Jarhead Movie: Yes or No?

JARHEAD, the movie based upon Anthony Swofford's book, came out on Friday, 4 November.

Any word on whether the movie supports the War Effort or if it is another Hollywood attempt to undermine the military?

I don't want to vote with my dollars and see it if it turns out to have an agenda.

Went to see last night.

Walk out after 30 minutes. (See my bio...I'm ex-Special Forces)

This was not only the worst depiction of military life, but it was a blatant attempt by Hollywood to scare young, intelligent, potential recruits from ever going into the military.

It was exaggerations and lies from the beginning.

Since the vast majority of those interested in service are of a traditional and conservative nature...they first started by filling the screen with as many incredible blasphemies as they could possibly squeeze in (and I'm not just talking cussing...but of vehement anti-god, anti-religious, pro-sadistic language)

Then they play on the fear of brain-washing in a big way. Within minutes of the beginning a thoughtful, intellectual young man (who reads books that other jarheads can't even pronounce) is indoctrinated into a blood thirsty lust for shooting innocent people in the heads and watching the "red puff" through his sights.

There is of course the real branding iron that every person receives from fellow jarheads when joining the military.

An of course my favorite, the barbed wire crawl that every inductee must crawl under while being fired upon with live rounds (which in real life is performed under such safe conditions it is next to impossible to even get scratched by the wire let along shot) yet a panicky young recruit raises his head during training to find the live rounds are not only inches over his "stupid" head, but he takes one in the head, dies, and is cursed out by the drill instructor (which by the way receives no reprimand for his stupidity).

This is a must see movie for all College and University campus's that have justified the removal of any type of recruitment's on the school grounds. It plays into the unreal stereotype they have formed of the US Military.

Don't waste your money.

Here's another review to throw into the mix...From a conservative e-mail list...

Jarhead:
Hollywood Ridicules the
United States Marine Corps

Movie Reviews. SPOILERS. Nov. 6, 2005.

Just in time for Veteran’s Day commemorations of Americans who have died liberating Kuwait and Iraq, the center of cultural terrorism on the Left Coast has lobbed a shell at the United States Marine Corps – and fired a dud. "Jarhead" is a film brought to us by a protege of Steven Spielberg, who joined the barrage this past summer with his own anti-Iraq War propaganda film, an actual live round, called "War of the Worlds." Jarhead’s director, Sam Mendes (husband to Kate Winslet), is a Brit who was recruited by Spielberg to direct the film "American Beauty" after a long career in theater (including as an award-winning director of a rendition of Cabaret). See www.imdb.com/title/tt0169547/trivia Someone thought that made him well-suited to direct an "irreverent" "comedy" (apologetic terms certain reviews have used about this film) about the U.S. Marines and our presence in the Middle East. The producers behind Jarhead secured backing from partially French-owned Universal Pictures (20% owned by French company Vivendi [NYSE: V] and 80% by GE after Vivendi sold a stake to GE via a transaction completed in May 2004. See www.ge.com/en/company/news/press/nbc_univ.htm [the same studio boss, Ron Meyer, remained in charge of Universal Studios and Pictures through the transition]). "Jarhead" is being distributed by the "Hollywood" operations of NBC Universal, which is the same outfit (different divisions) that pollutes the culture with the Jerry Springer Show and broadcasts Queer Eye for the Straight Guy on its Bravo TV network. www.nbcuni.com. Little wonder then that Anthony Swofford’s tale Jarhead ended up with a "Hollywood" screen treatment that could be mistaken for Queer Eye for the Straight Marine.

Jarhead, which the New York Post’s review called a "flop," comes across as little more than a pathetic soft-core porno flick in macho drag, complete with a dance tempo to the sound-track. The film is quite overt about its spin after casting the actor Chris Cooper, who played a former Marine officer who was a repressed and closet gay in "American Beauty," as, gee whiz, a Marine officer (here Lt. Col. Kazinski [the obligatory anti-Patton character]) overseeing a unit of misfits.

Most of the movie has no real substantive plot development underneath countless references to sexual acts mixed in with an overly-long focus on a homemade porno. There is also a masturbation scene followed later by a metaphorical platoon masturbation scene in the form of getting their guns off in the desert after the war ended. The MPAA appears to have missed the boat on this one, and under-rated it. The most over-the-top moment, and the one where, if I wasn’t tasked with reviewing this piece of garbage, it would have been easy to walk out and demand my money back, was a contrived gay orgy of Marines in the desert. That scene was actually the entire point of the film: to ridicule the Marine Corps in general, and mock its policy on gays.

Every form of vice and weakness possible by non-Marines is shown in this film: degenerates, drunkards, wimps, cowards, morons, a criminal, a suicidal maniac, you name it. They all supposedly made it to the front line as Marines. Indeed, there is a scene in the film mocking a situation in which a convicted criminal who lied on his application was going to be drummed out as soon as the war was over. Such criticism of the powers-that-be for letting him, and by implication all others who run afoul of society at home, face death as a Marine but not serve as one after the war, was pervasive in this "soft core" version of "Three Kings." The only time the criticism of the Corps even attempted to go beyond the shallow and nonsensical was when the main character’s spotter (part of a two-man sniper team) ranted about how their mission and purpose had been rendered virtually obsolete by technology.

There is not much more to this ridiculous film, save for some special effects of men walking through burning oil fields. There is little "realism" in this film, except for a hard lesson in how real and destructive Hollywood’s invasion and occupation of American culture can be. Thankfully, in our world, modern U.S. Marines, especially the officer corps, are almost universally morally straight, as well as some of the best soldiers and patriots on this Earth. They bear little relationship to the detritus of Hollywood characters playing Marine on the screen.

Walking into a movie about U.S. Marines during Operation Desert Storm (1991) one should expect the sort of "realism" mixed with political messaging that is found in many war films. In light of Mendes’ role in that Liberal swipe at American middle class values that was "American Beauty," this reviewer expected it to be more like "Platoon" or "Three Kings" rather than "Green Berets." However, that was not enough to keep me out of the theater for this one. After all, regardless of the political spin, many war films naturally have a historical significance (not least for their impact, rightly or wrongly, on popular recollections of wars past) that is enough to keep viewers curious, or even entertained, and ready to marginalize or ignore debatable and absurd political contentions on-screen.

Mendes, himself, trumped "Jarhead" as a metaphor for the current war in Iraq via the British news service Reuters:"I'd like to think there's a huge interest out there because it's part of our daily life," Mendes was quoted on Oct. 31, 2005. Mendes is also quoted on a film scholar’s online site explaining:"Tony's experience in the desert took what we consider normal about war and turned it on its head as if Salinger were dealing with the Gulf War.... What we've tried to do is take the feelings, the impressions, the subjective version of the events to create a different account of this war." See www.emanuellevy.com/article.php?articleID=452.

Salinger crossed with John Wayne? How "different" is this film? You know a "war" film has hit rock bottom when Ty Burr, the film critic of one of the most Liberal anti-military dailies in the country, the Boston Globe, concludes:"Mendes...tells the story of a Hollywood war, and it’s simply not the news we can use" (Ty Burr,"Killing Time," Boston Globe, Nov. 4, 2005, pg. D1). Earlier in his scathing review, Burr wrote (after criticizing a rather implausible treatment on film of the accidental drill-related shooting of a recruit):"Call this what you will – righteous anti-military indignation, left-wing propaganda, sloppy filmmaking – it simply doesn’t square."

We pull no punches here, and are prepared to call it another example of "cultural terrorism," which is an operational concept of the Trotskyite and Anarchist Left (complete with essays on the topic in various works, and even related online forums for young radicals). Jarhead continues an accelerating trend towards "revolutionary cinema" spectacles out of Hollywood, such as Spielberg’s War of the Worlds [where the director and screen-writer publicly explained the film’s overt anti-Iraq War representations], the Matrix trilogy [portraying "revolutionary virtual" Marxist anti-American revolution – and included references in Matrix 1.0 to a French writer, Jean Baudrillard, who has propelled the extreme Left’s "cultural terrorism" movement], Kingdom of Heaven [another film using historical revisionism for anti-Iraq War messaging], and on and on.

"Truth" is relative in Hollywood, particularly so when films are ostensibly based on actual events. It gets even more convoluted in this particular case, since the mother of Lance Cpl. Troy Collier (represented by the suicidal spotter in the movie named "Allen Troy"), is reported by the Associated Press to have questioned some of the events in Anthony Swofford’s underlying publication (see AP,"Mother of Marine depicted in ‘Jarhead’ takes issue"). His mother is quoted by AP referring to the book:"A lot of things in there aren't true."

By the end of this film’s fizzled attempt to get the audience to laugh at the Marines and question the sanity of men enduring the deserts of Iraq, it will have become clear to the filmgoer that the director has actually succeeded in translating the disappointment of Marines who didn’t get to experience much of a "real" war into disappointment by the audience at not having experienced much of a "real" film. Supposedly "irreverent," as one online review called it, I only heard one timid laugh in the crowded opening weekend theater audience. MASH this was not. While Anthony Swofford's 2003 memoir may deserve to sit on library shelves for a generation, this film adaptation went through too many, and probably the wrong, Hollywood hands. Jarhead, the movie, is deep in the "suck," and ranks as one of the worst high-budget studio films of all time.

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