Word: platoons
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Just a dusty mile or so from where a fellow platoon leader was recently killed by a powerful roadside bomb, Army 1st. Lt. James Vansandt piles out of a Humvee and sets out with his Iraqi translator into the darkness toward the crowded main street of Musayyib, a ramshackle Shi'ite town set along the Euphrates River some 40 miles south of Baghdad. Robed men are gathered in clusters on benches and around tables brought out after the daily ritual of breaking the 12-hour Ramadan fast. As his platoon fans out into the shadows on both sides...
...surefire idea: a reteaming of Ben Stiller, Hollywood's biggest international comedy star, with Peter and Bobby Farrelly, writer-directors of cheerfully gross comedies. You probably loved There's Something About Mary, where Stiller fell in love with giggly blond Cameron Diaz and won her by fighting off a platoon of suitors and surviving a slew of acute embarrassments (the zipper, the hair gel, the dog). Now here's The Heartbreak Kid, in which Stiller falls for and weds a Diaz-type blond (Malin Akerman) only to discover, on his honeymoon, he's married the Woman from Hell - and that...
...consider this next movie like the other Vietnam ones, because they were all personal, those stories. There's me in Platoon. There's [Vietnam veteran] Ron Kovic in Born on the Fourth of July. And in Heaven & Earth, there's Le Ly Hayslip [the Vietnamese woman whose life is dramatized in the film, and who accompanied Stone on his trip to Danang]. All three were personal stories...
Oliver Stone honestly thought he was finished with the Vietnam War. With Best Director Oscars for Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989), and with 1993's Heaven & Earth to round out his Vietnam trilogy, the director had moved on to more current topics. Last year's World Trade Center centered around rescue workers on 9/11. Any Given Sunday (1999) was set on American football fields, not battlegrounds. So what was the 61-year-old filmmaker doing sitting in an airport lounge in Danang this week, watching himself lighting incense during a temple visit on local television...
...easy, but I can understand it. I mean, you saw a bit of it in Platoon. Not on this scale. But that's part of what the movie shows, visualizes, dramatizes - the peer pressure, the tension. [My Lai] happened. It's a fact. It's history. I'm not seeking to denigrate the average soldier. There was a breakdown in that division and there was a breakdown from the top. And I think it had a lot to do with the war policy, which was basically body counts, kill ratios, search and destroy, free-fire zones - these concepts, when they...