Screen

...Full Metal Jacket lacks such inspired wit, substituting heavy-handed satire on American soldiers in Vietnam: the Marine colonel who looks askance at "Joker's" mildly iconoclastic display of symbols tells him not only to "get on the team," but also, "Inside every gook, there's an American struggling to get out...

...This is inconvenient in a narrative medium like film, although Kubrick at times has gotten the better of the problem...

...And I'm doing it with James MacGuire, a friend of mine from Portsmouth...

...But it was told me by someone very close to him, who is also a Catholic...

...Compare Platoon's handling of batdefield atrocities by a desperately troubled, resentful Southerner (Kevin Dillon) and Kubrick's cartoon of a one-dimensional helicopter gunner in Full Metal Jacket...

...1 evenge of the Nerds, H...

...No idea ties together the first and second half of Full Metal Jacket --except, may'be, the novel notion of man's inhumanity to man...

...Well, yes, there is something of a bitter comment on machismo linking the first half and the Hue Sections...

...For example, Kubrick has a fetish for abstract dramatic structure...

...But Kubrick doesn't have enough ammunition to sustain the whole film with such reductive strategies...

...It has some of the genuine strengths of director Stanley Kubrick, but all of his weaknesses as well...

...Everyone was packed into Mass, and he got into the back of the church...

...To such authority, Kubrick might listen...

...To read the obituaries of Andy Warhol is too see how badly we need the kind of perspective on contemporary art that a study of the Futurist movement gives us...

...God does not ask anything from us that we cannot give Him...

...Jaws III (The Revenge...

...He probably considers himself a satirist ih the grand tradition of the eighteenth century, borrowing from Thackeray's nostalgic vision of that time, recalling Swift in his anger...

...He was sitting there with a bottle, getting ready to leave, when he saw a young priest running in the street...

...Thomas More, and I keep next to the screen of my word processor a postcard of the Holbein from the Frick Museum, the famous portrait of Thomas More...

...Ping Pong has more substance but also disappoints...

...While the acting and subject are appealing, the film just doesn't grow on you...

...He went to the edge of town and had a drink...

...But here they had a guy with the stigmata, and the crowds were starting to come...

...Despite a strong beginning, the film founders on too much mock-heroic and writer/director Juzo Itami's 458: Commonweal tendency to slip away from the main plot...

...True or not, we enjoy the illusion of free will, and, as Dr...

...More standard English film noir comes from the spy thriller, The Whistle Blower, so elegant in texture that I kept waiting for George Smiley to show up...

...Beverly Hills Cops I1...

...Now I really should have A. J. Liebling or E. B. White there, but I refer this to a higher authority perhaps than another journalistic buddy of mine might do...

...Rita, Sue, andBob Too is audacious, vulgar, equally offensive and delightful...

...That's a true story...

...The acting and feisty screenplay (by Andrea Dunbar) make the girls' exuberance and suffering compelling...

...Even character continuity is minimal...

...ure, Full Metal Jacket has some good moments, but it is too abstract, uneven, and fractured to work as compelling drama...

...Pardon my violation of l critical principles, but do I really have to see __ __ these films (again, in effect) to tell you they are worthless...

...His hands would bleed at the moment of the elevation of the host...

...The noodles are finally all properly cooked, but they have no place to go...

...Johnson would say, "There's an end on it...

...Some scenes in Hue give the clichrsporadic Power, but, except for the concluding encounter with a sniper, they lack dramatic shape...

...Worse, he has little to put in Ermey's place...

...All of a sudden it all began to fall into place, that it wasn't just a lawyer's brief on how to make it all the way, but an interpretation of how it had all come about...

...I suppose I have a fairly Manichean imagination, and I tend to divide things into good and evil...

...What is it that is so rational, obvious, logical about a dandelion or a butterfly...

...it is tedious...

...The priest ran right up to him and said, "I have a message from Padre Pio...

...In his eighteenth-century costume drama, Barry Lyndon (1978), his attitude toward character was no different from in Full Metal Jacket...

...SCREEN I I SATIRED OLJT 'FULL METAL,' 'TAMPOPO,' ET AL...

...The Whistle Blower puts stars Michael Caine, John Gielgud, and Nigel Havers (the lordly hurdler of Chariots of Fire) through a maze of moral ambiguities worthy of Le Cane...

...It speaks only to the converted...

...Worst of all, as inA Clockwork Orange (1975), Kubrick's camera too frequently delights in gory images to suggest the kind of steady anti-war stance of his early classic Paths of Glory (1957...

...You know, someone once complimented Winston Churchill on a speech he had just made and said, "Winnie, how long /I did it take you to write that...

...Sheen is spunky, and her struggle to get the relatives to accept "hyphenation" is apropos...

...But the reasons for the family's initial resistance and final submission seem inscrutable...

...Its BOOKS novelty is point of view: the title's m~nage d trois is seen from a feminine perspective...

...a Chinese-American version of the same subject occasioned last year's The Great Wall...

...As someone else might put it, I believe in that shit...

...There was no clearly explained narrative link between the appearance among apemen of a mysterious monolith in the first part, the exploration of the moon by contemporary astronauts in the second part, a space voyage to 14 August 1987:457 Jupiter in the third, and the strange para-physical passage, "Jupiter and Beyond," in the fourth...

...Full Metal Jacket at its worst embarrasses anyone interested in challenging Ramboism...

...At present, Kubrick has half its power...

...Some critics have said Kubrick's problem is his distance from America...

...So they sent him to a very remote parish in Italy that was hard to get to --precisely because they didn't want headlines saying, you know, THE AMAZING BLEEDING PRIEST...

...At the moment of the elevation, sure enough, Padre Pio began bleeding...

...In Full Metal Jacket Kubrick splits his film in two, initially covering harrowing basic training for Marine recruits and moving into Vietnam later...

...But here he forgets to provide a link, even mystery or suspense, to pull us from one part to the other...

...The message is this: Be at peace...

...Although a core of recognizable soldiers is drawn together around them in the Tet retaking of Hue by the Marines in the second half, there is no Platoon-like set of characters unifying the whole film...

...In an age of mechanical inventions that were transforming human experience --the automobile and airplane, typewriter and telegraph --both the space of the canvas and of the book-page were reconceived...

...More recently, Kubrick has salvaged his growing lack of interest in drama, character, and morality with comic depictions of superhuman machines...

...Interesting...

...Such universal misanthropy is not just repulsive...

...Art that adhered to classical genres --portraits, landscapes, the novel, lyric poetry --was thrown over for an art that questioned the power of paint or words to represent the world...

...the dark underside is the squalor of lower-class British life...

...14 August 1987:459...

...Anyway, Graham Greene, who is a rather complicated Catholic --I have no window to look into another man's soul, but he's a pretty skeptical dude --heard about Padre Pio, and he went to visit...

...i Timothy Maturer tradition even for the avant-garde...

...Perloff finds in Futurism some of the most crucial developments in modern art and literature, such as the breakdown of the prose/poetry distinction and questioning the power of art to represent reality...

...The Catholic church has taken pains to keep the Shroud of Turin quiet...

...I don't believe in ghosts, but I do believe in miracles...

...You know, the church is very wary of miracles...

...He says he has absolutely nothing against skeptics except --and here's the very Chestertonian trademark --they're not skeptical enough...

...Modine explains by referring to "the Jungian duality of man...

...Rita (played by an elfin-faced Celt, Siobhan Finneran) and Sue (Michelle Holmes) are late teens and lower class...

...Billed as "the first Samurai Noodle Western," it concerns the widowed owner of a restaurant (Naboko Miyamato) who needs help perfecting her fare from a truck driver (Tsutumo Yamazaki) who looks like a Japanese Gregory Peck...

...but here, no Strangelovian "Doomsday Device" and no HAL computer come to his rescue...

...Such fare is traditional but classic...

...Marinetti published his 1909 Futurist Manifesto not in Italy but in the Paris Figaro, and conversely Apollinaire's L'Antitradition futuriste (1913), with its poster-like arrangement of typography and its call for the suppression of "poetic grief.., syntax, punctuation, lines and verses, houses, boredom," was published, not in Paris, but in Milan in a bilingual edition...

...TOM O'BRIEN The past & present of futurism arjorie Perloff's The Futurist Movement . is the kind of scholarly book that should be bought in bookstores as well as checked out of libraries...

...As noted, he drops the sergeant fiat...

...Perloff thinks that the seminal importance of Futurism has not been recognized because the Italian Futurists were later associated with Fascism, and so their innovations in collage, manifesto, sound poetry, typography, and poetic forms have been neglected by later critics who disliked the tone or politics of their declarations...

...Summer at least has brought some foreign films which provide alternatives...

...Their ultimate lesson is to beware smooth-talking males, both suburbanites and lyrical Pakistanis, whose subculture is treated in an aside...

...He found himself observing her ear, this perfect, delicate little ear, and he decided this was not an accident, not a random accretion of molecules --it was designed...

...A still more important reason for this neglect is that prior to this book there has been no critic ambitious enough to synthesize the materials in English, Italian, French, and Russian in order to assess Futurism's influence...

...He does that rather well...

...Here's a true story told to me by a very good friend of Graham Greene, concerning Greene and Padre Pio...

...But Kubrick's distance is not measurable in oceans so much as emotions...

...They wanted to secrete him...

...t's very hard to say what goes into writing, whether it be religion or anything else, for that matter...

...I'm a big fan of St...

...It's actually happened that when, in the course of doing a magazine piece or whatever, I'm tempted to fudge a quote --if I think, Well, this quote doesn't do exactly what I want it to do, so I'll just fix it up -then I look at More and I unfudge it...

...In truth, such arithmetic makes for nullity...

...We will not laugh war away with such an absurd lampoon...

...A vivid account of the pre-World War I period of Futurist art, it shows us how the art of our time developed...

...Kubrick's moral ambivalence is summed up by his treatment of "Joker...

...I believe in Darwin and Genesis...

...they fall for the bawdy charms of middle-class Bob (George Costigan), who has been repelled by his frigid wife...

...As we all now know, any Marine who speaks loudly and with enough display of absolute conviction can compel broad audience attention...

...Churchill said, "Six hours.., plus seventy years...

...I'm not sure if Greene has ever told it -he rrtay possibly still be freaked out...

...Of the recruits in the first part, only "Joker" (Matthew Modine) and a minor character, "Cowboy," are seen fighting in Vietnam...

...I'm writing a play on the life of Edmund Campion, the Jesuit martyr under Elizabeth I, whose life was illuminated to me by Evelyn Waugh's book on Campion...

...I find nothing contradictory in the theory of evolution and Christianity...

...One doesn't have to go to Tierra del Fuego to know the trip there may be unpleasant...

...I believe in genuine evil...

...When Kubrick so empties the personalities of his characters that they seem to be no less determined than robots, he commits the imitative fallacyi mimicking their lifelessness, he achieves it in his films...

...This handsome, colorful book comes with more than seventy illustrations and with enthusiastic blurbs from avant-garde artists like John Ashbery and John Cage, as well as many distinguished academics...

...Modine wears both a peace symbol and a helmet inscribed with the phrase "Born to Kill...

...Language and morals are both loosein this English blend of bedroom farce and coming-of-age...

...The nationalist barriers of language and politics had to be overcome to assess a moment in history when a genuine international community of art was a reality...

...After watching Brideshead Revisited, he had the idea to do a saga of the recusants, a term from the sixteenth century used to describe one who refused to attend the Anglican services...

...A young Anglo-Chinese lawyer (Lucy Sheen) in London's Chinatown must execute an old businessman's will that requires his family to come to terms with their ethnic heritage...

...Of course, Kubrick is not interested in character, or continuity, but idea...

...Here, for example, in the basic training segments, his indifference to the insides of character fits the content: the precise goal of Marine drills is to eliminate character, to refashion identity down to the nicknames imposed on the recruits...

...And I was very grateful to such a sturdy and robust atheist as Mencken for having come up with the sentence: "The Latin church, which I find myself admiring more and more despite its frequent, astounding imbecilities, has always kept clearly before it the fact that religion is not a syllogism but a poem...

...And there are a number of miracles associated with his life, which are the subject of a fairly fascinating book, recently written...

...Some critics have earned their stars by claiming that "Joker" combines the good and evil sergeants in Platoon in one character...

...otherwise, he wore,gloves...

...there the puppets were just more gorgeously costumed...

...He located the village on a Sunday...

...Platoon embarrassed Ramboism...

...He says, "It seems to me fine to say that you cannot believe in God because you can't see him with your senses...

...Superman IV...

...Kubrick ends his basic training segment with the explosive resolution of his story of two key Marines, a drill sergeant who is a virtuoso of infantilizing sadism (played by Lee Ermey, an actual former basic training instructor) and a fat, dumb recruit whom Ermey nicknames "Gomer Pyle...

...But Augustan satire was as secure in moral norms and aesthetic means as it was harsh in its indictment of society...

...But I'll tell you something very concrete...

...Without emotional depth to either half of "Joker," two times zero remains, resolutely, zero...

...Watching The Exorcist was for me a truly horrifying experience...

...Padre Pio, who died not long ago, was an Italian priest who received the stigmata early on, and he became as such almost an embarrassment to the church...

...Without denying Warhol's talents, one may be surprised to see him praised (as Newsweek did) as the artist who saw that modern culture consisted of massproduced images (from Campbell's soup cans to photographs of an assassination...

...In 2001 (1968), this meant an abrupt four-part division of the action...

...Some of the asides are hilarious, and a running gag involving a gangster and his moll provides a superb scene of mock-erotic fun...

...Outside Hue a Marine colonel demands to know what these conflicting symbols mean...

...And I keep it there for a reason: He keeps me straight...

...And he left...

...As Pauline Kael has remarked, it's apt that a director with such a mechanical vision of humanity created his best character in HAL, whose swan-song when disconnected ("Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true") is the most pathetic moment in any Kubrick film...

...Tracing such a concept back to the period before 1914 reveals that there is a long THE FUTUNIST MOVEMENT AVANT-GARDE, AVANT GUERRE, AND THE LANGUAGE OF RUPTURE Marjorie Perloff University of Chicago, $24.95, 288 pp...

...There's a line in Orthodoxy, which I shall now render clumsily, and it's Chesterton's answer to the scientific denunciation of the existence of God...

...He has lived for over two decades in London, in whose abandoned East End slums Hue was recreated for the film...

...They take it out every twenty-five or thirty years, but that's about it...

...Tampopo has become a mini-hit, but it will leave you feeling undernourished...

...but typically one doesn't feel this as much as one sees Kubrick's intent...

...Right now I'm embarked upon a very distinctly Catholic project...

...Despite the familiarity of such drill scenes, Kubrick even gets some dramatic momentum from the crude, often blasphemous verbal energy of Ermey's instructor, Sergeant Hartman (that, too, an ironically symbolic name...

...but how is it that you can believe in a dandelion...

...Greene was horrified by it and he fled, he had to get out of there...

...But the net effect of all the tangents is to flatten interest in the main story...

...A writer's capital is his life...

...Whittaker Chambers writes in Witness that what brought him to belief in God was sitting in the kitchen one night feeding his three-year-old daughter...