Word: platooning
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Oliver Stone is a muckraker disguised as a moviemaker. He concocts films?Midnight Express, Scarface and Year of the Dragon as a screenwriter, Salvador and now Platoon as writer-director?whose blood vessels burst with holy indignation. And he gets money for his Savonarola sermons because he films them for peanuts: $5 million for Salvador, $6 million for Platoon. This new one is an up-tempo dirge, an I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag, about his experiences as a young grunt in Viet Nam. Stone means the drama, the carnage, the horror, the horror...
...boot camp of hell, and a sensitive man could die from it. "You don't belong in the Nam, man," a warwise soldier tells Chris (Charlie Sheen), who stands in for Stone as the narrator of Platoon. "This ain't your place at all." It is, though, and that is the rite-of-passage tragedy the film describes. For Chris is torn between the conflicting charismata of two sergeants: Elias (Willem Dafoe), a natural jungle fighter, and Barnes (Tom Berenger), a pure-blooded killer. Both men have a nice sense of their power?over themselves, their men and the enemy...
...early stages, Platoon's I-was-there authenticity does nothing but call attention to itself. That big ugly swirl of a scar across Barnes' cheek, for example, inevitably provokes thoughts of an early-morning makeup call. Then two things happen: the actors stop attitudinizing and fall smartly into their roles, and the rivalry between Barnes and Elias begins to suppurate sensationally. Elias, a night-world Natty Bumppo, believes only in his skills and his men; he is both in Viet Nam and above it. Barnes can act as impromptu medic to save a soldier's life or, with equal vigor...
...renegade war correspondent, a self-proclaimed weasel with an itchy social conscience. In El Salvador (and, climactically, back in the States), he learns firsthand of atrocity and duplicity in the name of law. Because the protagonist is knowing instead of naive, Salvador never slips into the haranguing righteousness of Platoon. If Salvador nonetheless seems a smaller film, this is because it is content to catalog the sins of power; they do not accumulate dramatically until the final twisting crisis. But it is a fine study of a wily man tiptoeing through fatal corruption. Just like Hollywood, Stone might...
...There are no ranks in the N.P.A.," Victor tells me, "only responsibilities." But experience makes some comrades more equal than others. Platoon leader Jorex, 41, is a brooding giant with a bandolier of grenades strung across his chest. As a youth, he was recruited by a government militia to fight the N.P.A. but instead defected to the rebels...