The World Beyond BetterMost > The Culture Tent
Jake Gyllenhaal's Source Code: BUMP THREAD for Amanda's Bowie Info (2011)
Aloysius J. Gleek:
--- Quote from: delalluvia on April 16, 2011, 08:51:15 pm ---SPOILERS SPOILERS SERIOUS SPOILERS SPOILERS
i.e. did he just hijack poor Sean's body? What happened to the teacher? The teacher is the guy Christina fell for. It makes it kinda creepy that you could be just living your life somewhere then someone else takes over your body.
--- End quote ---
I'd just say that--remember, within the logic of the movie --the teacher, Sean Fentress, Christina, and everyone on the train after the last station--are dead.
After many iterations of their utterly fatal (if sequentially repetitive) deaths, Jake's character, Capt. Colter Stevens, manages to save all these people except Fentress, but, given the logic of the movie, there is no way he can save Fentress. He might have even been trying to save Sean when he asked that, after the last 8 minute sequence, he, Colter, be killed--his own previous life was over any way. When Colter-as-Sean had his one last kiss with Christina, should he have felt sad when he found, astonishingly, that he, Colter-as-Sean, was alive in another time line after all? Quite weirdly Christ-as-Buddha selfless if he did!
Also--I'm not so sure Christina had fallen for the real Sean Fentress prior to the unwilling posession by the most certainly unwitting Colter Stephens. Rather, I think, Christina seems to have suddenly fallen for this 'new' Sean; in fact, at one early point, half jokingly, half admiringly, she says something like, "Who are you and how have you kidnapped Sean Fentress?" It is the new daring and desperate man that she has been learning to--love? Hard to do that in 8 minutes, I know, but--it's Jake after all, who wouldn't?
There ARE plot-holes galore, but Duncan does attempt to take a real idea from the spookily quantum notion of 'multiple worlds.' The borrowed cell-phone Colter Stephens-as-Sean-Fentress texts to the other Vera Fermiga character in the multiple world timeline in which the train-explosion-never-happened is telling her that multiple worlds ARE real, and is pretty much explicitly saying that there is another (and another, and another) cocooned, not-quite-yet-dead Colter Stephens who may yet become a butterfly into yet another (and another) timeline.
Is it bad that Colter-as-Sean is hoping that the other (still cocooned, unconscious, utterly wounded and damaged) Colter Stephens-in-the-capsule, the NEXT Colter, will take flight to another timeline/but must take the life of another man (or woman?) like Sean Fentress in the process? Maybe, but--if multiple worlds DO exist, there are an infinite number of Sean Fentresses who died in an infinite number of explosions, and an infinite number of Sean Fentresses who completed his safe journey to Chicago, and an infinite number of Sean Fentresses who lived happily after with an infinite number of Christinas--and an infinite number of Sean Fentresses who struck out because that infinite series of Christinas finally decided all the Seans were wimps (and not the Weakly Interacting Massive Particle type either).
Anyway--I sort of liked the movie. I liked that, unlike most shoot-em up Hollywood movies, Duncan sort of wanted the largest number of people to live. I sort of liked that.
:)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation
Many-worlds interpretation
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
delalluvia:
SPOILERS SPOILERS SERIOUS SPOILERS SPOILERS
--- Quote ---Maybe, but--if multiple worlds DO exist, there are an infinite number of Sean Fentresses who died in an infinite number of explosions, and an infinite number of Sean Fentresses who completed his safe journey to Chicago, and an infinite number of Sean Fentresses who lived happily after with an infinite number of Christinas--and an infinite number of Sean Fentresses who struck out because that infinite series of Christinas finally decided all the Seans were wimps (and not the Weakly Interacting Massive Particle type either).
--- End quote ---
I'm not against the multiple pathways/dimension thing, but that just makes it more horrific, IMO. There was this same argument for "Groundhog Day". The Bill Murray character wasn't reliving one life, each time he repeated, it was another life, so his previous actions in the other mornings led off on different pathways. He DID lead that life.
So as with Colter. He DID get run over by a train. He DID get blown up with the train, over and over and over and over and worse, he DID get put into forced servitude as a chunk of brain-swollen meat over and over and over.
Christina though, did love the teacher. In one line she clearly says she's been "waiting for him" to ask her for coffee "for a long time".
Aloysius J. Gleek:
--- Quote from: delalluvia on April 17, 2011, 02:13:37 pm ---SPOILERS SPOILERS SERIOUS SPOILERS SPOILERS
So as with Colter. He DID get run over by a train. He DID get blown up with the train, over and over and over and over and worse, he DID get put into forced servitude as a chunk of brain-swollen meat over and over and over.
--- End quote ---
I saw this when I was 17 years old. It was one of the moving things I have ever seen.
Directed by Dalton Trumbo
1971
The United States of America
[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7AFmXc0wK0&feature[/youtube]
http://forgottenclassicsofyesteryear.blogspot.com/2011/02/johnny-got-his-gun.html
(....)
And yet, there is another war film that never gets mentioned anymore. It also creates one of the most haunting images in the war genre…but it doesn’t have any gore. There isn’t any swearing or graphic violence. The image is of a broken man, lying on a hospital mattress that he will never leave. He is not so much a man as a shell, trapped in a destroyed body that will be his prison for the rest of his days. This is the true face of war. This is the reality of Johnny Got His Gun.
His name was Joe Bonham…or at least it used to be. Before the war he had a family, a young sweetheart, and a full life ahead of him. Now, he is a nameless patient in an Army hospital. Ordered on one of the last days of World War One on pointless and suicidal mission (to bury the body of a dead soldier who was stinking up the trenches in the middle of No Man’s Land), Bonham was hit point-blank with an artillery shell. That lifeless hunk of metal robbed Joe of his arms, his legs, his eyes, his ears, his nose, and cruelest of all, his mouth. Unable to communicate his name and with all possible means of identification eliminated, Joe has become a nobody; a hunk of red meat perpetually trapped to drift between consciousness and his imagination.
It isn’t long before Joe can sense when people are near him. He can feel the vibrations of footsteps, the touch of nurses changing his bandages, and the cold touch of the doctors. Because of his inability to communicate, he is unable to beg for mercy when they stitch up his arms and legs, permanently transforming him into a caricature of humanity. When he twitches about to get the attention of the orderlies, he is diagnosed as suffering from a seizure and is promptly drugged back into a state of hallucinogenic stupor.
In his dreams he finds refuge and sadistic reminders of the life that he once had and the life that has been stolen. He dreams of his last night with Kareen, his girl, where they peel off their clothes and nervously crawl into bed together, both terrified and exhilarated of their first and last physical communion. He dreams of his childhood when his father tells him that it is the young man’s job to die during war. Why can’t it be the older men who start them, he asks. The father has no answer. He dreams of Jesus, shepherding a fresh batch of dead soldiers onto a train bound for God knows where. The soldiers ask why Joe is allowed on, as he is still alive. Jesus puts his hand on Joe’s shoulder, bears a grim smile, and answers that he’s okay. And in one of the film’s most devastating scenes, he dreams that Jesus is the conductor of the train, hanging out the engine window and bellowing in a cry of frustration, pain, and anguish at his task that melts into the sound of the train whistle.
After a period of sustained sensory deprivation, the brain will start to fire wildly and desperately create images and sensations to occupy itself with. So for poor Joe, who has been stripped of his senses, soon there is little to no difference between what is real and what is a figment of his imagination. The only beacon of sanity that he finds is the touch of a kindly nurse who eventually figures out that he is conscious. She removes the bandages from his chest and slowly starts to write letters with her fingers on his broken body. First an “M.” Then an “E,” followed by an “R.” Then another “R.” He slowly spells out the message: Y-C-H-R-I-S-T-M-A-S. That’s it! It’s Christmas Day! His soul swells with refrains from abandoned carols and hymns as he desperately nods what remains of his head. Merry Christmas, nurse! God bless you! God bless you!
And what’s this? Other doctors have begun to notice his movements are not random spasms! Joe starts to spell out “S-O-S” in Morse code on his pillow. Miraculously, they start to respond. One wonders what a man who has been trapped within his own body would want to say first after such an ordeal. Joe has one request: to be taken around the country in a glass case so that people will learn about the horrors of war. But no…the officer in charge can’t allow that. It would be bad for morale. People might actually think that the army isn’t as glorious as it is said to be. Joe’s request is denied. And so, Joe is left with one final option. He starts to furiously spell out “Kill me. Kill me. Kill me."
The army’s response to Joe’s desperate appeal is shocking in its cruelty. The ending is one of the most heartbreaking and enraging conclusions possible. It is a testament to the blind-headedness that plunged the world into the two worst wars in human history where false pretenses of honor and good sportsmanship by the armed elite spelled death for countless young men and women.
Johnny Got His Gun was directed by Dalton Trumbo, a two-time Academy Award winning screenwriter and member of the Hollywood Ten, a group of film industry professionals who were blacklisted due to their refusal to testify before the House Un-American Activites Committeee (HUAC) in 1947 for supposed Communist influences. Working largely from exile, Trumbo accrued a massive body of published screenplays. His films included (1950), Roman Holiday (1953), The Brave One (1956), and Spartacus (1960). Johnny Got His Gun was based off his own novel of the same name published in 1939. Based off the ordeal of a real life Canadian soldier, the book was a massive success, gaining the attention of left wing and anti-war circles.
Dalton Trumbo
But for all of its brilliance, Johnny Got His Gun is not without its flaws. The film has some serious pacing issues, particularly in the second act, where the plot comes to a grinding halt in order to explore the depths of Joe’s hallucinations. Also, every now and again the audience is beset by a poor line reading that could have benefited from additional takes. Most of this can probably be explained to Trumbo’s directorial inexperience. He never quite seems to understand that in the cinema, it is more important to show, rather than merely tell. All of these criticisms can best be summarized by explaining that the film feels like Trumbo was more concerned with putting a literal translation of his book on the silver screen instead of interpreting the story in a manner that best suits the cinematic, and therefore visual, idiom.
But for its roughness, Johnny Got His Gun is one of the most powerful anti-war films ever made. More and more these days, I find myself willingly shying away from using such absolutes as “the best ever” or “the finest example of.” Such claims seem dishonest and can suggest a lack of film-going experience. But I don’t hesitate to use such language here. Johnny Got His Gun is a gut-wrenching, heart-breaking, and soul-shattering film. It has almost no gore or combat footage, and yet it stands tall with other anti war films like Paths of Glory (1957) and The Deer Hunter (1978). It forces the audience to confront the true face of war: a bandaged, bloody mess of wasted dreams, potential, and lives.
And in case you are wondering, no, they never do show what Joe looks like under his bandages. Some would ask why? I would respond, would it matter?
southendmd:
Wow, John. Speechless.
That looks like Donald Sutherland as....Jesus?
I'm reminded of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, by Julian Schnabel. Although, that film had no obvious anti-war or political view. Rather the depiction of one who is "locked-in".
Aloysius J. Gleek:
--- Quote from: southendmd on April 17, 2011, 09:10:31 pm ---Wow, John. Speechless.
That looks like Donald Sutherland as....Jesus?
I'm reminded of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, by Julian Schnabel. Although, that film had no obvious anti-war or political view. Rather the depiction of one who is "locked-in".
--- End quote ---
Yes!
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067277/
Directed by
Dalton Trumbo
Writing credits
Dalton Trumbo (novel)
Dalton Trumbo (screenplay)
Luis Buñuel uncredited
Cast
Timothy Bottoms ... Joe Bonham
Kathy Fields ... Kareen
Marsha Hunt ... Joe's Mother
Jason Robards ... Joe's Father
Donald Sutherland ... Christ
Dalton Trumbo ... Orator (as Robert Cole)
David Soul ... Swede
Tom Tryon ... (uncredited)
Storyline
Joe, a young American soldier, is hit by a mortar shell on the last day of World War I. He lies in a hospital bed in a fate worse than death --- a quadruple amputee who has lost his arms, legs, eyes, ears, mouth and nose. He remains conscious and able to think, thereby reliving his life through strange dreams and memories, unable to distinguish whether he is awake or dreaming. He remains frustrated by his situation, until one day when Joe discovers a unique way to communicate with his caregivers. Written by Anonymous
Postscript:
Johnny Got His Gun (1971)
Duncan Zowie Haywood Jones b. 30 May 1971
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version