Yet Another Cycling Forum
Off Topic => The Pub => Arts and Entertainment => Topic started by: GruB on 05 October, 2008, 09:13:20 pm
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I bought Jarhead today for 3quid in Woolworths.
I have always enjoyed war stories, the more factual the better. I normally enjoy the story in the written format but following the brilliance of Black Hawk Down and Saving Private Ryan I thought I'd give Jarhead a go.
It is not the death, but more the battle with survival and the finality of it when you get it wrong. The special effects are normally brilliant too.
I see war as a bit of a competition. One side vs the other.
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I like a war film, the less action the better. MASH, Catch 22, Ice Cold in Alex and Paths to Glory.
Damon.
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I found the books of Blackhawk down and Jarhead to be far better than the films.
On the other hand I did prefer the TV series of Band of Brothers to the book.
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Battle Picture Library.
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Tora Tora Tora every time...
...who was it who famously said that everyone wonders what it would be like if they went to war? Hemingway?
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The Fortunes of War
..and I'll tell the plain
are a wooden leg
or a Golden Chain
Written anonymously soem 300 years ago, but still true
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My recent reading has been all WWII, in that the 3 books I bought to take on holiday with me were Stephen Ambrose's 'D-Day', Knut Haukelid's 'Skis against the atom' (Telemark), and George Macdonald Fraser's 'Quartered safe out here' (Burma).
I have to say that no amount of filmic entertainment could ever come close the the memoirs in those books. Haukelid and Fraser, from the perspective of the man on the ground, and the meaning (or lack of it) from their point of view, are particularly worth reading. Fraser's view of where British society has gone since the war is also interesting.
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I have never seen the fascination of war films (or indeed books) as a genre. There are exceptional examples of course, and many films set against the backdrop of war that are superb, butI find most 'war films' dramatically tedious, historically inaccurate and often morally offensive - Black Hawk Down being a case in point. It's not much more than propaganda.
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FM,
I agree the films appear to contain a high propaganda content, but that is also part of the psychological draw to them. I have no desire to be running around getting shot at after watching one, but I do on the other hand stop and think about those that do simply from watching a film.
Jarhead was very similar to my favourite book - Sympathy for the Devil by Kent Anderson. Here were two highly trained individuals that started to question the war and the ludicrousness of the situation.
I love reading but at present I don't have time to enjoy it. I would have loved to read Jarhead rather than watch it, but hey ho.
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I like them too although I do worry about the perspective they offer at times. I really enjoyed the Band of Brothers (?) series for example. I do tend to enjoy most historical movies/series I have to say.
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"We Were Soldiers" is my favourite modern war film. It depicts a single battle in the Vietnam war and shows the chaos and carnage of war along with the randomness of death. It shows the battle from both sides and does not really seem to have a political axe to grind as with so many Vietnam movies, it is instead about the behaviour of men under fire. On of the few films with Mel Gibson in that I like.
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Grub if you want a factual war movie you have to watch this one Conspiracy (2001) (TV) (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0266425/), Conspiracy (film - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_(film))
"fifteen high-ranking members from all areas of the Nazi government - soldiers, economists, administrators and lawyers...The issue before them is to determine a solution - a final solution - to the Jewish problem"
There is not much of action/special effects going but boy the this run shivers down my back, top movie.
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The advantage of war as a setting is that it provides its own disjointed narrative, there are moral decisions to be made against a complex evolving background. The plot can be arbitrary because it is driven by incident. My favourite war book is Naples 44 by Norman Lewis, about his experiences as an intelligence officer. It has been optioned as a film and a director has been appointed, bound to be a disappointment though.
Damon.
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I think my favourite war book is Catch-22, and my favourite war films are A Bridge Too Far and Dambusters, and I'm ashamed to admit I have a soft spot for Escape to Victory.
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What about really bad war movies ? Two that spring to mind are the infamous "Green Berets" about Vietnam staring John Wayne and the crap because it had no budget and was pieced together from bits of other films "Mosquito Squadron" .
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For my money you really can't beat "Johnny Got His Gun", an oldy but a goody(but I notice they have just remade it!).
Johnny Got His Gun (1971) (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067277/)
For a light hearted side to the first Iraq conflict I really enjoyed "Three Kings", especially the exploding cow....
Three Kings (1999) (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120188/)
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I'd probably say Catch-22 for a book as well.
Films, hmmm. There's one scene in Hamburger Hill that hit me (bloke with legs blown off trying to get up to carry on fighting) and I'll always watch Full Metal Jacket (which is really two films in one).
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Then there's Das Boot, the only war film to be condensed into a Techno Dance track.
YouTube - U96 - Das Boot (http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Nwc0shJ2aYc)
Damon.
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Das Boot, now that you remind me Damon!, is a favourite of mine. I can't help watching it whenever it is on TV.
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I searched on 'Das Boot' because I much prefer the 6 part TV series and I always thought that the film was a condensed version of that, it turns out that the film came first and the TV series was an expanded version using unseen footage. There are various long edits and director's cuts about. On interesting fact is that the sequences shot in the submarine hull with the crew running were done with a custom made Gyro-stabilised mount for an Arriflex 35 mm camera, it looks like camcorder footage but it is 35mm. The Gyros were so noisy that some dialogue had to be dubbed later. They had a mocked up U Boat and one day they turned up to shoot and found that someone had hired it to Spielberg for Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Damon.
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In France the series was what I saw first; with my grand dad in fact, on holidays in Le Pouliguen! I was a kid but still remember it. We watched it in B&W on our holiday TV. Then I discovered the movie version.
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As Tiermat mentions - "Johnny Got His gun" is pretty incredible really, I haven't seen it for 20 years I bet but it made a lasting impression.
I grew up with "The World At War" documentary series. I loved them then and I loved them last month when they were repeated back-to-back. One of those rare "epic" documentaries.
Nothing really competes with the realism (and therefore horror) of reality I find.
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From what I understand from recent films.......
Only american soldiers sailors and airmen were involved in WW2
Only american soldiers seaman and airman did anything brave in WW2
All bravery on Land Sea and Air was performed by Americans
All secret work was done by americans
America saved the world.
(Did I miss anything?)
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The Axis forces were there too to give the Americans someone to fight with.
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From what I understand from recent films.......
Only american soldiers sailors and airmen were involved in WW2
Only american soldiers seaman and airman did anything brave in WW2
All bravery on Land Sea and Air was performed by Americans
All secret work was done by americans
America saved the world.
(Did I miss anything?)
You missed out the Brits, who did try to help but generally were so posh they were unintelligible, and they were all well-meaning bunglers.
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From what I understand from recent films.......
Only american soldiers sailors and airmen were involved in WW2
Only american soldiers seaman and airman did anything brave in WW2
All bravery on Land Sea and Air was performed by Americans
All secret work was done by americans
America saved the world.
(Did I miss anything?)
Burma was liberated single-handedly by Errol Flynn. Important FACT*
* I saw it on telly, so it must be true.
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[
Burma was liberated single-handedly by Errol Flynn. Important FACT*
* I saw it on telly, so it must be true.
Yes the 2.5 Million Indian soldiers rarely get a look in, maybe there's a Bollywood war movie about them.
Damon.
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A quick Youtube search reveals an episode of 'It ain't half hot mum' which touches on this subject, it should provide Flying Monkey with something to write about.
YouTube - It Ain't Half Hot Mum - Being Japanese (http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=NkWjwrQvHWQ)
Damon.
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The 14th (Indian) army has been referred to as the 'forgotten army', and the Burma campaign as the 'forgotten war'. Even when reading Fraser's book, I found myself going 'why have I never heard of x...?'
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I have never seen the fascination of war films (or indeed books) as a genre. There are exceptional examples of course
Therein lies the problem with "genre" as a concept, as far as I'm concerned - I don't get the idea of liking something simply because it conforms to an archetype. I like some war films but not others. I like some romantic comedies but not others.
But genre is not only an unhelpful concept, it can also be very misleading - what do Casablanca, Catch 22 and The Longest Day, for example, have in common apart from a WWII setting? Apocalypse Now, Jacob's Ladder and Platoon apart from Vietnam?
d.
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what do Casablanca, Catch 22 and The Longest Day, for example, have in common apart from a WWII setting? Apocalypse Now, Jacob's Ladder and Platoon apart from Vietnam?
d.
Can we have a clue? I'm struggling a bit with these.
Damon.
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FM,
I agree the films appear to contain a high propaganda content, but that is also part of the psychological draw to them. I have no desire to be running around getting shot at after watching one, but I do on the other hand stop and think about those that do simply from watching a film.
Jarhead was very similar to my favourite book - Sympathy for the Devil by Kent Anderson. Here were two highly trained individuals that started to question the war and the ludicrousness of the situation.
I love reading but at present I don't have time to enjoy it. I would have loved to read Jarhead rather than watch it, but hey ho.
I'm mid forties, so probably grew up watching the same war films as everybody else. I remember as a child cheering when a German pilot was shot down in "Battle of Britain" only to be told off by my parents as "he was fighting for his country"...
I think the last war themed film I saw was "The Pianist", I was watching the Germans shelling Warsaw the night we started bombing Iraq.... nowadays I try to avoid stuff like that. I can't stop thinking about the ordinary people who's lives are destroyed, usually because of some scumbag politician.
Have you read the sequel to "Sympathy for the Devil" ? "Night Dogs", in which Hanson/Kent Anderson joins the Seattle Police ?
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Yes. It is much darker. I would like to get the short stories too, but haven't yet.
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Yes. It is much darker. I would like to get the short stories too, but haven't yet.
I was reading a fairly scary article yesterday (Rubicon in the Rear-View, Part I: Militarizing the Police by William Norman Grigg (http://www.lewrockwell.com/grigg/grigg-w49.html)) about troops coming back from Iraq & Afghanistan and being given accelerated entry into various US police depts.
Didn't know he'd done short stories as well. Time to hit Amazon.
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Have you seen the series Over There?
Set in Iraq, I thought it was pretty watcheable.
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"We Were Soldiers" is my favourite modern war film. It depicts a single battle in the Vietnam war and shows the chaos and carnage of war along with the randomness of death. It shows the battle from both sides and does not really seem to have a political axe to grind as with so many Vietnam movies, it is instead about the behaviour of men under fire. On of the few films with Mel Gibson in that I like.
The book is very good, but the film is utter trash. Completely. (And it only covers the first half of the book).
It's a Randall Wallace screenplay(Braveheart, Pearl Harbour). The only thing that's remotely like the book, is the Sgt.
It's the only movie I ever wanted to walk out of the cinema from.
"Black Hawk Down" wasn't the propaganda piece I expected. The release was rushed after 9/11, so I was expecting a big stars & stripes piece, but there was remarkably little of that.
On the DVD one of the commentary tracks are by 2 of the soldiers who were there, which also makes for compelling listening. (And funny at times, as they are not afraid of saying when the film is taking liberties with what happened).
All-time favourite is probably "A Bridge too far".
(Dr.Stranglelove doesn't really count as a war movie, otherwise it would be no1.)
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It's not much more than propaganda.
War films, like any other films, are just that - films. They are meant to be enjoyed as entertainment. They are not documentaries. Some films have a higher degree of factual content than others. There have also been many films about war that have conveyed anti-war messages - Deer Hunter, Johnny Got His Gun and Full Metal Jacket spring to mind.
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I'm of the post-Vietnam generation, who grew up watching the movies that were made in the 1980s (The Deerhunter just scraping in for continuity's sake) as America came to terms with what it had been through, or more accurately, what it had done. The sense of alienation portrayed in these films was inevitably seductive to an adolescent, quite apart form any sense of empathy one might feel for a drafted teenager. So I watched Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Apocalypse Now et al, and perhaps inevitably, subconsciously identified with the Americans.
I can't watch them any more. After several trips to peacetime Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, through the Tunnels of Cu Chi, along the DMZ and into the Killing Fields, those films make me so angry that I have to switch them off. It's the self-indulgence of them, the incessant portrayal of America as a victim, which grates so much. For sure, they are considerably more watchable than "Comrades marching towards the front", or "Women's Brigade of Da Nang, Onwards!", and I can understand the alienation of a 19-year-old GI from some shit-kicking Midwestern dorp who found himself in a firefight in the Mekong Delta, then, years later, getting flashbacks in his local bar.
But the Viets are inevitably portrayed as sub-human in a way that feels horribly like the old Tojo posters of the Second World War. The sadistic camp guards of The Deerhunter, the primitive Montagnards of Apocalypse Now surrounding Kurtz, the double-crossing ARVN in the execrable TV show Tour of Duty. Even self-proclaimed anti-war films like Platoon portrayed the locals as possessing some kind of innate Oriental cruelty that began to contaminate good old American boys into commiting atrocities. Rarely, if ever, did any of these films dwell on the real victims: the Vietnamese, or begin to show them as fellow human beings, capable of suffering and pain just like any other.
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Well said Jezza, curiously one of the few films to engage with the Vietnamese is Good Morning Vietnam, and it has a good soundtrack too.
Damon.
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Well said Jezza, curiously one of the few films to engage with the Vietnamese is Good Morning Vietnam, and it has a good soundtrack too.
Damon.
I was reading Jezza's post and the immediate film that had sprung to mind as a little bit more humanising of the Vietnamese was Good Morning Vietnam. It kinda starts with that initial belief and stereotyping (by the characters) before the descent of the Americans and the 'Who is the enemy?' conversation in the back alleyway.
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Sympathy for the Devil may appeal to you Jezza, based on your post above.
It is not your normal war book. Far from it.
Many of the integral characters are Montangard Tribesmen.
Montagnard - French Lit. "Mountaineer" Originally from Polynesia, they were the original inhabitants of the coastal region of Vietnam
The book is from the view of a Special Forces cadre and they are heavily entwined with the Montagnards. They both loathe the regular army.
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Rarely, if ever, did any of these films dwell on the real victims: the Vietnamese, or begin to show them as fellow human beings, capable of suffering and pain just like any other.
Hardly surprising since most films about the Vietnamese war have been made by Americans.
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It's not much more than propaganda.
War films, like any other films, are just that - films. They are meant to be enjoyed as entertainment. They are not documentaries. Some films have a higher degree of factual content than others. There have also been many films about war that have conveyed anti-war messages - Deer Hunter, Johnny Got His Gun and Full Metal Jacket spring to mind.
Your reply suggests that you don't understand the term 'propaganda' and why I used it in the context of that particular film. And, BTW, nothing is 'just' anything, I'm afraid, however much you would want it to be so. Your view (in the first two sentences) is either very naive or simplistic here. Films like any other cultural product, have all sorts of purposes - overt and covert, explicit or implicit. They also exist within a cultural context that influences the way that they are viewed and understood by audiences. You then go on to contradict what you said in the first two sentences with the observation that many films about war have an anti-war message (well, of course)... and there was I thinking that they were 'just films' and weren't about anything... make your mind up!
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I was in Durness in the far North West of Scotland in August, the RBS Screen Machine http://www.hie.co.uk/special-feature-rural-cinema-north.html was parked up in the village square. We'd got talking to a couple of lads from Zurich the previous night and together we got talking to the Driver/ Projectionist, our friends jokingly asked if he had been to Switzerland, he said he had, on the way to Bosnia. The MOD had hired the truck to entertain the troops there, so we asked him what the troops liked best. The reply was Chicken Run, always went down a wow apparently. The mobile cinema had gone down so well that the MOD had bought their own and it is now in Iraq. On a different tack. I was impressed by a film on BBC 3 the other night about a soldier in Afghanistan, 'Jack, A soldier's story' largely from the filming point of view, It might come round again or it is on I Player and in 10 minute segments on Youtube. YouTube - Jack: A Soldier's Story 1/6 (http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=oNvJf6Vj460&feature=related)
Damon.
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Rarely, if ever, did any of these films dwell on the real victims: the Vietnamese, or begin to show them as fellow human beings, capable of suffering and pain just like any other.
Hardly surprising since most films about the Vietnamese war have been made by Americans.
Well, I was specifically talking about American movies made about Vietnam. However I don't think it should be automatically assumed that a war movie has to portray the enemy as somehow sub-human. The spate of films made in the thirty or so years after the Second World War underwent a transition from the kind of mindlessly jingoistic hun-bashing of the war years to something more considered, where you might actually see a degree of empathising with the other side. One that springs to mind is Tora Tora Tora, which clearly shows the Japanese perspective in a very similar way to the American one - they have heroes and villains, incompetent leadership and everything else.
Good Morning Vietnam does present a more human side, from what I recall, but it's definitely veering towards the 'war as entertainment' side of things. One of my favourite films is The Killing Fields - less of a war movie and more a movie set in a war - which traces the story of a friendship between an American and a Cambodian. Interestingly, while I found that it attempted to address the issues of cultural interaction between two people in a very bold way, when I watched it with my Cambodian friend she found it hugely patronising. 'Nothing to forgive,' says Pran at the end to Sidney Schanberg, who has come back to find him in a refugee camp, and she almost yelled out 'Yes there is! You caused this, then you abandoned us, and now you come back saying sorry to make yourselves feel better'.
I'm reading 'Dispatches' by Michael Herr at the moment, which is an excellent read. I shall look out for 'Sympathy for the Devil' now as well.
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It's not much more than propaganda.
War films, like any other films, are just that - films. They are meant to be enjoyed as entertainment. They are not documentaries. Some films have a higher degree of factual content than others. There have also been many films about war that have conveyed anti-war messages - Deer Hunter, Johnny Got His Gun and Full Metal Jacket spring to mind.
Your reply suggests that you don't understand the term 'propaganda' and why I used it in the context of that particular film......
I think I have understood very clearly indeed.
And yes, of course a film can be both entertainment, and contain a message. Even a kid's film like Shrek can manage that.
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I think I have understood very clearly indeed.
And yes, of course a film can be both entertainment, and contain a message. Even a kid's film like Shrek can manage that.
Well, then I have no idea what you thought you were trying to say in the original message. It clearly isn't what you actually said! This makes it rather difficult to have an intelligent conversation...
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I have never seen the fascination of war films (or indeed books) as a genre. There are exceptional examples of course, and many films set against the backdrop of war that are superb, butI find most 'war films' dramatically tedious, historically inaccurate and often morally offensive - Black Hawk Down being a case in point. It's not much more than propaganda.
I'd agree with your last point, and add Saving Private Ryan to the list, a film that purports to be anti-war but is in fact about American heroes.
As for the fascination of war films and books... it's a cultural reflection of the times. Maybe a sort of catharsis or a re-writing of history to make it more palatable. I grew up in the shadows of WW2, yes, even in the 70's it loomed large in the collective conscience. War comics were the norm and war films were on tv all the time. That particular war has passed on with the generation involved in it.
<edit.... I've just read the remainder of this thread and seen that you've made this point very eloquently upthread>
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I'd agree with your last point, and add Saving Private Ryan to the list, a film that purports to be anti-war but is in fact about American heroes.
An interesting point about Saving Private Ryan is that it attempts to justify the US habit of killing their prisoners through the role of the German they spare. This policy is something the US usually glosses over. It's a point that most would not pick up from the film. Well produced propaganda can be enjoyable and informative, it should encourage us to explore the background and deconstruct the values we are being invited to swallow. But first we must see the film as it is without imposing an idealogical template over every incident.
Damon.
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I'd agree with your last point, and add Saving Private Ryan to the list, a film that purports to be anti-war but is in fact about American heroes.
An interesting point about Saving Private Ryan is that it attempts to justify the US habit of killing their prisoners through the role of the German they spare. This policy is something the US usually glosses over. It's a point that most would not pick up from the film. Well produced propaganda can be enjoyable and informative, it should encourage us to explore the background and deconstruct the values we are being invited to swallow. But first we must see the film as it is without imposing an idealogical template over every incident.
Damon.
In saving private ryan the men depicted are rangers - US army commandos
The depiction of them preparing to shoot a prisoner was simple revenge on there part and should not be confused with the practice of simply killing all the enemy troops as you take a position as part of of a final assault. Rangers, the US airborne, the Paras etc would all find them selves operating forward of there own lines and the tactical doctrine was and still is that if you take on an enemy position you kill everyone in it as you do not have the manpower to process prisoners and you can not take the risk of letting them go
The killing of unarmed prisoners did go on during the war, especially if the enemy put up to much of fight prior to being over run but it was not only the US who did such things
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A fair point Zoidburg, I was thinking of this passage from Naples '44 by Norman Lewis, a Field Security Sergeant in North Africa and Italy in WW 2.
'September 28th.
Admitted to the American 16th Evacuation hospital at Paestum with malaria......Most of the patients have battle wounds, and from several of these I have received confirmation of the story I found so hard to believe, that American combat units were ordered by their officers to beat to death Germans who attempted to surrender to them. These men seem very naive and childlike, but some of them are beginning to question the morality of this order. One man who surrendered to a German tank crew was simply stripped of his weapons and turned loose because he could not be carried in the tank, and as a result he is naturally a propagandist for what he accepts as the general high standard of German humanity.'
The Rangers would be a special case, but Saving Private Ryan brings the issue into the open more than is usually the case in US films.
The effect of the reputation that the US gained was to produce series of reciprocal atrocities, Malmedy was one committed by the SS. http://www.30thinfantry.org/malmedy.shtml Here is an extract from an account of that incident.
'Between 1500 and 1600 hours vehicles of Kampfgruppe Peiper fired into the bodies lying in the field as they passed through the crossroads. But amazingly there were survivors of the massacre. Of the original members of the 1st serial of B Company a total of 55 men survived the ordeal. Some of the soldiers escaped during the initial attack and some escaped after they were captured. Some of them were recaptured by other German units, (they did not say anything about the shootings at Baugnez until after the war for fear they would be shot for being a witness to a war crime), and some made it to friendly lines to tell of the shootings. The last one took four days to make it to friendly lines.
When these men told their tale of the shootings at Baugnez, it enraged the Americans and inspired them to fight with conviction and with little compassion towards the enemy, especially towards SS or Fallschirmjäger soldiers. In fact, there has never been found a written order by a German commander to kill American prisoners, but there were orders written by American regimental commanders that directed that all SS and Fallschirmjäger would be shot on sight.'
Damon.
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The fact that a standing order was issued is one the US would like to forget
The SS and Fallschirmjager order may was probably well founded
The SS - well they were the SS so thats fair enough but the Fallschirmjager were known to be used for for special taskings and if they showed up it usually meant trouble, these are the same guys who rescued Mussolini and who also lead a large break out from the the eastern front after being parachuted in to relieve the encircled german forces, no mean feat
The Germans did operate the same policy towards the british SAS troopers as well
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Biscari was an instance of US soldiers being tried for shooting prisoners Biscari massacre - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biscari_massacre)
That was around the time of Norman Lewis's account in the campaign in Sicily. I'm not out to make any point other than that the issue is touched on in Saving Private Ryan and that that is unusual, I was sensitive to that point having read something of the background previously. The reference to Patton in the account of the Biscari incident reminds me of the fantastic central performance of George C Scott in the film Patton. YouTube - Patton Speech (http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=YDecLiA_Qbw)
Damon.
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It's not just soldiers that US troops are known to freely dispatch. I remember hearing of US troops amusing themselves by trying to hit japanese civilians as they committed suicide by jumping off a cliff. Korea also, and of course by the time they got to Vietnam the media had a free reign to report this kind of thing. I'm under no illusions that only the US are capable of this.
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I think I have understood very clearly indeed.
And yes, of course a film can be both entertainment, and contain a message. Even a kid's film like Shrek can manage that.
Well, then I have no idea what you thought you were trying to say in the original message. It clearly isn't what you actually said! This makes it rather difficult to have an intelligent conversation...
Propaganda can be used when making a film - such as in the 1945 German propoganda film Kolberg. I have also watched many films with friends and family who have not been aware of the message contained within a film. For them, it was entertainment only. I would not judge them any less for this.
I also think that the message contained within a film is subjective - it can be interpreted differently by different people. On this very thread, the film Saving Private Ryan has been described as both an anti war film, and a portrayal of American heroism. The message is therefore not absolute. It can be further complicated if mixed with other genres such as satire, which may make the message more ambivalent.
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So you don't disagree with me after all. Good. :)
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So you don't disagree with me after all. Good. :)
;)
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I also think that the message contained within a film is subjective - it can be interpreted differently by different people. On this very thread, the film Saving Private Ryan has been described as both an anti war film, and a portrayal of American heroism. The message is therefore not absolute. It can be further complicated if mixed with other genres such as satire, which may make the message more ambivalent.
And surely it can be both at the same time. Individuals can be heroic even if war itself is an abomination.