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platoon (1986)
 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2019-07-08 02:41 [#02582081]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



'tis my usual sort of tangential orgy. there is an article
on metafilter, about things cut in half;
recommended.

from that i find this, about viet cong tunnels.
also recommended. i begin googling it.

i find has made a movie involving these tunnels based on his
experiences, and i had no idea oliver stone was in vietnam.
i just know him for "natural born killers" and "scarface" so
the idea of him covering a more serious topic is interesting
to me.

back on wikipedia, i find out that platoon (1986)
actually established stone as a more proper figure in
movies. i promptly torrented the movie, and i also
recommend.

also of note: charlie sheen can play serious roles? i had no
idea
also of note: i've totally heard this in so many
other places before

dismal movie, emotionally, but quite good


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2019-07-08 02:53 [#02582082]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



i think now, loocking back,
we did not fight the enemy,
we fought ourselves.
And the enemy was in us.
the war is over for me now,
but it will always be there,
for the rest of my days.

my grandfather was in the navy in WWII. there was a brief
fracas that i had funny at the time, when he got mad at my
father for buying japanese car. it was funny to me at the
time -- my dad said, "he only contributed $20." like, you're
buying a honda? $20 is all i have for you.

within a year or five, though, he'd toned it down. whenever
asked about the war, he would say: it was terrible, every
time i've spoken about it it's made people unhappy, and
please don't ask me about it again.

my father came very close to being drafted in vietnam. i'm
not sure of the details, but from what i've been told, it
was just barely not. he was a very nice man and i feel like
had he been drafted, i would never have come to exist. he'd
probably have just gotten blown up. but, had he survived, he
would have had to become a much harder, nastier person
rather than the genuinely sweet man he was, it would have
disrupted his academic career... and, yeah, i wouldn't be
here.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2019-07-08 02:55 [#02582083]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



silly as it is, what unsettles me most about this movie is
the idea of my dad having been sent into that. it didn't
happen; what's it matter?

just such a horrid thought.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2019-07-08 04:42 [#02582084]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



rambly fact ~ the the 92 civil LX he contributed $20 to in a
a trollish fashion would bedome my first car about fifteen
years later. he was generally an owum grandfather, with the
occasional glitch -- my father called him bill, for various
complex reasons -- and i remember a distinct moment out in
front of the barn: you will call me grandpa! and i'm like:
jesus shit, ok

then the incident in which i was four or six and i'm just
doing my thing coloring in coloring books with crayons. some
irish lass who, in retrospect, was quite pretty, was nuking
up wax to make jam preserves. grandma, who was dying of
cancer at the time, calls her off or some task.

eventually, she returns. she lifts the lid off the pot of
molten wax; it explodes. the walls are on fire. she screams.
i am, at four or six, in a bart simpson state of "cool man"

my grandfather walks into the kitchen. observes the fire.
ponders a moment. cool as a cucumber; fetches a fire
extinguisher out of nowhere and extinguishes the kitchen.
years later, i would connect this moment with my father's
almost irrational fear that i would set the house on fire --
it was just sort of a thing in that household


 

offline Roger Wilco from Mo's Beans on 2019-07-08 09:34 [#02582089]
Points: 1707 Status: Lurker



Now this is interesting.


 

offline umbroman3 from United Kingdom on 2019-07-08 10:43 [#02582091]
Points: 6096 Status: Regular



I like reading about your dad


 

offline Tony Danza from Fabulous Hollywood on 2019-07-08 13:02 [#02582094]
Points: 3420 Status: Regular



> i feel like had he been drafted, i would never have come
to exist

the contingency of the self is messed up. If he'd walked a
little more slowly one day out of a thousand, there'd also
be no you. We've all won the infinite improbability lottery,
and the prize is: fun. ^_^


 

offline Roger Wilco from Mo's Beans on 2019-07-08 13:59 [#02582095]
Points: 1707 Status: Lurker



The irony being of course that we're all EpicMegatrax


 

offline Tony Danza from Fabulous Hollywood on 2019-07-08 14:26 [#02582098]
Points: 3420 Status: Regular | Followup to Roger Wilco: #02582095



Not me buddy I'm different I'm special, I post long rants on
a dying electronic music messa- oh.


 

offline Hyperflake from Wirral (United Kingdom) on 2019-07-08 15:10 [#02582099]
Points: 30707 Status: Regular



LAZY_TITLE

did you watch this epic? it was really good


 

offline Roger Wilco from Mo's Beans on 2019-07-08 16:04 [#02582100]
Points: 1707 Status: Lurker



I watched Black Hawk Down again the other day and
pondered the alarming possibility that if my father had been
born 50 years later, in Somalia, and not mowed down by the
Delta Force, I'd currently be hawking shit in some
fly-blown market in Mogadishu. There but for the grace of
Allah, etc.


 

offline Hyperflake from Wirral (United Kingdom) on 2019-07-08 16:10 [#02582101]
Points: 30707 Status: Regular | Followup to Roger Wilco: #02582100



I watched star ship troopers once and had the exact same
thought,


 

offline mermaidman on 2019-07-08 17:29 [#02582104]
Points: 7991 Status: Lurker



i watched star ship troopers once and had the
exact same thought as well


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2019-07-09 00:53 [#02582126]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict | Followup to Tony Danza: #02582094



the contingency of the self is messed up. If he'd walked
a little more slowly one day out of a thousand, there'd also
be no you. We've all won the infinite improbability lottery,
and the prize is: fun. ^_^


my reaction was twofold.

first, you have a valid point, but you're at the wrong level
of scale. think: how many people don't exist because of
vietnam? never mind me and my lonesome, how many of them
might have been the next oliver stone? if gerald donald's
father had died in vietnam before there was a gerald donald?
it's just such an abysmal, abhorrent waste of potential.
but, then again, according to platoon, "they were the bottom
of the barrel." people from corners of mississippi, alabama.
black people, who didn't quite have proper civil rights yet.
the poor. perhaps, in a sub-conscious way, war is a culling
mechanism... but, still, it is a crude machine, and i'm sure
plenty of talent went down the drain in vietnam. and that
bothers me.

second, just the thought of someone i cared about very much
having to go through that was even more upsetting.


 

offline Tony Danza from Fabulous Hollywood on 2019-07-09 01:12 [#02582128]
Points: 3420 Status: Regular



I'm sorry, I shouldn't have grabbed your mental football and
run off into the weeds.

> i'm sure plenty of talent went down the drain in vietnam

Yes absolutely. I'm reminded of this Stephen Jay Gould quote
I saw recently - "I am, somehow, less interested in the
weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the
near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and
died in cotton fields and sweatshops."

> second, just the thought of someone i cared about very
much having to go through that was even more upsetting.

Yeah I get it. Wait till you have a kid and you read about
bad things happening to kids and you want to go in your
kid's room and hug him or her but it's 2 a.m. and why are
you reading the bad news at 2 a.m. you idiot. you garbage
brain crap person.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2019-07-09 01:40 [#02582130]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict | Followup to Tony Danza: #02582128



exactly why i'm not going to torrent that 10-part series of
vietnam, despite the feeling that i probably should
understand the whole arc of the thing


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2019-07-09 02:21 [#02582136]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict | Followup to umbroman3: #02582091



I like reading about your dad

here's one more, that disney just dredged up

we were at disneyLAND, the one out in california. splash
mountain or whatever. as we get to the log boat, my dad's
all "why don't you sit in front?"

i do.

as we're reaching the splash part, i promptly duck. dad,
sitting behind me, gets soaked. he immediately admitted that
i'd gotten him right good


 


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