Do any of you guys watch movies? Something occurred to me today and I want to discuss. It's my opinion that, with a few exceptions, movies about Vietnam suck. I have a hypothesis: there are two kinds of Vietnam filmmakers, hippies and reactionaries. Hippies hate the war, and their films depict it as absurd. Reactionaries hate hippies, and their films depict the war as john wayne-ish. What I found interesting, though, is that neither side cares about the Vietnamese. Can you name a single Vietnamese character in a Vietnam movie? My friend Andy, whose DVD collection spans all four walls of his bedroom floor to ceiling, came up with the hooker in Full Metal Jacket, and I got the kid from Good Morning Vietnam. That's it. That's the thing about Vietnam movies: they're not about the war. They're not America vs. Vietnam; they're America vs. America. (Most arent even war movies. They're existential brooding by soldiers. You could transpose the setting without losing much of the plot, which of course is what Apocalypse Now did.) I think it would be interesting to see a movie from the Vietnamese perspective. Maybe not Letters from Iwo Jima-style, all-NVA, but with a few deeply developed characters from the other side. It was a pretty complicated war for them as well.

Incidentally, Good Morning Vietnam is my favorite Vietnam movie.

Discuss.

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