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Full Metal Jacket, Wed April 19
2006, 7:00 & 9:30

Kubrick by Request

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Full Metal Jacket shows at IFS on Wed April 19, 2006, 7:00 & 9:30

Full Metal Jacket
Kubrick by Request
Wed April 19
2006, 7:00 & 9:30

More than any other major American film maker, Stanley Kubrick keeps to his own ways, paying little attention to the fashions of the moment, creating fantastic visions that, in one way and another, are dislocated extensions of the world we know but would prefer not to recognize.

"Full Metal Jacket," Kubrick's harrowing, beautiful and characteristically eccentric film about Vietnam, is going to puzzle, anger and (I hope) fascinate audiences as much as any film he has made to date. The movie will inevitably be compared with Oliver Stone's "Platoon," but its narrative is far less neat and cohesive - and far more antagonistic - than Stone's film.

Like "The Short Timers," Gustav Hasford's spare, manic novel on which it is based, the Kubrick film seems so utterly reasonable that one doesn't initially recognize the lunacies recorded so matter-of-factly. The film is a series of exploding boomerangs. Just when you think you can relax in safety, some crazed image or line or event will swing around to lodge in the brain and scramble the emotions.

"Full Metal Jacket" is divided into two parts, which at first seem so different in tone, look and method that they could have been made by two different directors working with two different cameramen from two different screenplays. Only the actors are the same. Part of the way in which the movie works, and involves the audience, is in its demand that the audience make the sudden leap to the seemingly (but far from) conventional battle scenes in Vietnam, which conclude the film, from its flashily brilliant first half, set in the Marine Corps boot camp at Parris Island, S.C.

Drill Sergeant Hartman (R. Lee Ermey) is a machine whose only purpose is to turn the soft young men into killers without conscience. Everything is made subordinate to "the corps," to which end the recruits are humiliated, beaten, exhausted, tricked, lied to, subjected to racial slurs and drilled, constantly drilled, physically and psychologically.

The effect of this part of the film is so devastating that one tends to resist the abrupt cut to Vietnam, where order is disorder and truth is simply a matter of language.

The film's stunning surprise is Ermey, a leathery, ageless, former Marine sergeant in real life. He's so good - so obsessed - that you might think he wrote his own lines, except that much of his dialogue comes directly from Hasford's book. (V. Canby, NY Times)

To see a trailer and read a review, visit InternationalFilmSeries.com.

Tickets

10 films for $60 with punch card
$9 general admission. $7 w/UCB student ID, $7 for senior citizens
$1 discount to anyone with a bike helmet
Free on your birthday! CU Cinema Studies students get in free.

Parking

Pay lot 360 (now only $1/hour!), across from the buffalo statue and next to the Duane Physics tower, is closest to Muenzinger. Free parking can be found after 5pm at the meters along Colorado Ave east of Folsom stadium and along University Ave west of Macky.

RTD Bus

Park elsewhere and catch the HOP to campus

International Film Series

(Originally called The University Film Commission)
Established 1941 by James Sandoe.

First Person Cinema

(Originally called The Experimental Cinema Group)
Established 1955 by Carla Selby, Gladney Oakley, Bruce Conner and Stan Brakhage.

C.U. Film Program

(AKA The Rocky Mountain Film Center)
First offered degrees in filmmaking and critical studies in 1989 under the guidance of Virgil Grillo.

Celebrating Stan

Created by Suranjan Ganguly in 2003.

C.U. Department of Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts

Established 2017 by Chair Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz.

Thank you, sponsors!
Boulder International Film Festival
Department of Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts

Looking for a gift for a friend?
Buy a Frequent Patron Punch Card for $60 at any IFS show. With the punch card you can see ten films (a value of $90).

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