Weekly Cinemeh

Hello, and welcome back to Weekly Cinemeh. Each week Eshi and I watch a few movies and talk about them here. This week we decided that being depressed is a good thing, so we watched a bunch of war movies.

1: The Deer Hunter
This movie doesn't spend too much time in battle, it mostly deals with people experiencing the worst of it, and what its like trying to cope with the aftermath. It is a very heavy and powerful movie, not just emotionally, but in its depictions of violence and the struggles people have with PTSD. Its a movie about three friends from a small Pennsylvanian town who go to war, get captured and then separated. When one of them, Michael (De Niro), gets home he finds out that one friend has returned and the other is still in Vietnam, so he goes back to find him. Streep, De Niro, and Walken are powerhouses: carrying a lot of the emotional weight of this movie, and doing it well. Everyone knows about the Russian roulette scene, but it is disturbing actually watching it, I haven't felt that uneasy about what was going on onscreen in a while (since our David Lynch week probably). Its a fucked up movie, but that is not a bad thing, it shows the human costs of war, and that is very important. Well worth the watch.

Eshi: If we hadn't recently watched The Wind That Shakes The Barley, this week would have been unbearably bleak. This movie is heavy as shit. It's bleak, almost plodding, in tone and doesn't really make any attempt to lead the viewer. Not so much that you have to find your own way through the story as much as it feels as though the story itself is wandering through a haze. Don't take that the wrong way, by the way, the film is really, really moving and very good. Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep are both super engaging but Christopher Walken, unsurprisingly, steals the fucking movie. He's charismatic, sympathetic and when he falls it is a thing of abject agonizing defeat. I hesitate to recommend any of the movies this week, not because they aren't good they are, but because oh my fucking god its so heavy. So, watch this but be prepared.

2: Full Metal Jacket
This movie is odd since it is essentially two movies in one. The first is a movie about boot camp and what it means to turn young people into weapons. Mostly how it makes a person go crazy by mentally and physically torturing them while telling them that their only purpose is to kill. R. Lee Ermey is amazing as the drill sergeant (especially since he ad-libbed most of his lines) and D'Onofrio as Gomer Pyle showed some pretty excellent range. The second half of FMJ is not quite as impactful as the first, it's a move that takes place during a war on the battlefield, showing these trained killers and how they have become disillusioned with the war. Joker (Mathew Modine) represents this disparity via his job as a war journalist, who basically works for the people in charge of keeping the war going as a propaganda writer and the peace symbol pin on his body armor. This self expressed duality is also shown later in the film in a scene that is disturbing, not because of the violence per se, but because of the juxtaposition of the subject matter. After executing (see mercy killing) an NVA soldier in a way that was described as "hardcore" by his squadmates, Joker and his squad march through a ruined city singing the Mickey Mouse club theme song. Kubrick has always been a master as far as I see, and this movie is no exception to that. Kubrick is good at creating powerful scenes that influence the culture as a whole, and this movie has certainly left is mark

Eshi: The first half of FMJ is spectacular and deeply painful to me. Watching a bunch of meatheaded kids loose their humanity, The Goddamn Master leading us through the reprogramming of these boys. I fucking dig Vincent D'Onofrio, he's the perfect blend of detached intellectual and primal fucking lunatic, and he's pretty good in this film as well. The second half of FMJ always feels a little phoned in to me, which is disappointing. Also, I don't like Adam Baldwin. He bugs me and I feel like he detracts from the end of this one. Still, damn fine movie.

3: Saving Private Ryan
This movie excels at showing the relentless violence that happens in war. The Normandy landing scene is brutal, and the way the violence was displayed in such a matter-of-fact sort of way mirrors the message the rest of the movie tries to portray. Killing is an easy answer, but preventing death is both costly and the only redemption from the darkness that is war. Every time they try to prevent death it results in more death. Normandy, tons of people die. Assaulting a machine gun emplacement so it doesn't kill more people, people die. Letting a prisoner go instead of executing him, he kills some of them later. Trying to get a kid home, results in the death of tons of people. Its a fucked up problem. All of these movies have the same theme, maintaining humanity during war is fucking hard, if not impossible. There are costs to doing the right thing, but doing the right thing is what keeps us from being monsters. Regardless of the bleakness of the movie, it is a good movie. Spielberg is a good director (though maybe a little Flag-wavy since there are only American soldiers in the movie, even though there were a lot more Brits and Canadians in the assualt) and Tom Hanks is a fantastic actor. Its a good movie.

Eshi: I'm glad we ended on this one, it was the least bleak to me. I feel like WWII was the last time the U.S. ventured out into the rest of the world with a motivation not entirely fucking exploitative, and the fact that non-americans played such an insubstantial role (either as a hindrance to the mission or as fucking Nazi's) came off as very disrespectful to me. That said, this isn't about joint operations or bringing people together. This is a movie about an unsettling number of people grinding themselves to hamburger in an effort to do the right thing. It was moving, painful, and the dialog was entirely to fucking quiet (almost blew out the speakers on my TV trying to balance the whispered fucking speech with goddamn mortar fire). I do feel the need to let some poison out at this movie so look out, spoilers ahead. The last words Tom Hank's character says are to Pvt. Ryan, are "Earn this James.... Earn it." And that is the most fucked up thing I've ever heard out of a human being's mouth. You just put the weight of dozens upon dozens of lives on the back of a kid who is maybe, maybe nineteen. It ruins him, the last scene is of Ryan as an elderly man begging his wife for solace, begging to be told that he'd done enough to make up for the lives lost to the mechanisms of war and the guilty consciences of old men. The worst case of crippling survivors guilt I've ever seen on film and it could have at least been mitigated by one (sympathetic, kind, highly humane) character just not being a cunt as he died. I love Tom Hanks, but man fuck his character in this movie.