Full Metal Jacket, revisited

You-know-what came back on Netflix this month, and since I'm reticent to watch that one western movie, I decided to rewatch, of all things, Full Metal Jacket. 

So, I think that maybe I have found a new appreciation, or something, for this movie.. yes, I still think it's kind of weird, but it's... fairly decent. It's better than Apocalypse Now, at least. I wonder what kind of statement Stanley Kubrick was trying to make with this movie. I also am still not really sure what the significance of the singing in the last minutes of the movie is. It kind of reminded me of when I caught the last ~30 minutes of some other war movie on television one morning and the ending was of the soldiers' family members in a bar/restaurant singing a patriotic song. It was kind of weird. 

Speaking of war movies, I do not think that I would want to be in the military based on what I've seen in war movies. I wonder how accurate war movies are to the actual experience of being in the military. If I ever have the chance to strike up a conversation with someone who's been in the military, I'd like to know what it was like for them since that's not something I'm familiar with. 

Rewatching this movie also gave me an idea for a graphic t shirt design. "Born to Kill" and a peace sign. I think that could be interesting. I wonder what people would think if they saw someone wearing a shirt that had that design on it. Would they recognize it as a reference to Full Metal Jacket? Would they even care? 

I got to thinking about what, theoretically, I would make a war movie about if I were a movie director and directing one. As far as I'm aware, there haven't been any well known war movies directed by women so there's a hole in the market there. I think I would want to do an in depth look at how a soldier is affected (destroyed - more so mentally, probably, but also possibly physically) by war. I would want it to be kind of brutal, but also thoughtful and beautiful in a way. It would be a war movie with a feminine touch. That's probably not something you hear all the time. I would want it to be the Requiem for a Dream of war movies, with all that that entails. Although Requiem was actually not directed by a woman. It's still a very good movie, in my opinion. So now the only question is, which war do I set it in? I think it would be interesting to have the main character be drafted, as it creates the situation of him being thrust into the war out of his control and I like that idea and the dynamic it creates. I wonder what it takes to be a famous director like Stanley Kubrick or Martin Scorsese or Steven Spielberg, etc. I'm not sure if David Fincher and Christopher Nolan and Darren Aronofsky are quite as famous as the others, but they're still up there somewhere. 

There actually happens to be a war movie that Peter Sarsgaard was in, so I'd like to watch that, probably, sometime eventually. You can definitely expect me to review that.