The Worst Film Ever

n my opinion it was a great movie with some interesting elements, even though having some plot holes and the ending probably was just too messy and crammed together, but still fun to watch and not your casual movie that is similar to all other ones.

a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

A documentary of the conflicting attitudes of the opponents of the Vietnam war.Roger Ebert wrote, "Here is a documentary about Vietnam that doesn't really level with us... If we know something about how footage is obtained and how editing can make points, it sometimes looks like propaganda... And yet, in scene after scene, the raw material itself is so devastating that it brushes the tricks aside." Exactly right. The folks who made this are clearly anti-war, but some of the footage they get is unforgettable.Most notably is the interview with General William Westmoreland where he says, "The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient." How can that be interpreted any other way? The movie was chosen as Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 47th Academy Awards presented in 1975. This win was not only well-deserved, but opened the door for possibly an even better Vietnam documentary: Errol Morris' "The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara" (2003), which also won the Oscar.

Peter Davis tried to help us see our purpose in Vietnam with use of cinematic juxtaposition. In that regard, this film is extremely successful. On the one hand you hear the callous remarks of an aloof man far removed from the intricacies of everyday life in the country of Vietnam. He casually states that life in the orient is "cheap" in his own words. In the next scene, we see the pain and misery (I should say we feel it) that villagers who have lost children experience. It is agonizing to watch. The arrogance on the part of some Americans reduced the enemy to stereotypes carried over from World War II and was made to apply here by over simplistic politicians. The lessons from Vietnam are hard to forget for my generation, who lost so much: our innocence, our trust, and our brethren. When we watched those mistakes take place in Iraq, it pained many of us to relive them all over again. War enacts a terrible toll in terms of lives lost and wounded. Those wounds extend for generations.This review comes at a time when politics once more plays a new important role in the Academy Awards. On the night of his acceptance, Peter Davis complained that the Vietnamese people still suffered at the hands of the American military and pleaded their case during the Oscar telecast. Frank Sinatra came out next and excused the speaker as not being a voice for members of the Academy. Warren Beatty, who next presented, thanked Sinatra as "you old Republican, you!" It displayed the bitter divisions that fracture our democracy along political lines, all started with Vietnam.War has a terrible impact on the people who live in the area of conflict. While soldiers comprise a very small percentage of those involved, it is the citizens who suffer and die the most (most unreported), and whose lives are forever affected. Peter Davis simply tried to help us see the impact of what we do in places so far removed from this "peaceful" nation.

Many have considered this film to be biased, and rightly so. It is no accident that the Vietnamese are sympathized considerably more than are the American soldiers and their leaders. In a time when many pro-war Americans felt that our position as a world power granted us the right to intervene and make decisions for other groups of people, Peter Davis' documentary was an eye opener for those willing to embrace its strong and poignant criticisms. Part of what Davis attempts to do is to show us the Vietnamese, not as a baser and apathetic people, but as real human beings with intelligence, history, and culture that were being trampled upon and overlooked in the face of a debilitating fear of spreading Communism. To carefully watch this film is to experience a side of war that has all too often been disregarded in American history: the view from the other side. If you would like to read more about my interpretation of this film and see a variety of other sources and helpful materials to better understand Hearts and documentary film in general, click on this link to my viewing guide for the film: http://www.trinity.edu/adelwich/ documentary/comm3325.viewing.guide.charles.tallent.pdf

Davis does a neat job of laying out the absurdity in the US's involvement in Vietnam. He does it mainly through the use of two techniques.(1) Successive contrast, as it's called in the psychology of perception. If you stare at a black square for a while, then switch your gaze to a gray square, it looks white, not gray. In this movie Davis juxtaposes moments from interviews and newsreel footage to demonstrate how far removed high-level speeches can be from events as they take place on the ground. General Westmoreland, who, like General Douglas MacArthur, was another one of those giants in the field of Oriental psychology, explains to us that Asians don't place the same kind of value on human life as Westerners do. (He might have been thinking of kamikaze attacks from WWII.) Cut to a Vietnamese funeral full of wailing mourners. A coach gives a pep talk, screaming and weeping, to a high school football team in Niles, Ohio. "Don't let them BEAT US!" he cries. Cut to a scene of combat.(2) Selective interviewing and editing. The Vietnamese seem to speak nothing but common sense and they are seen doing nothing but defending themselves -- and very little of that. The Americans that we see and hear are mostly divided into two types: phony idiots and wised-up ex-patriot veterans. Fred Coker is an exception. He's a naval aviator who was evidently a POW. He's clean-cut, intelligent, and articulate, and he's given a lot of screen time. This is all for the good because he's about the only pro-war character we see. He's been there and he still believes. He serves as a useful bridge between the pro-war idiots and the embittered anti-war Americans.And of course the statements we hear on screen are selected for their dramatic value. One former pilot describes how he and his comrades approached their bombing missions -- for some of them it was just a job, part of the daily grind, but for some others it got to be kind of fun. And for him? "I enjoyed it." The amazing thing in propagandistic documentaries like this is not that the sound bites were selected. Of course they were, otherwise you'd have a dull movie of a thousand people from the middle of the road. "Dog bites man" is not news. "Man bites dog" IS news! No, the truly astonishing thing is that some of the interviewees actually SAID these things in the first place. Selective or not, here is the evidence on film. And how is it possible to "take out of context" General Westmoreland's disquisition on the Oriental attitude towards life? Or a vet smirking and saying he enjoyed killing Gooks? I'm reminded of a scene in Michael Moore's first documentary, "Roger and Me." Moore is talking to a handful of rich wives who are on some Flint, Michigan, golf course, chipping balls. His camera rolls on and on while the ladies chat about the closing of the plants and the movement of jobs to cheaper labor markets. They love the area around Flint -- great golf courses, good riding country. And the newly unemployed? Well, says one of the wives, before a swing, now they'll have to get up and find a job. Poor people are always lazy anyway. It's a shocking statement, and we hear similarly shocking statements throughout this movie. It all leaves a viewer with a sense of awe that anyone could be so unashamedly deluded.I don't see any reason to point out the similarities between what happened in Viet Nam and what's going on as I write this. I wish our current leaders, practically none of whom served in the military let alone Viet Nam, could have seen this because it might have served as a useful reminder that war isn't REALLY very much like a high school football game.G. K. Chesterton once wrote, "My country, right or wrong, is a thing no true patriot would think of saying. It is like saying, 'My mother, drunk or sober'".