Word: drills
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Good Men opens with an elite Marine drill team, resplendent in dress blues, executing spectacular variations on the manual of arms. In itself an entrancing sequence, it comes to symbolize something more as the film develops...
...crispness to come in an extraordinarily well-made movie, which wastes no words or images in telling a conventional but compelling story. All its scenes have been polished till they shine like brass belt buckles at a regimental parade. More important, metaphorically the few good men of that drill team have attained the military ideal -- perfect order, perfect discipline. They are, for their brief moment, an impossible dream made manifest. And a vivid contrast to the rest of the action...
...life, as you may have noticed, is not a close-order drill. Even in the Marines things get messy. At the Guantanamo naval base in Cuba, known to servicemen as Gitmo, a private is dead -- the result of harassment by two members of his platoon. The victim was a screw-up who compounded his sins by stepping outside the chain of command to report a rules infraction and seek a transfer. A "Code Red" -- informal disciplinary action by his barracksmates -- is suspected. But are the offenders wholly culpable? Or did they act under orders (or tacit encouragement) from superior officers...
...replacement, one of 500,000 such operations performed each year. The trick in these procedures is to cut a snug hole into which the artificial hip snaps. The standard method is to jam a tool into the thighbone with a hand-held mallet. Robodoc, using the high-speed drill at the end of its mechanical arm, can ream a cavity that is 20 times as precise...
John Weinstein does an adequate job directing but too often slips into cliched staging. This has particularly disastrous results in the several crowd scenes, some of which bear a striking resemblence to a drill team performance. There are some nice touches--the death of the cow is cute and the knife-wielding Little Red Riding Hood is funny--but too often the actors seem to have been left to fend for themselves...