Tuesday, February 06, 2007
WAR
Today's NYTimes Best 1176 Films was Oliver Stone's
This is an anti-war war movie. The issues are generic. You could show this today and get about the same resonance with current affairs.
Stone was intimately involved with the Viet Nam War; a middle class kid who volunteered to be in an army drafted up from the unprotected strata of our society—the poor, the minority, the badly educated.
They turn out to be, also, the brave and the good.
The themes here are fairly simple. There is Charlie Sheen, (paralleling his Dad's performance in Apocolypse Now). He is the innocent. Tom Berenger, with that nasty scar on his face is the devil. I could not stop noticing his resemblance to george bush. Really.
Willem Dafoe is the good guy/hero christ figure. If you think that is too heavy, take a look at the billboard on that carton.
Both play on the recruit throughout while we see the 'realities' of a war that we never understood and still cannot comprehend.
Even those of us who were against it didn't really articulate completely why it seemed so evil to us.
Stone helps with this in very specific terms.
There is nothing heroic about this picture, although it does have heroes.
It is a 5 out of Netflix5 as far as I am concerned.
Labels: anti-war, best films
