Film reviews

There’s a scene in the film Full Metal Jacket where a raw recruit joins the platoon and is instructed not to leave the path. He is of limited ability and unable to follow instructions. No sooner does he join the platoon than he leaves the path and is skewered in a Vietcong man trap.

In Apocalypse Now there’s a scene where the young soldier, hardly able to follow any orders, wasted on dope, starts shooting wildly. He is out of control, as much a terrified observer as an active combatant.

And in Forrest Gump the hero joins the army and miraculously manages to survive and do well despite being odd and below average in IQ. The way things work out well for him are fantastical. That’s a device used repeatedly in the film.

The war in Full Metal Jacket, Apocalypse Now, and Forrest Gump is the Vietnam War.

You might wonder how men of below average IQ ever got into the army. I knew that people from poor backgrounds, disproportionately black, were most likely to be drafted, but I didn’t wonder at all beyond that. I just watched the films.

Hamilton Gregory

But today I watched a talk by Hamilton Gregory, a man who volunteered for service in Vietnam. He was a college graduate, so he could well have avoided the draft. Many middle class young men did. They didn’t have to try hard; there were exemptions of which they could take advantage.

But Mr Gregory volunteered and as chance would have it, he was ordered to escort another recruit to Fort Benning in Georgia. That recruit was educationally subnormal. He didn’t know that America was at war. He didn’t know in which state he had been born.

Hundreds of thousands of men like him were drafted under Robert McNamara’s Project 100,000. That was the project under which young men of poor IQ were inducted each year.

Robert McNamara

Robert McNamara was the U.S. Secretary of Defence, so it was his call. The army couldn’t get people to go to Vietnam, So McNamara lowered the IQ requirement. He said that the army was one of the world’s best educators, and it could raise the IQs of the draftees. So people who were previously unfit to server were now fit.

In battle they were too slow to react, too slow to understand what was going on, two slow to formulate a plan. They were poor marksmen, erratic and a danger to themselves and their fellow soldiers. And they died in Vietnam at three times the rate other soldiers were killed.

Unofficially, the soldiers in McNamara’s Project 100,000 were called McNamara’s Morons.

Hamilton Gregory was so appalled by Project 100,000 that after the war he gathered evidence and wrote McNamara’s Folly: The Use Of Low IQ Troops In The Vietnam War. And that is what he was talking about in the video I watched.

So now I wonder whether the makers of Full Metal Jacket, Apocalypse Now, and Forrest Gump knew about Project 100,000 and whether they were making a reference to it?

Escape In The Mind

I didn’t really like Forrest Gump that much. I know there was some homegrown wisdom peeking out of that character, some humanity that would not be denied. But I wasn’t fond of the fantastical element because I knew that being saved and prospering is not what generally happens to people like Forrest Gump.

Sure, it has to happen by random chance to someone, even to a person with limited abilities. But still, it seemed like a cop-out, a way of making the audience think that things are good, when in truth they are not.

Reality

In contrast, there’s the film Brazil. It’s fantastical in that the world depicted in the film is odd, odd like in a Kafka novel, but yet near enough for us to be able to recognise it. Life could be like that with just a bit of a shift sideways.

There are the scenes in Brazil where a ninja appears out of nowhere to save the main character. He does so repeatedly. He sweeps in just when things look bad. But in the final scenes, in the end we see that these rescues were an illusion, an attempt by the main character to escape mentally from the horror of torture.

Brazil is depressing. The baddies win and there is no redemption. It’s 1984 in film. But I can live with that more easily than being fed a diet of heroism from characters that were three times more likely to die in war than their fellow soldiers.

What did I think of the film? It was depressing. It’s the story of Judy Garland. It’s the story of a woman with a wonderful voice who was starstruck with her own stardom. It’s the story of a Hollywood mogul who gave her a tough time when she tried to break out of the straitjacket existence in the movies that she signed up for.

It’s the story of a woman who loved her children but would not seek help to get off the pills she had been on since a teenager. The pills were forced on her by her mother. She had pills to keep her thin, pills to get her up, and pills to get her to sleep.

So give her a break, she was messed up.

Yes, OK. I give her a break. But it wasn’t enough for a film. It was a dramatised documentary. And it was all about her, except for the scenes with the gay couple in their flat trying to make a meal for them and her and enjoying the poignancy of each others’ company. That was nice.

When one of them falls asleep on the sofa late at night, his partner talks about how his partner was in prison for homosexuality, and says ironically and knowingly and wistfully that since the change in the law it appears they didn’t do anything wrong all along. Nice social commentary.

Renee Zellweger was very impressive near the end when she moved around the stage. I mean she was impressive irrespective of what character she was supposed to be playing.

And she captured some ‘Judy Garland looks’ and those almost black eyes. But, it didn’t amount to a film. And if it did, it was depressing. No redeeming end, just a very British bit of cake in a cafe with Bernard Delfont’s uptight personal assistant and a nervous band leader.

The worst part of the film were the credits, the credits in gold sparkle against a black background. They seem designed by someone who thought that we the audience would be so stricken by the emotional intensity of the film that we would stare spellbound at the names as they came up sparkle by sparkle and then faded, slowly.

Except that the snail’s pace at which the sparkles sparked and faded was not emotionally charged; it was ponderous.

The names of the producers and the associate producers in sparkles just had me wondering when the lights would go up in the cinema. In fact, I thought, did someone associated with the film insist that venues keep the lights down until those names had passed and the rest of the credits could begin?

The 2014 film Still Alice follows the descent of Alice, suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.

She is, of all things, a linguistics professor at a prestigious American University, and when the film starts she is starting to go downhill. She is only 50 years old.

Alice has early-onset familial Alzheimer’s. The ‘familial’ factor means it is hereditary. And as we learn in the film, one of Alice’s daughters tests positive for the gene.

So in addition to the descent of Alice, there is a long-term ‘death’ sentence hanging over the head of the daughter.

And Alice’s husband has to deal with this tangled situation.

As the film progresses, Alice becomes more incapable. She becomes incapable of even carrying out the plan to kill herself that she formulated earlier.

She promised herself she would kill herself when things got really bad.

She got the pills ready, but now she can’t recall what she was supposed to do.

By the end of the film, she can’t speak and she can’t do very much at all.

Vegetables

Today I chopped a parsnip and put it into some soup. I used our little Kenwood thingy to chop the parsnip up very small, and when I served up the soup my wife Tamara asked me whether it was rice that was in the soup.

I told her it was a vegetable and she asked me what it was. I couldn’t remember the name and I had to reach inside the fridge and hold up a parsnip so she could see it. She said ‘parsnip’.

For a few seconds I felt as though I was hearing the word parsnip for the first time. Not only did I not know it was a parsnip, I was learning parsnip anew.

Then after rolling the word around in my mind, I got back into the swing of things. And the parsnip went back to being a parsnip.

But for those few seconds I had an intimation of what it must be like to be Still Alice, but slipping away.

I was thinking about the film A Serious Man, made by the Coen brothers. The film is unusual because it begins with a short film shot in sepia about a poor Jewish couple in nineteenth century Russia who are visited by a dybbuk (a malicious spirit) that has inhabited the body of a recently deceased rabbi.

The wife is fearful and practical. The husband is ambivalent and hesitant. There is not much to a story but the nub of the story is that the wife is certain that she and her husband will be visited by more bad luck.

Then we segue into the main film A Serious Man about a man who watches his life fall apart around him. Set in the present day, the main protagonist is a middle-aged man, a lecturer at a college somewhere on the East Coast of the U.S. – an intelligent man with a responsible job.

His wife is having an affair right under his nose. Now she tells him she is leaving with her lover.

His daughter ignores and derides him. His son, who is soon to be bar-mitzvah’d, seems to be in a world of his own. His boss at work is enigmatic and disconcerting. His wife’s new boyfriend patronises him.

In the middle of all of this one of his students tries to bribe him to change his grade on a paper. The hero refuses to take the bribe. The student threatens him. The hero talks to the father of the student and the father also threatens him.

Still our hero refuses. He will not take a bribe.

And then he looks around and everything seems to tell him that the smart money is on the people who have no conscience. They prosper.

The student comes to see him again. Sitting in his office, and after saying no, no, no, repeatedly, he gives in and says yes and takes the bribe.

He wants to be seen. He wants to be heard. Taking the bribe is payback time for the pain of being left behind and ignored.

Taking the bribe makes him feel like he joined the human race.

And immediately after the student departs, the phone rings and it is his doctor saying he should come in right away to discuss the results of his latest tests.

Right there he sees the punishment for his sin of accepting the bribe. His life has immediately changed for the worse and he will probably die.

When Bad Things Happen To Good People

He is basically a good man. He has a moral conscience. He tries to do right. He falters and does something he knows he should not.

And this is his reward! That he should be struck down with a serious illness and probably die!

How can this be fair when there are people who do much worse things and don’t suffer any consequences?

They even prosper!

What Is The Answer

Let me ask you something. When you read this sub-heading ‘What Is The Answer’, did you wonder what the answer was? I bet you did. I would. We are all going around in smaller or bigger circles. We think we have it sorted out. We know what is right and wrong, but still…

The protagonist in A Serious Man is Jewish and so are the film’s directors – so it seems fitting to examine the question from the point of view of the touchstone of their beliefs.

There is a thread in the Jewish tradition that teaches that the inclination to do evil is a strange beast. For a man who does what he wants without a thought as to whether it is right or wrong, the inclination to do evil has no work to do and so it becomes lazy, and weak.

But with a man who is striving to do good, the inclination to do evil is really stretched. It is in tip-top condition, so it waits for its moment, and then it slips in and does its work.

And the nearer that a man gets to being a good man, the finer the balance and the greater the consequences for doing a bad thing.

That same thing if done by a bad man will not bring about serious consequences or perhaps even any consequences at all.

Whether this is all true of course, is another question, but we can at least accept that there is logic in the system of thought that holds it together. It is not crazy and illogical, at least.

Of course, a person may accept all this and conclude he can be really bad. Then the chances are that he will get away with just about anything without serious consequences. At least he will do not worse than someone trying to do good.

Way to go!

And that is really the test, isn’t it? – whether one can be a fool when everyone around you is being smart.