#95: FULL METAL JACKET (1987)

 

THRILL SCALE 1-10

6

HAVE I SEEN IT BEFORE?

Yes, 15+ years ago

BEST SEQUENCE

The climax of the boot camp sequence is filmed like a horror movie and it is genuinely chilling

BEST LINE

"Bullshit. I bet you could suck a golf ball through a garden hose." - Gunnery Sergeant Hartman

ROTTEN TOMATOES SCORE

92%

ROTTEN TOMATOES CRITICS CONSENSUS

"Intense, tightly constructed, and darkly comic at times, Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket may not boast the most original of themes, but it is exceedingly effective at communicating them."

IMDB SYNOPSIS

"A pragmatic U.S. Marine observes the dehumanizing effects the Vietnam War has on his fellow recruits from their brutal boot camp training to the bloody street fighting in Hue."

THOUGHTS

• Not only is this our first Stanley Kubrick film, it's also our first war movie, of which there will be several. And I'll admit, the war movies may be a little hard for me to assess. The actuality of the Vietnam War, the sheer destruction and loss that result from any war, the inhumanity that occurred during this time period, these are all pretty heavy topics to unpack in my silly little blog in which I wax poetic about Dennis Hopper blowing up a bus. To assign a Thrill Score to a movie like Full Metal Jacket feels glib at best, insensitive at worst. Just know that we are still treating these movies as movies, and we are not necessarily addressing the concepts behind these films. War is not thrilling, war is not action-packed. War is terrible, and war is Hell
• And to be fair, most war movies take this exact same point of view. Full Metal Jacket has a particular focus on the way war dehumanizes its active participants. We spend the first 45 minutes of this movie going through Marine boot camp, during which the recruits are emotionally disassembled through physical, verbal and mental abuse, only to be reassembled into pliant, obedient weapons. This effect lasts through the rest of the movie, as well. The characters are rarely ever referred to by their actual names, they mostly go by the nicknames assigned by their brutal drill instructor, Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, played by R. Lee Ermey
• Famously, before acting in this movie, Ermey was a real drill instructor and he started as just a technical advisor for Kubrick. He was then cast in the movie, and ad-libbed most of his lines. If you can get past the homophobic, fatphobic and racist abuse he heaps on the recruits, you can definitely find some pitch-black comedy in parts of this performance. He then went on to have a fairly long film career, including as the voice of the main Army Man, Sarge, in Toy Story. I can guarantee you there are some pretty amazing mashups of these two movies out there on the interwebs
• Vincent D'Onofrio appears, also in his first major film role, playing Private Pyle (nicknamed after Gomer Pyle, incidentally, a character from The Andy Griffith Show who went on to have a Marines-based spinoff show). Private Pyle receives the brunt of Hartman's ire, culminating in the above-mentioned climax of the boot camp sequence. Christian Bale and Robert De Niro are always brought up as actors who go through extreme physical transformations for roles, but check out Vincent D'Onofrio! These two movies both came out in 1987! (Full Metal Jacket and Adventures in Babysitting)

• After the boot camp sequence, we then go to Vietnam with the Marines, and the movie becomes a bit more of a generic war movie. There are some notably difficult scenes in which the Marines' utter disregard for the enemy is on full display. They do not see the Vietnamese soldiers, or even the civilians, as human beings; they see them as things to kill, as they were trained. This is the kind of movie in which the concepts of "good guys" and "bad guys" become increasingly murky, even just amongst the Americans
• We end with a fairly tense scene in which an American squad is pinned down by a Vietnamese sniper. They are eventually forced to confront the enemy as an individual person, and they are left with a choice between mercy and indifference. Of the latter half of the movie, this part is definitely the most effective
• When it came out, Full Metal Jacket was somewhat overshadowed by Platoon, which won the Best Picture Oscar for 1986, and which we'll be talking about a little later (it's #72 on the list). On rewatch, I remembered the boot camp sequence pretty well, but I was surprised by how little I remembered of the Vietnam section. I don't think it's the most effective war movie I've ever seen, but the more I've been thinking about it to write this review, the more of an effect it's had on me. This is a very good movie. But I don't necessarily think it's thrilling, at least not in the way I like my thrills. If this description intrigues you, though, I recommend watching it if you haven't

Up Next: #94, The China Syndrome. I know nothing about this movie. Through some light Googling, it looks like it's about a nuclear power plant, but I don't even know if it's a disaster movie or more of an investigative thriller. We'll find out!

#96: BLUE VELVET (1986)

TW: Sexual violence and assault; kidnapping

 

THRILL SCALE 1-10

7

HAVE I SEEN IT BEFORE?

Yes, but it was roughly 15 years ago

BEST SEQUENCE

Candy-coloured clown they call the sandman

NSFW

BEST LINE

"HEINEKEN?! Fuck that shit! PABST BLUE RIBBON!" - This is a fun thing to yell at people you see drinking Heineken, and it's even more fun if you happen to be drinking PBR at the time. Guaranteed to make you a big hit at parties

ROTTEN TOMATOES SCORE

94%

ROTTEN TOMATOES CRITICS CONSENSUS

"If audiences walk away from this subversive, surreal shocker not fully understanding the story, they might also walk away with a deeper perception of the potential of film storytelling."

IMDB SYNOPSIS

"The discovery of a severed human ear found in a field leads a young man on an investigation related to a beautiful, mysterious nightclub singer and a group of psychopathic criminals who have kidnapped her child."

THOUGHTS

• The chilling, disturbing nature of this movie is entirely contributed by Dennis Hopper's performance as the villain Frank Booth. He is a brutal, sadistic psychopath who seems to act entirely on impulse. One gets the sense that Frank Booth himself doesn't really plan his actions any further than five seconds into the future, and that unpredictability makes him a terrifying wildcard
• The interesting thing about this performance is that Hopper is playing it straight, but if you pitch it slightly differently, or you take certain scenes, lines or mannerisms out of the context of the full movie, you could be forgiven for thinking it's supposed to be comical. His excessive vulgarity, especially, approaches absurdity; he swears in nearly every single line of dialogue he has
• His introductory scene, however, in which he physically and sexually assaults Isabella Rossellini, is so bleak and so starkly violent, that it colours the entire performance for the rest of the film. We see what kind of a person he is right away, and it's impossible to forget, even if the character's crassness may be played for laughs in a very different kind of movie
• While he also played a mass-murdering psychopath in Speed, Blue Velvet is certainly a darker movie and a darker performance, partly because of how much more raw and graphic it is. Funny that two of Hopper's best-known villains appear so close together on this list of 100 movies, and I believe this may be the last we see of Dennis Hopper on the AFI's list, unless Waterworld or Super Mario Bros. make a surprise appearance
• Isabella Rossellini, as Dorothy Vallens, is also extremely effective as the woman being terrorized and sexually blackmailed by Frank. She projects such desperation and vulnerability
• Kyle MacLachlan plays our protagonist, and he's good, especially when you can tell he's scared out of his wits by his interactions with Frank. Kyle's budding romance with Laura Dern was fine, didn't do much for me, but it was kind of nice to have a little bit of optimism in a movie like this
• I haven't seen much David Lynch, but I do feel like I have a good sense of his style. By all accounts this is one of his more plot-focused movies, but there are some very bizarre parts to it, including the scene highlighted above. Certainly, this is way more coherent than something like Eraserhead
• Finally, Kyle MacLachlan's urbane college student, Jeffrey, sure does love Heineken. "Man, I like Heineken! You like Heineken?" he says to Laura Dern at the start of one of their dates. I'm sure this trait is intended to say something about his character, but I prefer to think of it as very ill-advised product placement, especially considering Frank's vociferous critique of Heineken when compared to a nice, cold PBR

Up next: Stanley Kubrick has a total of five movies on the 100 Thrills list. We'll be looking at the first of his five, Full Metal Jacket

#97: SAFETY LAST! (1923)

 

THRILL SCALE 1-10

5

HAVE I SEEN IT BEFORE?

Never

BEST SEQUENCE

The climactic building climb

BEST LINE

“...” - Everyone

ROTTEN TOMATOES SCORE

97%

ROTTEN TOMATOES CRITICS CONSENSUS

"Persuasive enough to give audiences acrophobia when they aren't laughing at Harold Lloyd's antics, Safety Last! is a marvel of visual effects and slapstick comedy."

IMDB SYNOPSIS

“A boy leaves his small country town and heads to the big city to get a job. As soon as he makes it big his sweetheart will join him and marry him. His enthusiasm to get ahead leads to some interesting adventures.”

THOUGHTS

• Due to its age, Safety Last! is in the public domain. So if by any chance you do want to watch it, the whole movie is easily available on Youtube. That's how I saw it
• This isn't a very plot-dependent movie, so I'll just describe it. The main character is a department store employee. He has a friend who's really good at climbing buildings. Main character overhears the storeowner say that he'll give $1000 to anyone with a good idea for a promotional stunt. Main character suggests his friend climbing the building will be good for business. Friend gets chased around by a cop, so main character has to climb the building instead. Seriously, that's the plot
• I haven't seen many (if any) silent movies, but this one has Harold Lloyd playing the protagonist, and Lloyd is considered an icon of silent comedy, alongside Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. Lloyd did a lot of the stunts himself, and there was a certain amount of movie magic used to make the stunts less dangerous than they look, but they're still pretty impressive (and by the sounds of it, they were also still pretty dangerous)
• But while this was undoubtedly mind-blowing in 1923, that was also 100 years ago and we've come a long way since then. Watching Harold Lloyd climb the outside of a building is pretty cool, but he's still just...climbing a building. It's not exactly riveting stuff. Apologies to Tom Cruise in Ghost Protocol, which I haven't actually seen
• I'm sure this movie is included in this list for historical reasons, which is understandable and we'll have a few more like it, but they'll be hard-pressed to stack up to more modern stuff, at least in my opinion, which is the sole criterion of this blog
• Side-note, the aforementioned friend who can climb buildings like the dickens is named "Limpy" Bill, which is delightful
• Up above, under best quote, I made a silent movie joke, because I'm a clever boy like that. But there was some good old-timey wit in some of the title cards, and some good sight gags
• For example, in describing the main character's superior: "Mr. Stubbs - Head Floorwalker. Muscle-bound - From patting himself on the back." Something very quaint about that
• And having said that, my favourite part of the movie was probably seeing the depiction of working as a 1920s retail employee. The customers stay past the store's closing time, they fight over merchandise, and they ask annoying questions. As an ex-retail employee myself, I can confirm, some things never change

Up next: #96 on the list, and the first which is mostly thrilling because it's actually pretty disturbing, David Lynch's Blue Velvet. I'm also now remembering that movie titles should be italicized, so...moving forward, they will be!