From my favorite movies..

Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

Yo, there's no way for me to review this film without saying, take your *insert ethnicity + "ass" here* to see this film,like now. You have to see it in order to know what you're really messing with.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

This was made in 1974 before the end of the Vietnam War and one can feel the tensions of that era in this documentary. There are many interviews with people – both for and against the war. What is special in this film is what comes from Vietnam itself – both the war footage and the interviews conducted there – most of them are very poignant and heart-rending. This is not an easy film to watch.Some of the Americans interviewed come off as veritable idiots. Despite the hard-ships that George Coker endured he is nothing more than a super-patriot. Westmoreland is simply callous – to think that this man was in charge of U.S. forces is frightening. Daniel Ellsberg, Clark Clifford and others are most forthright.But there are some simplistic aspects to this documentary. To intersperse scenes of an American football game with the Vietnam War footage is very questionable. All cultures worship sport and to idly suggest that there is a connection between sport and war is a rather odd and detracts from the seriousness of the documentary. There are other interludes like this where clips are shown from older movies.While it is true that American involvement began with the French in the 1950's - it was the Kennedy administration and particularly the Johnson administration where the real troop escalations began. Actually Eisenhower was very good at keeping the U.S. out of foreign entanglements in terms of sending American soldiers.But watch this really for the Vietnamese aspect – it is very charged.

I first knew about this Oscar-winning documentary when Rex Reed and Bill Harris mentioned it on their "At the Movies" program in the late '80s when they discussed Vietnam War films in the wake of the success of Platoon. I also later read about the controversial comments producer Bert Schneider read from the Viet Cong when he accepted the Academy Award that got Bob Hope and Frank Sinatra to disavow those remarks as Oscar approved. Having watched it now, director Peter Davis does a remarkable job of trying to find a balance with the various viewpoints of Americans-conservative and liberal-and that of the Asian country-persons whose loss of homes and family are the most heartbreaking scenes on film. But he also exposes how the propaganda of World War II movies may have contributed to such ignorant comments like those of former prisoner-of-war Lt. George Coker-"If it wasn't for the people, it would be very pretty. The people over there are very backward and very primitive and they just make a mess out of everything." Or this from Gen. William Westmoreland-"The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does the Westerner. Life is cheap in the Orient." One wonders if they ever regretted those remarks. Many other painfully touching moments occur that I won't mention here. With all that said, I highly recommend Hearts and Minds.

I remember watching a few "Yankee" musicals as a kid and enjoying them as silly entertainment (maybe I was the silly one) and clips of them start off this documentary, which jolted my memory and reminded me that they were part of a comprehensive campaign to promote US overseas war efforts. And the rhetoric heard throughout the documentary was almost as "bad" as the Maoist rhetoric of the Cultural Revolution in China, except that the US was by far more polished and convincing. Nixon saying "the US has shown a degree of restraint unprecedented in the annals of war...", by which he probably meant that we should thank the US for not using the atom bombs again, probably ranks near the top the long list of misguided beliefs and "white lies" showcased in this time capsule of 1974 sentiments: when the US thought it had already won a war it was going to lose.So kudos to the director who quickly proceeds to ask the fundamental question: "why do they need us there (Vietnam)?" The honest answer given, only after the director was ridiculed as a "sophomore", actually started all the way from "Sputnik"-- no wonder then that people have to keep asking why they have been involved in this or that war, because the truth was so convoluted. But all these explanations start to sound hollow when the Vietnamese launch into their own centuries-old historical/ narrative tradition: where they have been fighting in defense or for independence against Chinese, then French, then American Imperialism-- it seems that someone conveniently forgot to ask how the Vietnamese saw things at their end, using the justifications that the Vietnamese were just "children", "savages", etc..Made in 1974 after the Paris Peace Accord of 1973, this documentary shows various people in the US reflecting on its involvement in Vietnam and sheds light on why the US didn't get involved again when North Vietnam invaded South Vietnam in 1975: the US never had a clear, consistent or compelling reason or plan to be in Vietnam ("I think we are fighting for the North Vietnamese", says a truck driver) in the first place-- to the point where a veteran says "the reason we went over was to win this war"-- and they thought they had achieved victory in 1973. The US only began to wake up and accept the true nature and effect of their involvement after 1975, when draft dodgers were finally pardoned.

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'".