- Full Metal Jacket (allthetropes.org)
Full Metal Jacket is the story of the Vietnam War seen through the eyes of a US Marine known to the audience as “Joker”. The movie, directed by Stanley Kubrick, is split into two parts. The first part follows Joker alongside his fellow Marine recruits through Boot Camp as they suffer under the colorful Gunnery Sergeant Hartman (played by R. Lee Ermey in his most famous role), and the second part follows Joker’s struggle to keep his humanity while he covers the Vietnam War as a combat correspondent.
- How Kubrick Turns Men into Weapons | Full Metal Jacket (YouTube)
Full Metal Jacket sees Kubrick explore the Vietnam war, he focusses on the experiences of the American soldiers and how they are transformed from normal people, with unique personalties and experiences, to reprogrammed soldiers ready to kill at a moments notice. Through characters such as Pvt. Pyle and Pvt. Joker, Kubrick looks at this idea from multiple angles and, with a heavy layer of irony, depicts the Vietnam War in a unique way that no other film has captured since.
- How Kubrick Uses the Camera (YouTube)
Kubrick is one of the most influential directors of the 20th Century, his career spanning almost five decades. He is perhaps best known for his bordering on insane attention to detail when it came to what’s in the frame, requiring take after take until the shot was perfect. This video looks at a handful of his most interesting shots, and breaking them down, examining how they elevate the themes of their films, and the visual techniques that are on display.
- Voltaire (plato.standford.edu)
François-Marie d’Arouet (1694–1778), better known by his pen name Voltaire, was a French writer and public activist who played a singular role in defining the eighteenth-century movement called the Enlightenment. At the center of his work was a new conception of philosophy and the philosopher that in several crucial respects influenced the modern concept of each. Yet in other ways Voltaire was not a philosopher at all in the modern sense of the term. He wrote as many plays, stories, and poems as patently philosophical tracts, and he in fact directed many of his critical writings against the philosophical pretensions of recognized philosophers such as Leibniz, Malebranche, and Descartes. He was, however, a vigorous defender of a conception of natural science that served in his mind as the antidote to vain and fruitless philosophical investigation. In clarifying this new distinction between science and philosophy, and especially in fighting vigorously for it in public campaigns directed against the perceived enemies of fanaticism and superstition, Voltaire pointed modern philosophy down several paths that it subsequently followed.
- Full Metal Jacket (Wikipedia)
Full Metal Jacket is a 1987 psychological war drama film directed and produced by Stanley Kubrick from a screenplay he co-wrote with Michael Herr and Gustav Hasford. The film is based on Hasford’s 1979 autobiographical novel The Short-Timers. It stars Matthew Modine, R. Lee Ermey, Vincent D’Onofrio, Adam Baldwin, Dorian Harewood, and Arliss Howard.