re: Was Full Metal Jacket a great movie or just a great first half of a movie?

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It’s almost like two totally different movies, before the war and during the war.

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That’s the point

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Animal Mother is the "success" (as would be defined by the USMC)

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He had the right make up of a successful NFL DL, LB or safety from the 60's or 70's too. I'm talking about the guys that seemed to enjoy hurting other people. If they weren't playing football, there were a few of those guys might have ended up in jail.



Guys from the 90's I felt that way about were Charles Haley and Greg Lloyd.



If you watched what they did to other human beings, you might be inclined to wonder what else they could do, if they weren't trying to kill other men in the NFL.

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First half is so much about R. Lee Ermey's performance as the Drill Sergeant in Boot Camp, and he dominated most of the scenes.

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I love this excerpt from a Rolling Stone interview with Stanley Kubrick:

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Interviewer: He had actually been a marine drill instructor?

Parris Island.

Interviewer: How much of his part comes out of that experience?

I'd say fifty percent of Lee's dialogue, specifically the insult stuff, came from Lee. You see, in the course of hiring the marine recruits, we interviewed hundreds of guys. We lined them all up and did an improvisation of the first meeting with the drill instructor. They didn't know what he was going to say, and we could see how they reacted. Lee came up with, I don't know, 150 pages of insults. Off the wall stuff: "I don't like the name Lawrence. Lawrence is for **** and sailors."

Aside from the insults, though, virtually every serious thing he says is basically true. When he says, "A rifle is only a tool, it's a hard heart that kills," you know it's true. Unless you're living in a world that doesn't need fighting men, you can't fault him. Except maybe for a certain lack of subtlety in his behavior. And I don't think the United States Marine Corps is in the market for subtle drill instructors.

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