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#39. The Substandard Salutes Our Military, War Flicks, and R. Lee Ermey
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Dudes Chatting — Memorial Day war movies and R. Lee Ermey: The hosts share their Memorial Day war-movie favorites. Sonny picks Inglourious Basterds and Aliens (which he reads as a Vietnam allegory). JVL names the BBC Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy miniseries, MASH, and the first half of Full Metal Jacket; he also pre-announces Dunkirk as a film he expects will become one of his all-time favorites before he has even seen it. Vic chooses the 1976 Midway and Full Metal Jacket, but rejects Casualties of War — he found it too disturbing. The episode's emotional high point is a pair of R. Lee Ermey stories: Vic recounts arranging Ermey's visit to The Weekly Standard offices, during which Ermey gave out challenge coins and explained how he came to star in Full Metal Jacket — he was originally a technical advisor, began doing impromptu drill sergeant improvisations with the crew, and word of it eventually reached Kubrick. JVL adds a story about Ermey running alongside a disabled Marine Corps marathon runner, refusing to let him stop. No reviews or box office segment.
Full transcript
Vic00:00:00Hello and welcome to another micro-episode of The Substandard, sponsored by Dollar Shave Club. I'm Victor Matus, along with Jonathan V. Last and Sonny Bunch. Just a quick reminder that full episodes of The Substandard are available every Thursday at 11 a.m. and Substandard show notes are posted by Jonathan Last every Friday at weeklystandard.com. So we just celebrated Memorial Day, remembering those who sacrificed their lives for this country, for democracy, for freedom. So why don't we talk about our favorite war movies? Because channels like AMC, they'll do a whole day of broadcasting war movies. And I'm like, oh, great. I look forward to seeing things like A Bridge Too Far and then The Longest Day and then suddenly Casualties of War. Yeah. That's an interesting. Yeah. That makes me feel good about my country. So that's why I thought we could talk about the movies that we like as opposed to the ones we don't. Sonny, do you want to go first?
Sonny00:01:07Sure. You know, I am a big fan of some of the war movies that aren't, you know, kind of necessarily thought of as war movies. So, you know, obviously I love Patton and we've discussed this before on the show. And I'm a huge fan of Black Hawk Down, as we've discussed on. But if we're if we're if we're getting I want to go a little off the beaten path and suggest a few war movies that aren't necessarily always in the mix. For instance, I would say Inglourious Bastards is one of my favorite war movies. This is obviously a war movie. It's obviously in World War Two, but nobody really thinks of it as kind of your traditional Saving Private Ryan, you know, big combat scenes type movies. It is a Quentin Tarantino film, so it's very talky, but it is also punctuated by moments of extreme violence. Which, to my understanding, at least, is what war is actually kind of like. I wouldn't know because I have soft, girlish hands. I've never served in the military. But but, you know, it is one of these movies where you have a lot of kind of waiting, waiting.
Vic00:02:08Right. It's also kind of an alternative history. What do you call it?
JVL00:02:12Yeah. Counterfactual history.
Sonny00:02:14Counterfactual, yes. If you, you know, what if what if a group of Jewish American soldiers blew up the Nazi high command in a theater? I can get behind that sort of counterfactual history. JBL, you?
JVL00:02:24It's counterfactual. Counterfactual history, but also just sort of wish fulfillment. Alternative timeline.
Sonny00:02:31I don't know what you, it's not really a counterfactual because it's not like, what if, you know, Gettysburg had gone differently.
JVL00:02:36It's just revenge fantasy in the same way. It's just Django Unchained for the Holocaust.
Sonny00:02:40Which is awesome. I mean, I don't know.
Vic00:02:42But it's also not unconditional surrender because, you know.
Sonny00:02:45I mean, to be fair, though, Django Unchained was really Inglourious Bastards, but for slavery. Yes. Because Inglourious Bastards came first. Same. Yeah. Okay. Anyway, point is, I'm a big fan. In this vein, over the weekend, I saw some people discussing how Aliens is actually one of the great Vietnam War movies. And this actually strikes me as perfectly right. It's about a bunch of grunts in a terrible jungle-like setting filled with heat and humidity and smoke and, you know, an awful, unkillable, unstoppable monster that they're going up against.
Vic00:03:22And the only solution was to nuke them? Yeah.
Sonny00:03:25You've got to nuke them from orbit.
Vic00:03:26That's dehumanizing. It's othering. It was 1986, again, one of the great years of filmmaking, and it came out at the same time as Platoon.
JVL00:03:36No kidding. Yeah, yeah, yeah, which is interesting. JVL. My favorite war movie of all time is actually Dunkirk. Oh, okay. Yeah, sure. I'm just preemptively telling you that it's going to be my favorite movie of all time. You may be right. No, so I, you know, I don't love war movies as a genre. My favorite ones tend not to be the big, splody, or big, Patton-type. Like, Cold War movies. I really like Cold War movies, even though there's not a lot of shooting. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which is neither a war movie nor a movie. It's a BBC miniseries starring Alec Guinness. Good.
Vic00:04:10I was afraid you were going to say the movie version, which I didn't understand at all.
JVL00:04:14Well, no, there's no way to understand the movie because they're condensing too much stuff. And the truth is, the BBC production is so uncompromising. That it throws you into the deep end. I did not understand anything that was happening for the first two episodes of it. And it was only by sticking through until, like, the third or fourth hour that everything starts coming together. They make you work for it. It really makes you work for it, but it's entirely rewarding. And it's beautiful and slow, and you should see that. That's not really a war movie. That's a spy movie. But it's a Cold War movie.
Sonny00:04:46It's off Bridge on the River Kwai with another Alec Guinness.
JVL00:04:50It's fantastic. M.A.S.H., the Robert Altman M.A.S.H., I like quite a lot. I like quite a lot. Starship Troopers, it's a war movie.
Sonny00:04:58Yeah, sure.
JVL00:04:59And Full Metal Jacket, which is weird. I think the first half of Full Metal Jacket is maybe the greatest war movie ever made, despite the fact that it's not war. It's just a basic. The first half is riveting. And the second half loses, for me, loses a tremendous amount of steam. Me too.
Sonny00:05:15Didn't you and I watch that together?
Vic00:05:17No, we watched Saving Private Ryan together in the theater. Well, yes.
JVL00:05:19I mean, in a home video. I feel like you were over.
Vic00:05:22Yes, we did watch a lot of movies in our apartment. In our apartment together. Okay. But I'm not sure. And we weren't even roommates.
JVL00:05:29Did you guys have, like, a love nest? Like, sleepovers.
Vic00:05:32Sometimes I don't want to drive at night. You do each other hair. I just, you know, it's too dangerous to drive at night. I could have to stay over.
JVL00:05:37No, but you're actually, I watched, I believe, at your behest. Is that right? You were such an evangelist. Oh. Because, again, because I don't really love war movies, my war movie viewing by the time I got to age 22 was a blind category for me.
Vic00:05:50Well, you know, we were talking about movies that we don't like, and movies that I do like. You know, Midway is actually a really good movie from 1976. It's Charlton Heston, Henry Fonda, Hal Holbrook's in it. A whole bunch of people are in it. And it's great because it's, you know, obviously pre-CGI, so all the footage is, you know, actual aircraft, aircraft carriers. And they actually do good by also the Japanese Navy and Yamamoto and that whole subplot. I mean, it's really fascinating stuff, and they're searching for each other. And this is a game of, you know, cat and mouse, and I really like that. But we were talking about also movies that I didn't like, and obviously Casualties of War. Sean Penn and Michael J. Fox and John C. Reilly, and it's just a long, great movie.
Sonny00:06:31It's the homeless man's platoon.
Vic00:06:34Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. But, you know, just because a movie is anti-war doesn't necessarily mean that I'm not going to like it because, as you were mentioning, JVL Full Metal Jacket in that first half is riveting. It's amazing film work. It really is. And if you look at it just the way, you know, just the camera itself going around and following Arlie Ermey, speaking of which, you were there, JVL, when Arlie Ermey came to The Weekly Standard office.
JVL00:07:02It was one of the greatest editorial lunches we've ever had. It was. And it was your behalf, right? You set this up.
Vic00:07:07Yeah, they contacted me, and it was because Arlie Ermey was doing charitable work for the troops and helping people, you know, who are left at home, whether it be husbands or wives with kids and they need help. And so he wanted to talk about it, and I'm like, yes, absolutely, please come over. So I went down. I went downstairs and waited outside, and a car came and dropped him off. And I was really excited, and I think I said, oh, hi, Sergeant, you know, it was great to meet you. And he said, call me Gunny, because, you know, they're not just sergeants, they're gunnery sergeants. So I said, okay, Gunny, and he gave me a coin, like a marine coin. His challenge coin. Yes.
?00:07:44Wow. I don't know where that is.
Vic00:07:45Anyway, he- What? I don't know where it is. I don't know where it is. You know what happens?
JVL00:07:49Somebody else plunks down that coin. You don't have yours. I know.
Sonny00:07:52It means you've got to buy.
Vic00:07:53Yes. Drinks for everybody. I'm shamed. But he came up, and so we started chatting immediately before we got to the office, and I said, oh, I'm a big fan of yours and your movies and things like that. And he had, of course, served in Vietnam, and after Vietnam, he just stayed in the Philippines, and he actually took acting classes in the Philippines. And then he met his wife, who's Filipina, and they have a son. And so that's his family. So he's like, oh, I love the Filipino people and this whole thing, and he was wonderful about it. And he comes into the office, and we're all there in that conference room, and he tells us about the charitable work that he does for the troops. And I remember him saying, you know, there's different ways you can help the soldiers, you know, because, you know, you can fix roofs and plumbing and electrical work, and you look around this office of, you know, editors and writers.
Sonny00:08:36Again, a bunch of people with soft hands who don't understand. They're all looking down.
Vic00:08:39Nobody can even look at them in the eye.
Sonny00:08:41How does a wrench work?
Vic00:08:42Yes. No, that's exactly right, Sonny. And so then there was a pause, and he goes, or you can, you know, donate, you know, financially. And everyone goes, oh, okay, okay, great, great. But then finally I said, so Gunny. Gunny, can we talk about Full Metal Jacket and how you got that role? Because there's always all sorts of rumors about how this happened. And he was like, sure. And he said he was a technical advisor for the film, and the guy who was doing it, and to Arlie Ermey's credit, he wouldn't tell us who the actor was. And I think he could find out online who it was, but he said that he just wasn't doing it, and Kubrick had him do several takes, and Arlie Ermey was there, the technical advisor, so he's constantly trying to tell him how to say the lines, and then Ermey just had the idea of, you know what, I can do this myself, and he started auditioning with other members of the film crew, but not Kubrick. And so he'd go to the assistant directors and cinematographer, whoever else, and finally word traveled up the chain, and Kubrick finally called him and he goes, okay, I've heard you've been doing auditions, what do you got? And Ermey does it, and immediately he was like, okay, sold. That's amazing.
JVL00:09:47Can I share my Arlie Ermey story, which is not mine, it's a story of a friend of a friend. So there was a girl who went to college with my wife. Uh, and I'm not going to give you her name, but she's, uh, born with severe physical disabilities and like really severe physical disabilities. And she is an amazing woman. She just, one of these people who just was like, yeah, screw it, whatever, and just has taken the world by storm. And she ran the Marine Corps marathon several years back. And I remember we had seen her like the month before she was going to go and she had stopped like playing in a kickball league that she was playing in because she didn't want to hurt her self before the, anyway, so she gets to about mile 22 and she is dying and she hears from behind her a voice start to curse at her and say, come on, maggot, what's wrong with you? And it's Arlie Ermey. And he ran with her for two miles and did the full, like no prisoners, you know, like no, like, oh, come on little girl with your problems. You can do it, but just full on gunny. And I bet it. It fired her up. And she said it fired her up so completely. And it was, she said it was like having like this little angel in the form of this giant man.
Vic00:11:01It's so awesome. It's great. He, um, we asked him about those lines that he gave. Remember, like, where'd he come up? And he said that he picked up a lot from other drill sergeants at Camp Pendleton, I think. And so he stole a bunch of it, not stole, but borrowed. And then, uh, but then remember this, uh, JVL to meeting, then he said about that line about the courtesy of a reach around and he goes, uh, I don't know where that one came from, but you know what?
Sonny00:11:23Uh, I'm sure. Stanley Kubrick was like, eh, this is fine.
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