Merry Christmas, if you’re into that sort of thing!

Never seen a war movie that actually covers what war is like.
.
However, if you do want to experience combat duty for some reason, watch a 200 hour video of paint drying while locked in a room with too many people you barely know and being randomly given a jump scare every so often.
You’re only allowed to eat cold pizza and pee in the potted plant for the duration, for extra realism.

@ shadowplay

‘Lebanon’ (2009) is pretty good at capturing the 99% boredom 1% terror vibe. And it uses an interesting technique to show the squalor and general unpleasantness of soldiering.

ETA: This one

http://cdn.collider.com/wp-content/uploads/lebanon-slice.jpg

@Alan

I’ll look into it. Not usually a war movie fan – feels too much like homework 😛

I LOL’d at that photo of Courtland Sykes doing his best “Blue Steel”.

@Z&T

A. First I have to apologize for my behavior the last time we spoke. It was shitty wording, and I thought about it, and I would be pissed as well. I honestly feel bad about it.

B. As Alan said, you need professional help. I’ve already mentioned Money Management International; there is a branch in Chicago, phone #1.713.394.3232. They offer some free services, and some for a fee. (Although I believe they may have a sliding scale) There is also “the National Foundation for Credit Counseling, the nation’s largest nonprofit credit counseling organization. Member agencies must be accredited by an independent body, and counselors must meet a standard of education and quality. While member agencies vary in size and scope of services, the basics of counseling services and advice shouldn’t differ too much among them.” So that site should give you a listing on professionals, should you not like MMI for whatever reason. (And the nerdwallet review on MMI that I yanked that paragraph from.)

C. I had about 7 and a half hours into writing a book for you (including on the advice given to me when I was in financial collapse), but stupid me, I let my battery die, and I was writing in incognito. Reply and I will try to rewrite it this weekend, otherwise I’m going to hang over here and sulk. :p

Because I’m just randomly dropping links today, this made me tear up a little it was good. It’s a must read.

https://theweek.com/articles/749978/female-price-male-pleasure

It makes an excellent companion piece to The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf which tackles the presumption that suffering for beauty is part of being a woman. I know Wolf has fallen out of favor lately for saying a few shitty things, but I still consider that book a must read. It’s not an exaggeration to say it changed my life.

Nequam,
Oh, my, how I love that last picture (of the the little girl being escorted to school). It brings a lump to my throat.
All the those children (& their parents) who were the flesh & blood embodiments of the American ideals of justice & equality, had more courage in their little fingers than all the keyboard bigots and tiki torch toting marchers have in their entire bodies.

Another Canadian politician is out of a job. Kent Hehr has resigned from the Federal Cabinet after allegations emerged of him making sexually inappropriate comments to women while an Alberta MLA.

Why do my post randomly go into moderation only when I try to edit them cause my other post is all messed up brackets?

Repost, cause other post is an unreadable, bracketed mess…

@Shadowplay

At that size, she doesn’t just want a breast reduction, she medically needs a breast reduction.

Oh, oops, what am I saying? I’ve been told by sexists that women have no medical or body needs that are in any way inconvenient. We don’t even need tampons! Yes we can hold menstrual blood, but we are just too lazy to do so.

Going back a few pages…

RE:War Movies

@Valentin

“there are much better film’s [than SPR] with more women and more complex ideas. For example Fury. which is horrible and awful but at least it is something more than “we must to rescue our American Boy and take him home so he can eat Mama’s apple pie.”(brackets mine)

A. On Fury; to me it seems that the women were basically props to be afraid, basically-raped*, and then slaughtered in the most “girl in the refrigerator” way possible, so that movie really, really made me uncomfortable. For me, from a feminist POV, I would rather a movie have NO women at all, than for a movie to have women, but to use them in such a way that they’re basically props used to titillate the male audience’s wish for violence towards, and power-over, women.

B. On “Saving Private Ryan”, I can see how it’s American (war) propaganda, since it’s basically “Yay look at the MURICAN heros single-handedly saving Europe without any other Allied troops”, again. But… there’s a lot more to it and it’s themes than “save our american boy because he’s american!”. (Spoilers and opinions ahead!)

1. One of the things that impressed me about SPR was it’s use of language. For a movie with a large amount of German being spoken, there was a lack of subtitles. This means that save for the very few Americans who are fluent in German, (or committed enough to research), American viewers are forced to experience the movie through the POVs of the non-German speaking GIs. This is significant in several ways;

i. It forces misunderstandings of the German characters. The Germans appear as scary men in strange uniforms, speaking a strange language that has a strange, angry, and harsh cadence to most American-English speaking ears. It’s easy to imagine in these scenes that the Germans are evilly taunting the Americans, but they’re not. They’re begging for their life, they’re offering comfort of sorts to the dying American GIs. They’re being fully human, but separates by language, they’re being human in ways that can’t always be understood by the Americans.

ii. Then you get scenes such as the one where two German soldiers are moving towards 2 American GIs, yelling in German, unarmed and holding up their hands. The two American GIs were yelling back “we can’t understand you” and ended up shooting them dead as the two groups of men moved closer and closer towards one another. Afterwards, the Americans joked about what they could’ve been saying in German, but the problem was, they weren’t German soldiers, and they weren’t speaking German. They were Czech, and they were speaking Czech.

Here’s the scene in question, and the slightly too enthusiastic analysis (TW for violence, obviously).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1aGH6NbbyE&feature=youtu.be&t=761

iii. And then you get the story arc of the translator, Upman.

It’s easy to think that Upman’s role is to retell a hero story; the story of the naive, indecisive, and soft boy, who was hardened through the fire of war until he emerged a chiseled MAYUN! (Oh hey, toxic misogyny~). And yeah, that tired old trope is absolutely part of Upman’s story, but it doesn’t explain everything he does, and it doesn’t entirely explain the reactions of the German soldiers toward him either. (Such as that that SS soldier that finds him crying in the stairwell, and walks past him).

It’s important to remember Upman’s role as a translator. While the American soldiers couldn’t understand the Germans, and the Germans couldn’t understand the Americans, Upman understood them both. He was the mediator between both sides, he heard the cries of both sides, and he couldn’t deny the humanity of either. I think that those who believe that Upman let the German soldiers go simply because he was a weak coward do his character a real disservice. He let them go because he saw the humanity in them, in his “enemies”, and that’s not an act of cowardice. That’s the bravest damn thing you can do in war, to view the enemy that’s shooting at you, as human.

Oh, and the ending of his arc, where Upman shot the German soldier that he had let go earlier, the German soldier was smiling in recognition and friendship, and saying, “I know this man. Upman” when he was shot. And I don’t think this scene is just to show Upman becoming a MAYUN, or just to show him committing a war crime; I think it’s a symbolic break of him as the mediatory. In other words, it’s a symbolic break of the thread of humanity and compassion that ran between the two sides, a thread that was destroyed by war.

2. Even if you want to say that the movie was about “getting our American boy”, several American boys died to get private Ryan. So, why *was* Private Ryan so special? Why are the lives of *some* American soldiers more important than others? (Actually, just in general, why are some lives more important than others in war?)

And we can go beyond the scope of the movie. What it means for American patriarchal society, that there’s an uproar when all the male members of a family are wiped out, even though there are surviving FEMALE members of a family left behind. Women will carry that family on genetically just as much as the men could have, so why is losing all the brothers in a war seen as “wiping out the whole family”?

(SPR may be fiction, but it is based on a real policy of the American military. And unlike HistoryBuffs, I think the American military absolutely would waste resources if it was a matter of following a policy).

C. Moving on… has anyone mentioned Good Morning Vietnam yet? I haven’t seen the film in over 10 years, and I’m sure I would find 1 million problems with it if I watched it today, but I remember that it was quite good, and made me cry. 🙁 (You’ll know the scene when you see it). And well, Robin Williams was always a plus.

*I know that the scene in Fury was supposed to be consensual, but the GIs had guns, and the German women had guns, and I just found the scene so freaking gross.

@Z&T

Well that’s good. *hugs*. 🙂

@mrex: The scene that always stuck with me in Good Morning Vietnam, from when I first saw it as a kid, was the one where (SPOILERS) Robin Williams’ friend who turned out to be on the other side gets to point out that he’s not the enemy, Williams is. I don’t watch many war films, but it seems like something rare in American ones for the “bad guys” to actually get to verbalise their point of view and for it to be unanswerable. Especially in a film that’s at least superficially a comedy. When I watched it again a few years ago, that was the scene I spent the whole film waiting for.

(More spoilers) Full Metal Jacket is maybe better described as an army film than a war film, since the first half is all about training, but it includes one of my favorite examples of playing with gender expectations. I still remember just how shocking it was the first time I saw it and the patrol sneaks up on the sniper who turns out to be a woman. You just don’t expect it, not least because the only other women in the film (I think) are prostitutes. The whole film’s just building up Macho Murricans, and the moment the sniper turns around and you see her pigtails you realise that the Vietnamese are fighting a completely different war from the one the white guys are.

Both of these movies are definitely “How the Vietnam War affected Americans” ones, but they do at least glance towards the fact another viewpoint is possible.

If American war movies seem like propaganda, that would be because they are. Movie studios use military equipment and bases on the cheap and the trade off is the Pentagon gets to vet the script to make sure it’s friendly to the US military.

I prefer scifi and fantasy battles because they can depict all the moral conflicts of war without having to worry about pissing off the military. I really liked the Battle of the Bastards episode of Game of Thrones. I’m sure everyone is shocked about that 🙂

Mild spoilers below

The way it was filmed made me feel like I was on the battlefield with them. The audience isn’t spared by a whole bunch of sweeping God’s eye views. I was so anxious and tense the whole time. Especially when Jon gets buried in a pile of bodies as I’m claustrophobic.

Probably goes without saying, but video contains violence