Films about the Vietnam War

[Ostrinski]

Any good ones out there?

[Manifesto]

Platoon and Casualties of War.

[SHORAS]

All the american ones are basically shit once you engage your critical faculties. I haven't seen one from a Vietnamese perspective or anything other than a US/bourgeois perspective.

[x359594]

Karma (1985, Democratic Republic of Vietnam) by Ho Quang Minh is the only Vietnamese made film about the war screened in the West (as far as I know.) It compares favorably with Sam Fuller's war movies, and when I saw it for the first I immediately thought of Fuller's The Steel Helmet (1951) because of the creative use of locations on a tight budget. The movie is about an ARVN soldier thought to have died in combat, and his wife, who is forced to become a prostitute in Saigon. The film explores the effects of the conflict on Vietnamese families by the war.

[Comrades Unite!]

Here are some great ones.
The Deer Hunter
Full Metal Jacket
Platoon
Hamburger Hill(This is actually pretty average but still...)

[x359594]

Here are some great ones.
The Deer Hunter
Full Metal Jacket
Platoon
Hamburger Hill(This is actually pretty average but still...)

The great reactionary ones, particularly The Deer Hunter and Hamburger Hill.

[Comrades Unite!]

The great reactionary ones, particularly The Deer Hunter and Hamburger Hill.

Wouldn't call Full Metal Jacket reactionary.But I guess HH could be called ''Reactionary''

[RedHal]

Deer Hunter's got to be one of the worse. The Vietnamese are the sadistic ones while the poor suffering American GIs are the victims...

[Bronco]

Meh you can appreciate a great film without necessarily agreeing with it's message, I've not seen the Deer Hunter (but been meaning to) but FMJ and especially Platoon are fantastic

[Comrades Unite!]

Bronco I agree with you.
Deer Hunter is a great film(Slightly Overlong however)

[piet11111]

we were soldiers is a movie i liked because it shows the americans as arrogant and woefully unprepared where their disrespect for the NVA as a skilled army places them in the clusterfuck that this movie was about.

Obviously its a nationalist wank movie and the way those soldiers where shown as family guys and overall likeable people made me cringe.

[x359594]

Bronco I agree with you.
Deer Hunter is a great film(Slightly Overlong however)

What's missing here is the historical context. The Deer Hunter appeared when the US was still maintaining an embargo against Vietnam, refusing to provide humanitarian aid, make reperations, share medical information about the effects of agent orange, provide maps identifying the location of land mines that were still killing and maiming people, and punishing US NGOs that tried to provide assistance to Vietnam as well as other countries in the region that wanted to trade with Vietnam. The movie played in the USA in this particular anti-Vietnam, anti-peace movement context.

The Deer Hunter also gave rise to folklore about Russian roulette forced on US POWs, and certain right-wing politicians like Senator Jeremiah Denton (himself a former POW) cited the atrocities against POWS depicted in The Deer Hunter as reasons for continuing to isolate Vietnam. Rightly or wrongly The Deer Hunter was seen as pro-war and anti-reconciliation. It was also around this time that the "peace activists spitting in Vietnam veterans' faces" folklore made the rounds in the media. In other words, it was a period of cultural reaction brought on by the defeat of US imperialism in the recent war, and The Deer Hunter played into that.

And I might add that it was a typical example of American narcissism whenever Hollywood depicts the Vietnam War. The Vietnamese were shown as depraved through invoking the old imperialist trope that "life is cheap" for Asians

[#FF0000]

Eastern Condors

[RedHal]

Meh you can appreciate a great film without necessarily agreeing with it's message, I've not seen the Deer Hunter (but been meaning to) but FMJ and especially Platoon are fantastic

white privilege

[x359594]

Two excellent documentaries are In the Year of the Pig (1968) and Hearts and Minds (1972.)

[Bronco]

white privilege

Me enjoying a reactionary film is "white privilege"?

[Diello]

"Hearts and Minds" is the big one for me.

[Prometeo liberado]

I prefer the subtlety of the Quiet American. Or the fancy pants Madame Butterfly. Not actually knee deep in the conflict but you'll understand.

[Lenin's Cat]

On YouTube:

Clay Claiborne | Vietnam - American Holocaust | 2008 | Uploaded by Sairagon 1988

[x359594]

I prefer the subtlety of the Quiet American...

I presume your referring to the 2002 version directed by Philip Noyce and not the 1958 version directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz.

While the Mankiewicz version is aesthetically superior to the Noyce version, it's also another reactionary take on the war since Mankiewicz reversed Graham Greene's novel by exonerating Pyle and turning Fowler into a European dupe.

[TheGodlessUtopian]

"Vietnam in HD"

Is bourgeois oriented, obviously coming from the History Channel, but it is a well made doc series that, though lacks materialist perspective, is a nice watch to hear some personal perspectives from those who went over.Also nice to see the end when the U.S got it ass handed back to them.

Can watch it for free on Youtube.

[MrCool]

Full Metal Jacket

In my opinion, the best movie ever.

And in documentaries, try to get your hands on "Battlefield Vietnam" (1999)

[Invader Zim]

Jacob's Ladder

Film is a mind fuck, in several different respects.

[redguarddude]

The Deer Hunter was the least realistic. Even the insignia on the uniforms were usually wrong. The movie also implied someone went straight from basic training to Special Forces. Nope. Not even close. After basic, training for specific job, jump school, and special forces training was and is at least another year beyond basic training.

[redguarddude]

In the book, "We Were Soldiers" author Hal Moore, dedicates the book to "soldiers on BOTH sides." You don't see that too often. What the movie and book leave out, the fight Moore's battalion was in, was not the entire battle. Another battalion walked into an ambush, and suffered twice as many deaths as Moore's battalion. About a year after the battle I talked to someone who was in the latter fight. He said out of 140 men in his company, 12 walked away "under their own power." The other 128 were either killed or wounded.