well delivered movie lines

Faust - I just realized that it is irrational to ask for something in the same vein as the very best. But I cannot locate this quote on te internet.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XBZO8JcClM[/youtube]

I couldn’t find an embeddable version. This is Crenna.

youtu.be/5sW1U-Y0hLg

“A man who’s been trained to ignore pain, ignore weather, to live off the land, to eat things that would make a billy goat puke.”

This made me laugh. It is not quite the typical hailing of an invincible soldier.

The film as a a whole is almost the anti-Apocalypse Now. Now poetry, no myth, no one chewing the scenery. Moves along well. I like this picture.

I will watch it. I have perhaps an unusual question for you: if we take “Apocalypse Now” to be the film equivalent of “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” (in terms of chewing the scenery), what might be considered the “First Blood” of philosophy?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVV1tVkCBFs[/youtube]

I like the last line.

The Public and Its Problems (John Dewey)

The ten divisions Kurtz spoke of constituted the enemies that American soldiers were fighting. They were men fully capable of chopping off the arms of young children that had been vaccinated against a horrific disease.

“The Horror! The Horror!” revolves precisely around acknowledging how we live in a world where such an events can occur at all. One can easily imagine it being “based on a true story”.

But the bottom line remains: The soldiers can be used to achieve any particular end. They are merely the most effective means of achieving it. Why? Well, in this case, because [unlike the American G.I.s], they are disciplined and committed.

As Captain Willard notes while watching the ludicrous USO/Playboy bunny fiasco, “Charlie had only two ways home, victory…or death”.

But does that make their cause [Communism] more noble? more virtuous?

iambiguous:

There are always value judgments. It is only a question of jamming all the conflicting ones together and coming up with the least dysfunctional behaviors. But this can never be more than a point of view. Kurtz’s own included folks dangling from trees and decapitated heads strewn about everywhere.

True, but I did not see Col. Kurtz’s own “methodless” nihilism as any more palatable than the policies “the clowns who ran the circus” back in Saigon and Washington pursued. Again, the horror [for me] is always embedded in the realization that “Vietnams” keep rearing their ugly heads over and again throughout the historical evolution of “human condition”. At any given time, there are dozens of them [large and small] infolding in the morning headlines.

There were no “heroes” to be found in the film—anywhere. And Coppola’s take never delved into the military industrial complex. Instead, it was rooted more in Joseph Conrad’s novella Hearts of Darkness. And while Conrad explored the at times brtutal role of European capitalism/colonialism in Africa, most folks tend to focus on the third theme: the “darkness” that haunts the soul of man, enabling him to do all manner of terrible things.

And while the “will-to-power” explains it in part, capitalism surely offers it a fertile ground in which to sprout all manner of historical monsters. Some even rationalizing their deeds by way of “the virtue of selfishness”.

Of course I had to go look this up, you have without a doubt read much more than I have. I realize that raiding quotes from wikipedia is only preferable to remaining ignorant in case of a properly representative wikipedia entry. He seems like a very rational man. This was a pleasure to read:

What a great insight!

My philosophical “lineage” is Hume, Nietzsche, Dewey, Russel and Ayer. I don’t always include Dewey on this list, because he seems to be little read, especially outside the US.

I completely agree. That is the reason I picked that line - in the cruelty of Kurtz voice, the horror is truly conveyed, or at least most potently suggested.
I would say that it conveys the sense of purpose, that lead to such atrocities.

It is as if, in this line Kurtzs insanity is revealed, by his actions after we have first seen it strewn about his dwelling. We never see him in action, to hear him utter the intention is enough.

A well made film, what will-power, to engineer an image of such magnitude and turbulence.

But the bottom line remains: The soldiers can be used to achieve any particular end. They are merely the most effective means of achieving it. Why? Well, in this case, because [unlike the American G.I.s], they are disciplined and committed.

A chill-inspiring moment even to re-read.

Have you seen the Redux - version? I ask because, only during that strange scene in the French stronghold which was understandably left out of the theatrical version, do we learn that the Vietcong is not actually communist in the sense of the doctrine - only in the sense that they can use the help of the Chinese and the Russians.

I think that what Willards line implies here is that their adversary is fighting for his home, and he has no choice to fight. After all, he could not possibly have the faintest clue why the Americans were there at all. To him, they might as well have been aliens from Mars.

Now this still does not imply that this was a virtuous people – only that it was impossible to bring down on the terms the Americans provided.

Not a great deal different from the current mission in Iraq, as it turned out, although this mistake could have been avoided because there was a majority desiring to get rid of the regime.

I would say less, even less. I think that there was some goodness in al the people except Kurtz. Simply because he had given up the idea of goodness at all, and yet continued to live on. This was his evil - it was good that he was killed. That was the great surprise for me at least, to experience it in the end from the point of view of the three men who have come to bring Willard the mission, instead of from a more or less exalted, indifferent point of view claiming to be beyond morality. We are led to see that morality might actually have it’s use, even if it is extremely hypocritical at best.

Indeed. And morality protects us from having to constantly realize this, by telling ourself that we are above it. We are above it, until we are lowered to it by (inevitably or not) succumbing to certain powers.

No moral hero’s. But Lieutenant Kilgore does stand out as a cinematic hero, or at least a what the audience responds to with a positive emotion. I think that this signifies the blindness necessary to hold a self-serving morality.

Capitalism, Communism, Nazism, Protestantism, Catholicism, Imperialism - all of these beasts are only vessels for a cruel, inhuman group-will. What I prefer about capitalism is that it is at least honest about this. It is transparent in it’s motives, therefore it can be tamed. One can impose virtues on capitalism, if one is so inclined. This is impossible with all the others, which in themselves claim to be virtues. How can one impose a virtue on a virtue?

Interesting. (The anecdote in the wiki entry on Ayer is remarkable) The theme of scepsis runs through this like a spine -
what I see is that Nietzsche stands out as the only one who explicitly embraced myth. I think that Nietzsche was convinced that “will to power” refutes this:

"The propositions of philosophy are not factual, but linguistic in character - that is, they do not describe the behaviour of physical, or even mental, objects; they express definitions, or the formal consequences of definitions. [Ayer was a logical positivist] I came across this "

I think that Zarathustra is essential to grasping the longing for the Übermensch, and that this is where the poet Nietzsche departs from the logical sceptic. I can see where this ceases to be interesting.

Alec Baldwin as Blake, the hotshot head honcho in Glengarry Glen Ross. The entire speech was pure gold, but here’s just a little taste…

Blake: FUCK YOU, that’s my name!! You know why, Mister? 'Cause you drove a Hyundai to get here tonight, I drove a eighty thousand dollar BMW. That’s my name!! (to Levene) And your name is “you’re wanting.” And you can’t play in a man’s game. You can’t close them. (at a near whisper) And you go home and tell your wife your troubles. (to everyone again) Because only one thing counts in this life! Get them to sign on the line which is dotted! You hear me, you fucking faggots?

True. Probing where nationalism ends and ideology begins is analogous to probing where society ends and the individual begins. It is always different for everyone. Even after watching the documentary Hearts of Darkness, I couldn’t really get inside Coppola’s head to guage his own intentions here. But there is no right or wrong way really to react to the lines from the film. We often react differently because our individual lives are so different in turn.

At least in my view. Which I don’t pretend is the only reasonable view to have.

Willard’s character seemed – to me – to be outside all of this. He seemed committed solely now to probing how and why Kurtz went from the man in the dossier to the man in the jungle. As a way perhaps to understand the changes in his own life. And the gap between him and the Vietcong was equally unbridgable.

We are all born of the same species but how we come to view ourselves and the world around us – especially in our “post-modern” world – can be both vast and varied.

And there are equally many diverse ways in which to approach “virtue”.

I have always viewed the Iraq war from the vantage point of political economy. It was a war over the oil. And a war rooted in the wants and the needs of the military industrial complex. In Vietnam there were a lot more people who viewed the conflict in ideological terms: Us vs. Them.

In other words, Western democracy [however nominal] versus Communist tryanny. In Iraq, the “jihadist terrorists” were merely the bogeyman used by the powers that be – what even Colin Powell called the ‘terrorist industrial complex’ – to rationalize the war. There is simply no comparison between the threat posed by Islamic extremists today and the Nazis in the 30s and 40s and the USSR/China in the 50s, 60s and 70s.

I saw that when I was looking for his speech in Nuernberg.
Indeed he delivers this very well. It seems suited to his character.

What I read in interviews is that Coppola simply wanted to make a californian war-film. He wanted to deviate from the plot of Johhny from the Bronx doing his dutiful service, to a wilder kind of picture. I am not sure that he had explicit moral or even historical narrative intentions as much as the desire to make a good movie.

The only point at which we see him truly involved is as he finds the head of one of his crew in his lap.
But what I meant is that the Vietnamese probably had not the first clue about what the Americans were doing there.

Still, similar ideological terms were what got the Iraq war the support it needed.

That may be true. In any case the war is not helping to reduce the extremism.

Predator “Johnny ain’t scared of no man” in response to what could be out there killing off their men…

  • Where would someone go to hide from Margos?
  • Hell?
  • :angry-fire:
  • Venezuela.

Where are the dogs heads?

They’re in the freezer.
I was going to make them into soup.
Make that bitch drink it.