Full Metal Jacket
This morning I took the kitties to the vet for their annual checkup. Jefferson meowed the whole way there, especially on the elevator in my building. The elevator terrifies him, for some reason. I once was carrying him around and wondered if he'd like to come down with me while I checked my mail. As soon as the elevator doors opened he flipped out, and I had to take him back inside.
Anyway, my cats have had dental problems since they were kittens, and it turns out they need some dental work, and Jefferson needs a tooth pulled. Poor guys. Other than that I guess their teeth are not too bad; they don't have any trouble eating, after all! And they eat dry food. So I will probably take them in in the next couple of weeks to get their dental work done.
Jefferson is still a couple of pounds overweight, but Newton is just about right. This is ironic considering that the vet looked up a recommendation for how much food they should be getting, and I'm feeding them a little more than half that amount. So I guess I need to play with them more and get them more exercise. (Sort of like a certain human who lives in the apartment with them.)
The cats always behave really well with the vet, taking their shots without any fuss, and allowing themselves to be picked up and carried around. I think the vet is always kind of surprised at this.
But they're basically in pretty good shape for four-year-old kitties, and that's good.
I have rarely worn turtlenecks in my life, and it was kind of weird to have this thing constricting my neck, although not nearly as bad as wearing a tie. But I rather liked it, all-in-all. Perhaps I'll buy a couple more for my winter wardrobe.
Full Metal Jacket is Kubrick's Vietnam film. It's a peculiar movie; it's not really a story, it's a series of vignettes, most of them involving a young recruit (and later military reporter) nicknamed "Joker". The first third of the film involves Joker going through basic training for the Marines, followed by a series of short takes, and finally an extended sequence where his unit deals with a sniper firing at them.
It was hard for me to find the meaning in this film. The most I could come up with was that it's about the terrible things the soldiers in Vietnam had to go through while fighting a war that was essentially a waste of time. Joker witnesses an awful lot of ugliness and loss before - I suppose you could say - finally losing his humanity, although the climactic scene is extremely ambiguous and it's impossible to judge Joker's actions one way or the other, given the situation he was placed in.
(Yes, I admit it; I'm one of those who basically regards the Vietnam War as a massively tragic policy mistake. Although I realize there are those who feel the war was winnable and that the army was betrayed by the peace movement in the US, I can't get behind that position. In hindsight, it seems to me that the very premise of the war was fundamentally flawed, and that the fault lies with those who got and kept the US involved in Vietnam for ten years.)
Strangely, the film bends over backwards to establish a link between war and sex, although it doesn't really do anything with that link. It's just part of the atmosphere. But after a while I was thinking, "Yeah, yeah, I get the idea." Overall, I found it more annoying than anything else.
So I was not terribly enthusiastic about the film. It just seemed like a very stylish and technically adept production hung on a rather thin story which had trouble finding its purpose. Perhaps it was a solidly realistic film, but I don't find realism to be enough of a raison d'etre for a movie. I guess I'd place Full Metal Jacket somewhere above A Clockwork Orange in Kubrick's body of work, but all-in-all I'd say that Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan is a clearly superior film.
|
|
|
|
