. The media was tired of “space” and wanted to sell that to the public. It also had too many white shirted white geeks on TV, that’s not cool either.
The Kubrick Stare.
They always wanted the money spent on more and more social programs .... like the War on Poverty. How has that worked out for us?! Think of the benefits that were reaped from the space program. In computer technology alone these benefits far outstripped any costs.
Two totally different movies... apples and oranges.
Newsweek
As brutally unsparing as “Platoon” was, it was ultimately warm and embracing. Kubrick’s film is about as embracing as a full-metal-jacketed bullet in the gut. [29 June 1987]
Full Metal Jacket actually takes place in an alternate universe where Private Gomer Pyle is assigned to Sgt. Hartman instead of Sgt. Carter.
Well, it is all about sex - Colonel Jack D Ripper, General Buck Turgidson - but to an eleven year old? I think I saw it about that age and I didn't realize it was a comedy till the second or third viewing....
Funny thing is they make such bloody good cameras.....
TV Guide Magazine
A perversely fascinating movie—one that answers no questions, offers no hope and has little meaning. In a way this is perfect for what the film has to say about war, but you find yourself numbed and apathetic as the film progresses.
Wall Street Journal Julie Salamon
By most standards of conventional film narrative, this movie is a mess. [25 June, 1987, p.22(E)]
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