Full Metal Jacket

If there is a message in here, then it's strongly tied to Joker's desire to get himself into "the shit". Why would anyone want to do this? Especially when he has firsthand experience (as an army journalist) with people who've been in it, and are much worse off for it.

Certainly this is an anti-war film. The self-glorification of several main characters (ie, them all big-upping themselves for being so hardcore) is offset by either a) their untimely demise, or b) some really, really heavy emotional baggage. (And I'm thinking specifically of the North Vietnamese girl begging "Kill me," in one of the final scenes.)

Hrmm. This makes me want to watch the film again.

"Stanley Kubrick shares with Orson Welles and Carl Dreyer the role of the Great Confounder--remaining supremely himself while frustrating every attempt to anticipate his next move or to categorize it once it registers. At once one of his most puzzling and most powerful films, this odd 1987 adaptation of Gustav Hasford's The Short-Timers, with script-writing assistance from Michael Herr as well as Hasford, has more to do with the general theme of colonization (of individuals and countries alike) than with the specifics of Vietnam or the Tet offensive. Using an unusual two-part structure--derived from the novel but in some ways resembling Kubrick's The Killing (a supposedly foolproof plan for group coordination slowly unravels before our eyes)--this picture probably has more raw compassion than any of his films since his first (the rarely seen war film Fear and Desire), but most of it is directed toward his characters rather than his audience, and a great deal of it has to do with the suppression by male soldiers of their female traits. From the opening scene of young marines getting their heads sheared to the chillingly beautiful and disturbing finale, Kubrick focuses on war's devastation, not only of a country and culture but of the American innocents enlisted to do this dirty work. Elliptical, full of subtle inner rhymes (for instance, the sound cues equating a psychopathic marine in the first part with a dying female sniper in the second), and profoundly moving, this is the most tightly crafted Kubrick film since Dr. Strangelove, as well as the most horrific; the first section alone accomplishes most of what The Shining failed to do."

http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0030.html

But then I didn't like 2001 on a first viewing, so we'll see.

I'm also struck every time I see it by the way Kubrick uses increasingly silly, even pre-verbal rock tunes on the soundtrack ("Woolly Bully," "Surfin' Bird"), as if to underline the jabbering insanity of war.

Is part of the reason Kubrick was treated coolly my some (many) critics because of his refusal to take a clear moral stance at times, especially with FMJ?

I'm thinking of Rosenbaum's criticism of Mystic River which (wrongheadedly IMO) concentrates on the morality of revenge/Eastwood's vision, and in the way SPR articulates, at different times, a clear moral message (war is awful, but ultimately a fine patriotic sacrifice, etc.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgOaT4xzdvo

RIP R. Lee Ermey
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3j3_iPskjxk