Word: swofford
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...traditional Singapore kebaya handed me a hot towel. I got up, stretched and walked around, which every long-haul veteran knows is necessary to keep your blood moving. I chatted with a few folks who were doing the same. I started one of my books, Jarhead, by Anthony Swofford, a former Marine's account of life in the military. Then, three hours into the flight, it was time for dinner: a swordfish-and-rice combo, accompanied by some Piper Heidsieck champagne. Who needs business class anyway...
...Broyles, Jr. have produced a vivid, accurate representation of Swofford’s book, which opens this Friday—showing the life of this 18-year-old who joined the Marine Corps and ended up fighting in the Gulf War. In an interview with The Crimson last Wednesday, Swofford said he “loved the film” and that “it’s a really smart and artful adaptation of [his] work and also [his] life.” A “reluctant memoirist,” he laughed about the first screening...
...subject of violence. As it follows the action of the first Gulf War, we sense chaos indirectly. We see bomb blasts reflected through windows; we watch smoke rise above the bodies of Iraqi civilians, recently burnt off-screen. This violence is filtered through the eyes of narrator Anthony Swofford (Jake Gyllenhaal), the everyman U.S. Marine, or “jarhead,” whose war autobiography this movie adapts. While training, Swofford is selected to join an elite scout unit, and he trades in his girlfriend for a sniper rifle and Peter Sarsgaard, his increasingly unstable spotter. Sergeant Siek (Jamie...
...Troy (a wonderfully cool, emotionally hidden Peter Sarsgaard), who are snipers, come close to actually doing something-killing a pair of Iraqi officers holed up in an airfield control tower-but at the last moment one of their own senior officer swans in and countermands the orders. In short, Swofford and his unit have nothing to show for the half year they spend in the eye of Desert Storm...
...previous films (American Beauty, Road to Perdition) bear no resemblance to Jarhead, except in the well-calculated expertise of his direction-lots of handheld cameras in constant motion here-is totally non-judgmental, entirely unsentimental. Despite writing his book and seeing it made into this intense and absurdist movie, Swofford seems only to have taken one thing away from his experiences, which is that in some way Corps values are permanently his core values, no matter what else he may do in life. A humanist might argue that there is something pathetic in that. But the best war movies...