For the full extent of my high school years (1988-92), I was a cadet in the United States Army Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps. My fellow cadets and I worshiped the Boot Camp half of this film. R. Lee Ermey was like a god to us, and we memorized all of his speeches. But because we were so obsessed with the Ermey character, we never seemed to watch the second half. We apparently bought into the myth that it sucked.…

This film has always given me a deep sense of unease. This feeling particularly applies to the first part, which takes place at basic training. In fact, I feel that what the recruits are exposed to affect myself directly. The whole film deals with partial degradation of human dignity and the self, but the way Kubrick throws this in our faces already from the beginning grabs me every time.
The haircut-sequence is an important part of this. As before a…

Film #14 in Driver’s December Death Penalty AKA The December Project , which is part of Cinebro's The December Challenge. 1 month, 100 movies.

116 minutes

Listen up, maggots! Listen hard and listen well! Because Full Metal Jacket is something that I will motivate you to watch! Or I will PT you all until you F**KING DIE!

Full Metal Jacket makes other movies of it's kind look like worthless pieces of amphibian SH*T! And do you know why that is,…

There are only a handful of truly iconic war films and this most definitely belongs among them. It does not merely depict elements of war in a realistic way, it also intelligently critiques and satirizes our species' instinctive tendencies to wage war and the inescapable need for a communal spirit while cyclically purveying an 'us vs them' mentality.

In the first part, perhaps most famous for the foul mouthed genius of Lee Ermy, Kubrick shows us how the cogs are…

"I bet you're the kind of guy that would fuck a person in the ass and not even have the goddamn common courtesy to give him a reach-around. I'll be watching you."
Gunnery Sergeant Hartman

It's quotes like the one above that make this film one of the funniest damn movies I've ever seen. The first half or so is full of dialogue like that and it cracks me up every time I watch it. If you've seen this film…

I don't pretend to know anything about war besides what I've learned in the movies, but there's a credibility to Full Metal Jacket that makes me feel like an expert on war after I watch it.  I expected Kubrick to reiterate some themes from his former war films, saying once again that war is pointless and inherently wrong. Instead, he steers clear of passing judgment on or moralizing war. It's a bizarre choice to make with a film that has…

"I am...in a world...of shit."

Brutal, honest, uncomfortable to watch and at times, disturbingly funny, Full Metal Jacket is one of those films that has become simply iconic, even if it is undoubtedly a film of two very distinct halves - the first showing the characters going through the harsh, dehumanising training and the effects it has on them, shown through the transformation of Private 'Pyle', and the second being about that relates to their experiences in Vietnam and manages…

Kubrick gives us a Vietnam movie of two parts both visually incredible and profoundly disturbing. War is given a sensory bludgeoning as Stanley goes to town with this epic tale of young Vietnam recruits being moulded into killers by marine gunnery sergeant Hartmann. R Lee Ermey gives one of the most powerful performances EVER as the sadistic drill instructor attempting to brainwash a group of raw recruits for the horrors of battle. Ad-libbing the majority of his dialogue Ermey was…