It should go without saying that if you’ve never been to war, you can’t pretend to know what it’s like. Yet for those of us who never have been, the movies have created our image of war; they’re the closest thing to it that most of us are likely to get. I’ll never forget the first time I saw the “Ride of the Valkyries” helicopter attack sequence in “Apocalypse Now.” I was a college newspaper intern who’d talked my way into the film’s American premiere on Aug. 15, 1979, at the Ziegfeld Theatre in New York. The movie, in a word, was shocking. The sound of Jim Morrison singing “This is the end…” told you, from the outset, that the stakes were about something larger than one disastrous American military morass, and by the time the helicopter massacre arrived, the film had become a trip...
- 2/20/2019
- by Owen Gleiberman
- Variety Film + TV
Paul Fussell—author, scholar, World War II veteran, and famously cranky bastard—died on Wednesday, May 23 of natural causes at age 88, according to The New York Times. Fussell’s worldview, priorities, and much of the shape of his career were set by his experience of the war, which he described as “ugliness incarnate,” leaving him in search of “any outlet that was artistic.” He partly summed himself up in the title of his 1996 memoir, Doing Battle: The Making Of A Skeptic. After completing his studies at Harvard University, Fussell began teaching at Connecticut College before settling in ...
- 5/24/2012
- avclub.com
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