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This article pretty much lays out what the movie is and isn't ("This is not an action movie... Critics expected a much more specific political commentary about what's going on in Iraq right now. I think they were shocked that it was so comedic, and that it was so specifically about Desert Storm." - Director Sam Mendes). Though I could have done without the paragraph on Jake Gyllenhaal being half-naked in one scene (no homo).
So, in the words of Professor Griff, "Consider yourselves... warned."
From Entertainment Weekly:
> Ready. Aim. Wait.
Sam Mendes on the creation of a different kind of war movie -- The director of ''Jarhead'' talks about the making of his take on Desert Storm by Steve Daly
For months, director Sam Mendes has been toiling at an editing facility in New York City. He's been shaping and reshaping the voice-over narration and fiddling with precise gradations of bleached-out imagery on the way to a final cut of Jarhead, an account of what one group of U.S. Marine Corps troops went through in the 1991 Gulf War. With only about a week to go before the movie's publicity junket, Mendes finally okayed a finished print. Now, near the close of a three-day barrage of interviews in Los Angeles, he sounds like he's got postpartum blues. It's one thing to whip your film into shape in comparative privacy. It's another to send your baby out into the hard world.
''I was sitting in a radio junket,'' he says, holding forth in his hotel suite. ''The first seven questions — I counted — were about how I thought the movie would open at the box office. It's pretty depressing. What am I supposed to say? You're the best ones to judge that. But also, who f---ing cares? I just spent 18 months of my life on this movie, and the big question you're asking is whether I'm worried that the war is going to affect the opening weekend of Jarhead? That's insane. When I think about the war, the last thing I'm worried about is my opening weekend.''
Which is not to say Mendes isn't worried about his opening weekend. An Oscar winner for his 1999 film debut American Beauty (which grossed $130 million and took Best Picture), the 40-year-old Cambridge-educated Brit initially made his name as a young, hotshot stage director. He's still a relative newbie as a filmmaker, and his excellent Hollywood adventure, which continued with 2002's reasonably successful Road to Perdition, could always go bye-bye. ''Black Hawk Down took $100 million,'' he points out a while later, in a moment of hopeful comparison. Directed by Ridley Scott, that 2001 film dramatized a botched 1993 mission by the U.S. military in Somalia (and its final domestic gross actually topped out at $109 million). ''But that was an action movie. This is not.''
Indeed, it's hard to classify Jarhead, and thus to sell it. Part coming-of-age story, part military-training horror show, part bawdy male-bonding romp, and part poetic meditation on the murderous impulses of men at war, the movie doesn't offer much in the way of conventional, audience-pleasing payoffs. It's about being worn down by fear in a combat zone where the war could start at any minute, but doesn't in fact commence for months after deployment. Jake Gyllenhaal stars as a grunt who's molded into an expert sniper, then left with no chance to strut his stuff because the Gulf War is over in a flash. Peter Sarsgaard is his loyal, hard-nosed sniper-scout partner, but it's not a warm-fuzzy, buddy-buddy kind of relationship — no cute clips to push on that score — while Jamie Foxx, the Oscar-winning star of Ray, takes a peppery supporting turn as a tough-love sergeant.
As journalists take in the film for the first time, Mendes is suddenly realizing that misperception could be an issue. ''I can feel people talking about the movie they expected to see,'' he says. ''They expected a much more specific political commentary about what's going on in Iraq right now. I think they were shocked that it was so comedic, and that it was so specifically about Desert Storm.'' The director, in turn, has been taken aback to see prerelease articles writing off Jarhead's impact sight unseen. ''I've read pieces about why this movie's already in danger of becoming irrelevant,'' he reports, looking incredulous. ''That the problem is, real-life events are going to overtake it. Huh? It' s about Operation Desert Storm! How can events overtake it?''
Remember General Norman Schwarzkopf? He wrapped up the ground-assault phase of the Gulf War in only four days, from Feb. 24 to 27, 1991. The mission had been to stop Saddam Hussein's Iraqi troops from annexing oil-rich Kuwait, and it was accomplished blitzkrieg-style, in an overwhelming display of force. Schwarzkopf became a media star because of his so-called surgical-strike triumph. Madonna even vamped to a lyric about him that year at the Academy Awards while singing ''Sooner or Later,'' a song from Dick Tracy. ''Talk to me, General Schwarzkopf,'' she cooed. ''Tell me all about it.''
But one Gulf War veteran by the name of Anthony Swofford wasn't so thrilled with the whole stormin'-Norman ethos. For a good decade after his six-month mobilization as a Marine Corps sniper in the Gulf War, Swofford brooded over the way his service had amounted, in his eyes, to a sustained arousal with no release. He turned his recollections and his anger into a 2003 memoir titled Jarhead — slang for what a Marine's cranium looks like after a high-and-tight haircut. As wartime chronicles go, Jarhead had a singularly strange, almost perverse theme: how a man who longed to be a killer was robbed of a shot at the gold by a gyp of a war.
Hollywood initially balked at turning such a dark, quirky book into a movie. When the galleys first circulated in fall 2002, just after the first anniversary of 9/11, nobody bit. It seemed too bleak, episodic, and difficult to market, not least because it would certainly get an R rating. To a studio-based book buyer's way of thinking, it was also a potential political minefield, with a new war on the horizon.
By the time Scribner — home of Hemingway — actually published Jarhead, though, the U.S. invasion of Iraq was at hand. That brought Swofford considerable publicity as a go-to witness of previous desert warfare, and helped make his book a best-seller. Producing partners Douglas Wick (Gladiator) and Lucy Fisher (Win a Date With Tad Hamilton!), impressed by the book's reviews, put a development package together. Their base studio, Sony, said no. By the fall of 2003, they'd managed to land a deal with then-Universal production honcho Scott Stuber instead, with screenwriter William Broyles Jr. (Cast Away, Apollo 13) attached. In Fisher's opinion, Swofford's book ''finally told the story, from the soldier's perspective, of a war nobody had seen.'' Meaning, of course, the ground war nobody had seen, as opposed to the air-war assault that was in fact televised up the wazoo. ''With a few exceptions, there was just no imagery of it out in the world as it happened,'' Fisher says. (There have been a number of Gulf War movies and documentaries released since the cessation of combat, including an IMAX movie, Fires of Kuwait, which Mendes and company would ultimately study for visual inspiration.)
Broyles had been a logical match for Jarhead. After all, he's a Vietnam veteran and an ex-Marine himself, and felt at home with the subject. But why in the world did Wick and Fisher go after an aesthete like Mendes, who they insist was their only serious candidate as director? ''It is preposterous, really,'' Mendes concedes with a laugh. In late 2003, he found he was going nowhere with some other potential movies, including Sweeney Todd and The Kite Runner. Then Wick and Fisher sent him Swofford's book. He remembers being up late a couple of nights with his infant son, Joe. (Actress Kate Winslet, Mendes' wife of two years, is the lad's mother.) Through a fog of sleeplessness, he fell in love with Swofford's take on the fog of war. He says it was the book's cascade of ''unusual images and incredible details — very difficult to translate, but gloriously vivid'' that made him agree to sign on barely a week later.
The biggest adaptation hurdle was to make engaging movie characters of the soldiers, as well as of Swofford himself. Broyles and Mendes created and compounded story beats to up the empathy factor, most notably a Christmas party with pounding rap music by Public Enemy. ''It's based partly on my experiences and some other stories we heard,'' reports Broyles. ''Christmas was always the most poignant, lonely time.'' And as audiences will discover when they see Gyllenhaal prancing around in nothing but two Santa hats, one strategically placed, while Christmas for a soldier might be the pits, movie scenes about Christmas for a soldier can be totally hot.
Impressed with how buff Gyllenhaal had looked when he caught him in a 2002 London stage production of This Is Our Youth, Mendes put the young actor through a couple of inconclusive meetings in mid-2004. Gyllenhaal, who turns 25 this December, tried reading the film's narration — a crucial script component — out loud at Mendes' New York City apartment. ''It was really, really literary and hard to get your mouth around,'' the actor remembers. ''I couldn't connect. I thought I'd f---ed it up.'' As the summer of 2004 wore on, reports and rumors went around that Mendes was looking at just about every eligible under-30 actor in Hollywood — rumors that tormented Gyllenhaal while he was in Calgary filming Brokeback Mountain for Ang Lee. But by fall, as Mountain wound down, Gyllenhaal got the nod. He celebrated by pushing his body bulk to the limit — a startling mass of muscle he has since lost again.
''He went nuts,'' says Gyllenhaal's 34-year-old costar Sarsgaard, a close offscreen cohort because he happens to date Jake's sister, Maggie. ''I know actors say, I got in shape for a role. But he was working out twice a day sometimes, with a trainer who was like a Nazi.''
Sarsgaard wound up coming late to the Jarhead casting table himself. He didn't get hired till the week before rehearsals. ''I think Sam knew he needed a relationship ,'' says Sarsgaard. ''Jake and I already had one. So — grab that one!'' It bothered Sarsgaard that he'd have barely any time to reshape his body, as Gyllenhaal did. He was too busy juggling final filming on Flightplan with initial rehearsals for Jarhead. ''I figured there was no way I was gonna look like Jake,'' he says. ''Then I started talking to one of our technical advisers. He was a sniper and he was a smoker. He said, 'In the end the only thing that matters is this,' and he mimed pulling a trigger. Marines look all different ways. I just had to get myself in the headspace of it, of what it means to want to pull that trigger.''
Sam Mendes treated Jarhead as his own opportunity to get in shape. Intellectual shape, that is. He pored over every aspect of military culture and hired a small platoon of actual Marines as advisers. (There was no official Corps input.) Using L.A. soundstages and California and Mexico desert locations to create his own versions of Saudi Arabia and oil-fire-plagued Kuwait — heavily enhanced afterward with enough CGI to make Jarhead one of the major effects feats of the year — he strove for a visual tone poem, leaning on his cinematographer, Roger Deakins (A Beautiful Mind, The Village), to photograph it all with a handheld immediacy.
But Mendes remains well aware that he's far from a pioneer in picturing boot-camp and desert-outpost life as a sort of surreal fantasia. Stanley Kubrick, for one, got there long before him, turning actor R. Lee Ermey into the archetypal drill instructor from hell for 1987's Full Metal Jacket. And as if to remind Mendes just how well-trod a path he'd picked for himself, Ermey sent the director a little gift shortly before he started shooting Jarhead, seemingly as a genuine goodwill gesture. ''I got this package,'' Mendes says. ''It said, 'Compliments of R. Lee Ermey. Good luck.' And inside was an R. Lee Ermey doll. He has patented himself, bless him.''
Mendes maintains he wasn't intimidated by Kubrick's ghost. ''Nobody can compete with those Full Metal Jacket scenes,'' he says. ''All you can do is shoot it your own way.'' And in fact, in a shrewd offensive move, Jarhead deliberately stokes war-movie memories, referencing Jacket with an insane drill instructor (played by Scott MacDonald) spouting baroque obscenities at the start of the picture. The film also salutes the ''Ride of the Valkyries'' scene in Apocalypse Now, which the Marine grunts use in a creepily pornographic way to amp up their bloodlust — just as they do in Swofford's book. (Giant irony: Walter Murch, who coedited Apocalypse and shared an Oscar for its sound design, also edited Jarhead.)
Can Mendes' movie enter the short list of great war flicks, devoid as it is of standard war-movie pleasures? Will it even hack its way to contender status among this year's best dramatic flicks? After all, it's got no bold political slant to help splash it across op-ed pages and chat boards. The Sarsgaard character actually explicitly dismisses the whole idea of such partisanship by declaring, ''F--- politics.''
Mendes claims he's mainly out to remind people of the individuals behind America's military might, a vast machine that Foxx's sergeant calls, unironically, ''the righteous hammer of God.'' That includes the soldiers of today, the ones who happen to be in harm's way in Iraq right now. ''Our intention,'' he says, ''above and beyond any specific narrative about the Gulf War, was to give human shape to these numbers you read about every day. Everyone thinks somehow that Marines are all the same. Which is, of course, nonsense.''
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defender of all things upn
currently on backorder for me and f--- (o-), cause us "morons" need it:
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=F81az3zB07&isbn=0312144776&itm=1
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