jarhead

[CJM]

this movie looks like it will be pretty intense. seeme to give an anti-war message, but still has the ability to give war buffs some cheap thrills.

http://www.apple.com/trailers/universal/jarhead/large.html
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0418763/trailers

[Tzar]

it's been a while since they served up a war movie. everyone seemed to stop making them.

hmm looks interesting. i'll wait to hear reviews about it on here before i see.

[Bob]

it looks almost full metal jacketish from the previews. which is a good thing.

you can never judge a movie by its preview these days though, so i'm mostly choosing to keep my mouth shut

[Nuzzolese]

I had never even heard of the book until after the movie was released.

When the marines - or 'jarheads,' as they call themselves - were sent in 1990 to Saudi Arabia to fight the Iraqis, Swofford was there, with a hundred-pound pack on his shoulders and a sniper's rifle in his hands. It was one misery upon another. He lived in sand for six months, his girlfriend back home betrayed him for a scrawny hotel clerk, he was punished by boredom and fear, he considered suicide, he pulled a gun on one of his fellow marines, and he was shot at by both Iraqis and Americans. At the end of the war, Swofford hiked for miles through a landscape of incinerated Iraqi soldiers and later was nearly killed in a booby-trapped Iraqi bunker." "Swofford weaves this experience of war with vivid accounts of boot camp (which included physical abuse by his drill instructor), reflections on the mythos of the marines, and remembrances of battles with lovers and family. As engagement with the Iraqis draws closer, he is forced to consider what it is to be an American, a soldier, a son of a soldier, and a man." Unlike the real-time print and television coverage of the Gulf War, which was highly scripted by the Pentagon, Swofford's account subverts the conventional wisdom that U.S. military interventions are now merely surgical insertions of superior forces that result in few American casualties. Jarhead insists we remember the Americans who are in fact wounded or killed, the fields of smoking enemy corpses left behind, and the continuing difficulty that American soldiers have reentering civilian life.


Yeah it sounds good.

[Bob]

(to rhythm fiction)

well, we dont even know that it's meant to be an anti-war movie yet, i think it's too soon to say that.

unless we do know that it's an antiwar movie, in which case, yeah, it's a good time to say that

[Nuzzolese]

ironically enough, my brother-in-law was suggesting this book to me just a couple months ago

I'm sorry. :(

[jackrock]

i think ill be in line (y)