♥♥♥♥
A young soldier with no uniform on his top half marvels at a barren oilfield in a foreign land on this poster for Sam Mendes' Jarhead
A young US marine gets deployed to First Gulf War (1990), against his own ill and without much understanding of the situation.
Jarhead is written by William Broyles Jr. (Apollo 13 (1995)), adapting the same-titled 2003 autobiographical book by Anthony Swofford (Exit (2007)), and directed by English master filmmaker Sam Mendes (American Beauty (1999)), whose 3rd feature it is. The title is a Marine slang term for themselves.
Definitely not a typical war genre movie, Jarhead is a kind of study of the anticlimax of war and frustrations that war - and life in general - entail.
Jake Gyllenhaal (Wildlife (2018)) very skillfully portrays the young protagonist marine. The images of the Iraqi desert are handsome, (cinematographer Roger Deakins (A Serious Man (2009))), and the film is underlain with music typical of its period. SPOILER The film revolves around the almost poetical dilemma that the young men think they get sent to war, but instead they wait around for 175 days in 45 degrees heat, before the war ends and they get to return home without having fired a single shot. The lack of plot is still somehow remarkable in Jarhead.
Related posts:
Sam Mendes: Spectre (2015) - Mendes' 2nd Bond is mostly good
rly celebrated third pout from Daniel Craig as Bond in slick production
Away We Go (2009) or, Where Do We Start This Family?
1999 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess
American Beauty (1999) or, Escape by Death
Watch a TV spot for the film here
Cost: 72 mil. $
Box office: 97 mil. $
= Big flop (returned 1.34 times its cost)
[Jarhead premiered 27 October (Hollywood) and runs 123 minutes. Gyllenhaal was paid 3 mil. $ for his performance in the film. Shooting took place from December 2004 - ? in Arizona, New Mexico, California and in Mexico. The film opened #2, behind Chicken Little, to a 27.7 mil. $ first weekend in North America, where it spent one more weekend in the top 5 (#5), grossing 62.6 mil. $ (64.5 % of the total gross). The 2nd and 3rd biggest markets were the UK with 9.5 mil. $ (9.8 %) and Germany with 4.7 mil. $ (4.8 %). Roger Ebert gave it a 3.5/4 star review, translating to a notch over this one. Mendes returned with Revolutionary Road (2008). Gyllenhaal returned in Zodiac (2007). Jarhead is fresh at 53% at Rotten Tomatoes.]
What do you think of Jarhead?
No comments:
Post a Comment