Arts of War on the Web

On May  5, the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences—the folks who give out the Emmys—held a different kind of awards banquet at the Beverly Hills Hotel in La La Land: one that honored “television with a conscience.”

Among the eight shows honored at this third annual event: HBO’s exceptional film Taking Chance, which told the true story of Marine Corps Captain Mike Strobl escorting the body of Marine Corporal Chance Phelps, who was killed in Iraq, from Dover Air Force Base to Chance’s home in Wyoming.

“This is about the television community and the people who work in it putting their heart and soul into their work,” Academy Chairman and CEO John Shaffner said. “None of these stories would be told if someone didn’t say, ‘I have to do this.’”

That certainly was the case with Taking Chance.  Strobl, who co-wrote the screenplay, received the VVA President’s Award for Excellence in the Arts at the 2009 National Convention in Louisville.

For more info on the awards go to the Academy’s website.

Khe Sanh, 1968

You can get a look at the synopsis of the script for an as-yet unproduced film called A Grunt’s Tale at the moviebytes.com web site. The script, written by by Justine Cowan and based on a true story, centers on an African-American housekeeper for a white suburban family who helps a Marine Vietnam veteran deal with his emotional readjustment after surviving the Siege of Khe Sanh and coming home.

Cowan concieved the idea for the script after interviewing Khe Sanh veterans at their 2007 reunion. “It  been my life’s dream to see it made into a film,” Cowan told us. “It is script is a tribute to Vietnam veterans and I want to see it made.”

To contact Cowan, email juscowan19191@aol.com

Military Times magazine staff writer C. Mark Brinkley has come up with a list of the ten best Hollywood war movies, in reaction to the fact that the American Film Institute’s list of 100 best movies has a dearth of such films.

The list, called “The Military Times top 10 American war movies that should have made the AFI’s Top 100,” includes only one Vietnam War film, Stanley Kubrick’s masterful Full Metal Jacket (featuring the amazing Lee Ermey as the drill sergeant from hell–above, center).

Here it is:

10. A Bridge Too Far (1977)

9. The Dirty Dozen (1967)

8. The Great Escape (1963)

7. Top Gun (1986)

6. Letters from Iwo Jima (2006)

5. The Caine Mutiny (1954)

4. Glory (1989)

3. Black Hawk Down (2001)

2. Patton (1970)

1. Full Metal Jacket (1987)

Brinkley calls FMJ “the best war movie of the past 20 years, if not all time,” and notes that “it didn’t even crack the [AFI] Top 400 ballot.”

The list is on line, and is interactive, so you can add your comments. My two cents: I’d take out Top Gun and The Great Escape, and add include Platoon and Apocalypse Now, both of which did make the original AFI Top 100 list.

When I saw The Big Lebowski in 1998, I loved it. But I had no idea it would become a cultural icon that would spawn its own subculture of devotees. I just thought it was clever, funny, and intriguingly strange.

The movie, among other things, has inspired several books. The latest is The Year’s Work in Lebowski Studies, a group of essays by academics edited by two college English professors (who else?), Edward P. Comentale and Aaron Jaffe (Indiana University Press, 512 pp., $24.94, paper).
The book contains the work of 21 “fans and scholars.” It deals with topics such as the film’s influences (westerns, noir, grail legends, the 1960s, and Fluxus) and its themes, which include the first Iraq war, boomers, slackerdom, surrealism, college culture, and bowling.

Here’s my brief review, which appeared in the April/May 1998 issue of The VVA Veteran.

Big John Goodman (Roseanne’s TV hubby) plays Walter, a big-hearted, big-mouthed Vietnam veteran in the Coen brothers’ cartoonish black comedy The Big Lebowski, which opened in the multiplexes early in March. Walter constantly prattles on about his war days. It’s the early nineties, yet he goes around wearing jungle boots, cut-off fatigue shorts and dog tags. Walter’s also got a wicked temper, and is not hesitant to brandish a firearm or resort to physical violence.

Okay, Walter is another cinematic Nam vet nutcase. Still, the movie is played for laughs, and Walter is pretty damn funny. And how can you get upset with a guy who confronts a transgressing fellow bowler by bellowing: “This is not Vietnam, this is bowling. There are rules!”

The new big Hollywood film, The Men Who Stare at Goats, has a minor Vietnam War theme.  The movie spin out a based-on-a-true (if extremely odd) story of military intelligence gone two steps over the line. Said theme plays out in the person of Vietnam veteran Bill Django, played by the always-good Jeff Bridges, who in the two decades after his service in the war, has morphed into a New Age hippie type.

He comes up with a goofy intelligence manual (partially under the influence of hallucinogens) that the Army decides to adopt.  It’s based on his hush-hush Nam assignment as the leader of an experimental unit called The New Earth Army.

“We must be the first superpower to have super powers,” Django, notes, and then the excellent ensemble, led by George Clooney (above, staring at a goat) Ewan McGregor, Bridges and Kevin Spacey, have fun with the Army’s version of Jedi “warrior monks.”

The reviews were generally positive. The New York Times‘ Manohla Dargis, for example, called the movie “likable, lightweight, absurdist comedy.”

Oliver (Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, et al.) Stone is at work on his latest film, a sequel to his first post-Platoon movie, Wall Street, which came out late in 1987. That movie, in which Michael Douglas starred as the unscrupulous wheeler-dealer Gordon Gekko, won critical and popular acclaim, and a Best Actor Oscar for Douglas. Charlie Sheen, who had the lead in Platoon, starred opposite Douglas as a young, hungry stockbroker.

Douglas will reprise his role in the new movie, which Stone says will try to capture the greedy Wall Street culture prior to the most recent economic unpleasantness, as the first film did with that mid-eighties Wall Street milieu.

“When Gekko comes out of prison in the beginning of this movie, he essentially has to redefine himself, redefine his character,” Stone said in a Sept. 9 The New York Times interview. “He’s looking for that second chance.” The on-line component of the NYT article includes a video of Stone talking about the films.

When the prime-time Emmy award nominations were announced this morning, HBO led the league, with 99. No. 2 NBC had 67. Among the 99 are ten nominations for the sterling original film, Taking Chance, which VVA will screen twice at the 14th National Convention in Louisville.

The nominations include Outstanding Made for Television Movie; Outstanding Lead Actor in a Mini Series or a Movie (Kevin Bacon as Mike Strobl); Outstanding Directing (Ross Katz); and Outstanding Writing (Strobl and Katz). The Emmys will air September 20 on CBS from the Nokia Theatre in Los Angeles.

Mike Strobl will be honored by VVA with the President’s Award for Excellence in the Arts at the Convention’s Saturday night banquet. Strobl, HBO CEO Bill Nelson (a VVA member) and John Phelps (Chance Phelps’ father) will be on hand for the Saturday afternoon screeningin Louisville.

The highly praised HBO film Taking Chance, which was first aired on February 19, will be released on DVD on May 12. If you didn’t catch this beautifully made, powerfully acted film about a 19-year-old Marine’s final journey home from the war in Iraq, mark your calendar and check it out.

VVA will honor HBO and screenwriter Mike Strobl (above) at the National Convention in Louisville at the Saturday night Awards Banquet. We also will have two screenings of the film for Convention delegates and guests, on Friday evening and Saturday afternoon.

The film, starring Kevin Bacon, tells the moving story of the journey that Marine Lt. Col. Strobl underwent after he volunteered to escort the body of 19-year-old Chance Phelps from Dover Air Force Base to Phelps’ hometown of Dubois, Wyoming. Strobl, a Persian Gulf War I veteran now retired from the Marine Corps, co-wrote the screenplay, along with the film’s director and executive producer Ross Katz in his first directorial effort.

“I was wondering about Chance Phelps,” Strobl noted in his journal as he waited to begin the work of escorting the remains. “I didn’t know anything about him; not even what he looked like. I wondered about his family and what it would be like to meet them. I did pushups in my room until I couldn’t do any more.”

What Strobl found on this journey—and what the film shows beautifully—was an outpouring of respect, tinged with sadness, from virtually everyone he encountered along the way: baggage handlers at airports, fellow commercial plane passengers, airline counter personnel, funeral home employees and, above all, the military personnel who took charge of Chance Phelps’ body in Iraq, transported it to Dover, and prepared it for burial.

The DVD is available at all the usual rental outlets and for purchase on line, including through HBO.

The University of Iowa’s College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, in conjunction with the University’s Veterans Center, is offering Identity and Social Issues: Wounded Warriors: Veterans in Literature and Film, a class this summer taught by creative nonfiction instructor Stephen A Kuusisto. The class runs from June 9 to July 31 and meets twice a week on the Iowa City campus.

“Disability has always been a difficult subject in literature and film,” the course description says. “Disabled characters often challenge cultural ideas of ‘normalcy’ while they also complicate the symbolism of the ‘heroic’ body. This course explores the contradictions in the representations of disability in literature and film by focusing on the experiences of veterans with disabilities.

Specifically we will analyze representations of veterans with disabilities in literature and film and seek to understand the wounded body in its political, social, and cultural contexts. Additionally we will explore how literature both reflects and distorts the experiences of returning veterans.”

The films and books the course cover will include several dealing with the Vietnam War, such as Ron Kovic’s primal scream of a memoir, Born on the Fourth of July and the accompanying film by Oliver Stone, and The Deer Hunter (above). It also includes the great post-WWII film the Best Years of our Lives, as well as selections from the writings of Toni Morrison, Ernest Hemingway, Tim O’Brien, Studs Terkel, and Norman Mailer.

For info, email stephen-kuusisto@uiowa.edu or john-mikelson@uiowa.edu, go to www.uiowa.edu/~uiva ohn D. Mikelson or call 319-384-2020.