"Thank God," says an exultant marine at the end of this story of the first Iraq war, "we'll never have to come back to this shithole ever again!" Sam Mendes's gleamingly accomplished and controlled screen version of Anthony Swofford's military memoir allows its historical ironies to float some way up to the surface, before sinking enigmatically back down again. With cinematographer Roger Deakins and editor Walter Murch, Mendes heads up a triple-A-team of filmmaking and Jarhead is something which is stunning to look at and to listen to, with elegantly chosen pop songs unspooling on the soundtrack under each fresh new horror.
Swofford is a 20-year-old soldier in the US Marine Corps during the 1991 Gulf War, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, an actor who here bulks up in maturity and presence: Swofford's future literary sensibilities are signalled with a battered copy of Camus' The Stranger which, to his embarr-assment, he is discovered reading on the lavatory by his drill sergeant, and through his deadpan voiceover, introducing us to each of the bizarre episodes.
Swofford endured all the brutal privations and initiations -- including having his head shaved into the "jarhead" cut -- and was then shipped out to the burning Saudi desert, where he and his comrades experienced an unending Beckettian nightmare of doing nothing in the 100℃-plus heat. Then, when the shooting war finally got underway, Swofford found that, as glorified infantry, the marines were virtually redundant as the hi-tech planes and computer-guided bombs flashed overhead. Even when he has a chance of real action as a sniper, this too is to lead nowhere.
PHOTO COURTESY OF FOX MOVIES
It is Groundhog D-day: a study of bafflement and frustration and disillusion, a study of nothing happening nearly all the time. It is an anti-war-movie in the sense that it reverses and confounds the conventional demands for exciting celluloid war action. This has caused some puzzled head-shaking among US critics on its US release last year. They are missing the point. Professional soldiers testify that a lot of their existence in the field of battle is spent going out of their heads with boredom. Military life does not guarantee to satisfy the narrative demand for confrontation. More than this, Jarhead reminds us of the dangerous lesson that the first Iraq war appeared to teach, and on which the current military adventure was partly founded -- that Saddam's Iraq can be defeated painlessly, in a hi-tech daze.
Swofford finds that the real drama is the male rage among his comrades. His sniper-partner Troy, played by the sleepy-eyed Peter Sarsgaard, has an awful secret about his civilian life. His drill sergeant Sykes (Jamie Foxx) is not merely a traditional screamer-7cm-from-the-face but a whim-sical satirist who forces Swofford to imitate bugling reveille without a bugle. His platoon disgrace themselves with a group nervous breakdown in front of a TV crew when Sykes sadistically makes them play touch football wearing chemical masks in the brain-frying heat. Finally, they chance upon the horrific mass death of refugees on the Basra road. They are forced to absorb both the frustration of not engaging the enemy and the horror of being associated with this wholesale slaughter of civilians.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist