Word: willem
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Oughta: Tom Berenger, Platoon. Just a tad bit better than Willem Dafoe's Good Angel, Berenger's performance as Bad Mother Barnes gave this movie an edge it would otherwise have lacked. I'd like to see them split the Oscar--live, on stage, with a grenade or something...
...Stone, Dye found a kindred spirit who wanted Platoon's actors to experience the fatigue, frayed nerves and fear that preyed on the Viet Nam infantryman and to understand the casual brutality that often emerged. Willem Dafoe, who plays Sergeant Elias, the platoon's conscience, recalls that "we certainly did get some taste of exhaustion, frustration and confusion." Tom Berenger, who plays the soul-dead Sergeant Barnes, agrees. "We didn't even have to act. We were there...
...spit bullets at the feet of a petrified Vietnamese, and before the day is over the group's leader, Sergeant Barnes (Tom Berenger), has seen to the slaughtering of villagers before the entire place is torched. During a third battle, Barnes tracks down a woods-wise sergeant, Elias (Willem Dafoe), who had interrupted Barnes' massacre, shoots him and leaves him for dead. On the final patrol Chris flips into heroism or psychosis, wipes out a nest of North Vietnamese and confronts the demon he has almost become. End with a murder -- the last of too bloody many...
Protecting and leading the men of the platoon are the squad sergeants, who, under the obligatory incompetent lieutenant, control the lives and fates of the grunts. Elias (Willem Dafoe) is the idealist, trying to preserve some code of moral behavior at the end of the world. Barnes (Tom Berenger) is a creature of the war, a drawling, scarred, amoral survivor. Both are killers. The only difference is how they go about it. As Chris describes it in one of his voice-over "letter home," the two sergeants fight "for the possession of my soul...
...woman waited anxiously in Newfoundland for a month before conditions finally allowed them to launch their 46-meter-tall balloon. But at last they caught the weather just right. After a flawless flight across the Atlantic, Pilot Henk Brink, 42, his wife Evelien, 31, and Fighter Pilot Willem Hageman, 39, last week became the first Europeans to accomplish the balloon voyage and, with a time of 51 hrs. 14 min., shaved more than a day off the old record. "A piece of cake," said Hageman. The only hitch in their speedy journey (up to 76 m.p.h.) was when the Dutch...