BlazeLime Strong and Moving!

MonsterPerfect Good idea lost in the noise

Hadrina The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Logan By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Sergeant_Tibbs Hearts and Minds is known as one of the most devastating and controversial documentaries there are, but that still didn't prepare me for such a powerful experience. The most striking thing about the film is the pace. You can hardly keep up. It's a torrent of emotionally charged insights from wounded soldiers and images from the battleground, covering some of the most iconic images of the Vietnam war that sear onto your brain. That's what the film is about - image. While it projects an image of its supposed reality of war, it also discusses America's projection of war. America has this grand idea of what war should be - defensive, victorious, glorious. Even though the Vietnam war doesn't fit, they try and cram it into that ideal anyway. Hearts and Minds does an enlightening job of showing what it was like at the time, rather than the movies that later showed a hindsight perspective. Its end parade sums it up. Trying to paint a picture of what returning home should be like, but it's not that simple. It's chaotic and complex. Peter Davis presents a rare conviction and directorial prowess here, overshadowed only by his compassion. It's relentless, draining, but utterly astonishing cinema.9/10

poe426 In HEARTS AND MINDS, war mongerer Clark Gifford states that, following World War Two, "We began to feel... that possibly we could control the future of the world." Well, as we now know, They COULD and They DID. More's the pity. One of the most shocking moments in the movie comes when former French foreign minister Georges Bidault quotes John Dulles, who said to Bidault: "And if we were to give you two Atomic bombs...?" I've heard the Nixon tapes wherein Nixon talked to Henry Kissinger about the possibility of using atomic bombs in Vietnam and Kissinger, in a rare moment of restraint, ventured that that might be going just a tad too far. Bidault's statement seems to underscore that exchange. "Throughout the war in Vietnam," Nixon says in one clip, "the U.$. has exercised a degree of restraint unprecedented in the annals of war." (As far as I'M concerned, ALL pre$ident$ should be held accountable for any and ALL lies that they tell while in office: they should be "under oath" from the moment they're sworn in- like any other defendant. And they should work for Minimum Wage and be forced to retire from Public Office by the time they turn 60- as should any and all members of Government.) As "deserter" Eddie Sowders put it: "It is a supreme irony to be prosecuted by the very same men who planned and executed a genocidal war in Indochina." "We weren't on the wrong side," Daniel Ellsberg says: "We ARE the wrong side." With the kind of arrogant ignorance typical of American$, William Westmoreland offers this bit of wisdom: "Life is plentiful, life is cheap in the Orient." When asked if the U.$. has learned anything from Vietnam, bomber pilot Randy Floyd says: "I think we're trying not to." Prosperity and prosthetics, people. THAT'S the legacy in this company.

JasparLamarCrabb It can be argued (probably successfully) that this is the ultimate bleeding heart's take on the US government's policies in southeast Asia from 1950 to 1973. Peter Davis has nevertheless made a riveting and very unsettling documentary. Relying on first hand accounts from vets, politicians, and a few grotesque "man on the street" interviews, Davis makes it clear that he's not interested in making anything approaching a balanced film. How could he when a scene of a young Vietnamese girl wailing over her fathers coffin is juxtaposed with General William Westmoreland explaining that people in the Orient do not value life? Among the more insightful interviewees are Daniel Ellsberg (who laments how five US Presidents managed to lie to the US over 25 years) as well as former Defense Secretary Clark Clifford, who admits he was wrong to go along with LBJ's policies many years before Robert McNamara (whom he succeeded) did. Ultimately this is a very sad movie about a really horrible time in US history.

Robert J. Maxwell 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'".