#Viet Nam War

[undergroundrockpress]

Bruce Kaiper. The Look of Imperialism - 1970

[silveragelovechild]

THE CREATOR

First, if you’ve seen some of the headlines for reviews of “The Creator”, it’s not as bad as it sounds. But is the story new or original… no.

The good stuff?

I first saw John David Washington (Denzel’s son) in “Tenet”. I liked him there, and that why I gave this movie the benefit of the doubt. And yes, he’s good here too.

Madeleine Yuna Voyles played a child-size robot (a Simulent). She cute and at first it was hard to tell if that was the extent of her talent, but as the movie progressed, she had some very emotional scenes and handled them like a seasoned pro.

Super-hero movies have been bashed lately for bad special effects, but here the effects are well done - mostly robot, flying vehicles, and futuristic sky scrapers. Except for a few goofy looking robots, the art design is great and they are well executed.

The bad?

Artificial Intelligence has been portrayed as cinematic baddies since before the Terminator. This movie tries to paint the US government as the villains but it feels heavy handed. It uses the Viet Nam war as its model.

Every war movie has a hard ass colonel calling the shots and committing atrocities. Here the colonel is played by Allison Janney. She’s pretty one-dimensional, spitting out bullets and eating baby robots. (Kidding!!)

If the writer and director were trying to tell a new story, why were there so many well worn tropes? Once you notice them - they telegraph what will happen next. For instance, Joshua (Washington) is searching for his wife played by Gemma Chan. He thought died five years earlier. She had been pregnant with his child at the time. Washington then finds a child robot who he uses to find his wife. He keeps saying he wishes to see Chan one last time. Meanwhile girl robot just happens to look the age of his child had she lived… you can connect the dots.

Several plot point didn’t make sense. Why do the robots have an on-off switch that’s easily accessible at the side of their heads? During the climactic scenes (which took too long) there is a giant MacGuffin floating above Los Angeles. Over the course of what could only have been an hour, the MacGuffin is suddenly over Southeast Asia - how did it get there so fast?!?

While I won’t spell out the end, remember when I said Joshua keeps saying he wished to see his wife one last time? Be careful what you wish for!

[orwellsunderpants]

It's not over, even today. There's still a fuckton of dangerous, unexploded ordnance buried under the soil in both Cambodia and Laos.

Kissinger.

US bombs dropped on Laos, 1964-1973. [Map published in article: Rosita Boland. "Death from below in the world's most bombed country." The Irish Times. 13 May 2017. Though map first uploaded on Redd/it by Andrew Gloe, as u/AJgloe, 12 September 2016.]

US bombs dropped, 1965-1972. [Map and animation by: Ha Pham. "Vietnam bombing history with data - Part 1." Medium. 4 November 2018.]

Laos. From 1964 to 1975, the US dropped over 2 million tons of bombs, equating to over 250 million bombs/ordinances. By some estimates, this averages as: full plane load of bombs dropped on Laos every 8 minutes, 24 hours a day, for 9 years. After the official end of the US military campaigns, US bombs on the ground continued to kill dozens of people every year. For decades. The bombs still maim and kill today, as over 80 million unexploded bombs/munitions still remain on the ground in Laos.

Cambodia. Kissinger was architect of the "Secret War", which the US president initially tried to hide from the public. Beginning in 1969, the US dropped over 2 and a half million tons of bombs at over 112,000 sites; over 11,000 sites were bombed indiscriminately. Most estimates suggest that US bombing of Cambodia directly resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths. On 17 March 1969, when the president's office received news of the first bombings in Cambodia, Nixon's chief of staff wrote in his diary: "Historic day. K's [Kissinger's] 'Operation Breakfast' finally came off at 2:00 pm our time. K really excited, as is P [President]." The next day he added: "K's 'Operation Breakfast' a great success. He came beaming in [...]."

[calicojack1718]

Does Johnson's Withdrawal from the 1968 Election Have Anything to Teach Us About Biden's Impending Withdrawal from Election 2024

NBC News headlines on Saturday 20 July: Biden’s fixing to drop out of the race. I don’t know about you, but waking up to these headlines, leaves me feeling just a wee bit depressed. It looks like it is just a matter of time before Biden is out of the race. It defies all reasoning and logic to push Biden out of the race unless there is a VERY GOOD REASON. For the life of me, I can’t find one…

[nerds-yearbook]

On a day in June 1969, Soldier "Ice" Phillips serving in Viet Nam, imagined what it would be like if the heroes from Marvel Comics were real and came over to fight in the war in the The 'Nam 41#, cover date February, 1990. ("Back in the Real World", The 'Nam 41#, Marvel Comic Event)

[brooklynislandgirl]

[mysterywhiteboii]

Nirris Nagendrarajah reviews 𝑉𝑖𝑒𝑡 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑁𝑎𝑚 (2024), directed by Trương Minh Quý, exclusively for Cha: An Asian Literary Journal:

/ It’s interesting to me that 𝑉𝑖𝑒𝑡 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑁𝑎𝑚 has been banned in its home country due to a “gloomy, deadlocked, and negative view”. For me, the film was so tender and romantic, and any sense of melancholy is part-and-parcel of a queer life: this is how we experience the world, where eros meets dust, present meets past, personal meets political, and beauty is met with bloodshed. There the men are, in the end, at sea, thinking of watermelons at the end of the world, together, like those skeletons discovered in Pompeii—the Two Maidens—doomed yet preserved.

“There are so many things I want to tell you,” he whispers to him.

This is a masterwork on love, dreams, and migration in the wake of the after-effects of war. /

𝐌𝐎𝐑𝐄: https://chajournal.blog/2024/10/29/viet-nam/

。。。。。

[bleublancrage]

Indochine. 1952.

[ellies-rambles]

I'm currently in the brainstorming phase of a short film I'm doing about a student who gets drafted into Vietnam and I'm researching ways people drafted. To my Holdovers fans out there, I thought you'd find this interesting:

Link: https://www.wearethemighty.com/lists/vietnam-draft-dodger/

This implies that his packing for St. Kitts was a direct response to fearing being drafted.

[undergroundrockpress]

1969

[mysteriiarch]

When you spend all night trying to figure out how old a muse is through their timeline in the comics. Carol Danvers in 2023 is 73 years old. Damn girl, looking good for your age.

[carolinemillerbooks]

New Post has been published on Books by Caroline Miller

New Post has been published on https://www.booksbycarolinemiller.com/musings/ayes-on-the-prize/

Ayes On The Prize

On an upcoming edition of my book talk show, Just Readi It, author Karl Marlantes reveals the struggle he faced to publish the first of his two best-selling novels, Matterhorn.  A young man newly returned from the Vietnam War, he was determined to recapture his experience as a soldier.  The public needed to know about the war and, perhaps, he wanted to make sense of it to himself.   Marlantes wrote and rewrote his book over the years but no publisher would touch it.  A collective amnesia had descended upon the country for a war that had ended in defeat and for the soldiers who’d given their lives, limbs, and sanity to fight it.    But, Marlantes refused to forget.  He continued to submit his work despite the rising pyramid of rejections. Then, one day, his wife had an idea. Why not submit the manuscript to a contest?   A road not taken, the writer tossed his novel into an envelope and sent it off.  Weeks later, word arrived.  Matterhorn had won first prize–the launch pad from which it rose to become a national bestseller. Deep River, his second novel was also a success.  Marlantes’ career was established.  A third novel is on the horizon.  If anyone cares, I consider him to be among the country’s best-living writers.   The author didn’t say whether or not he paid a fee to enter his contest.  In the past, competitions with fees were considered bogus–an operation that raised its prize money from aspirants rather than sponsors. In a 2010 blog, I wrote against literary scams like those and provided a list of guardian angels who devoted themselves to exposing such sand traps. A few of those angels are still around. One of my favorites is  Victoria Strauss, a woman who sometimes is threatened and sued for her courageous dedication to artists. One of her recent communications exposes another contest worthy of suspicion.  Nonetheless, times change and contests with admission fees are as common as sand fleas on the beach. Distinguishing between legitimate operations and those intended to create mailing lists to sell to advertisers is difficult. Fake contests, fake people, fake money, fake news, and AI fake novelists cavort with actual ones when the line between the virtual and real world blurs.  I begin to wonder if the difference matters.  A woman who knows her way around the writing world complimented me with a suggestion that I submit my memoir, Getting Lost to Find Home to two contests she thought I might have a chance of winning.  The first suggestion I discounted as it required travel. I’m an 87-year-old woman who doesn’t fly.  The second suggestion seemed doable, though it has a hefty fee.  I’m thinking about it.  The positive attention critics have given my new release satisfies me at the moment. Last week, the long-standing book blog Silversolara put the memoir in its Spotlight.   

[downmystreeandupyours]

Satirical piece (excerpt)

[granonine]

Memorial Day 2023

This weekend, there were a couple of old, black-and-white war movies I enjoyed watching. They were shown on the TMC channel. If you have Fios, that’s channel 230 in my corner of Pennsylvania. Anyway. What intrigued me about these movies was the minimal blood and gore, and the focus on the thinking and emotional struggles of the soldiers. My 18 years as a psychotherapist kicked into high gear as…

[theinnermeyoullneverknow]

My dad also made some decisions at the time justified with "what are they gonna do? Send me to 'Nam?"

My dad was talking about how his friend nearly got courtmartialed during Vietnam because he refused to salute anyone, including generals. And honestly? What a mood. Good for Gary. Also apparently whenever he got in trouble at boot camp he would constantly say stuff like "What're you gonna do? Send me to Vietnam?"

[bleublancrage]

Opération Camélia. Indochine. 1953.