#vietnam film

[sherryuki-callmeyuki]

Watching this Vietnam film with my parents is definitely nice bonding time. But, the love story is so cringy, like. Dude see’s a girl twice or thrice in his life and calls her his. “If you live, I’ll live, if you go away, I’ll die !!” He said. Stfu cringy ass hoe. Like you met her the day before yesterday. ☠️☠️☠️☠️

HE LITERALLY JUST KISSED HER ON THE FOREHEAD TF

[lotusinjadewell]

Vietnam. Credit to Hà Thành.

[bettsfic]

okay so i saw The Bikeriders today and i knew i wouldn't be normal about this movie and even though my expectations were impossibly high it exceeded them. i was happy for it to just be a cool movie for the sake of being a cool movie, toxic masculinity ultraviolence whatever, and it was but with Jodie Comer's character narrating about what fucking idiots all these macho biker dudes are. it's like if a woman narrated Fight Club while constantly pointing out how stupid Fight Club is

also, most of it was filmed near where i live and it was so exciting seeing places i recognized! it's been all over the news for weeks

things i loved about it:

protective older woman/loose cannon younger man

lowkey romantic stalking

a relationship suspiciously close to a throuple, by which i mean protective older woman goes to war against possessive older man, re: their mutual intense love for loose cannon younger man. and that's not even subtext that's just text

hot sadboy who doesn’t talk much and is so cool he doesn’t know how cool he is

british people doing midwestern accents

NO PLOT, god bless. just stuff happening and a lot of gay tension building

accurate portrayals of the aftermath of the vietnam war

accurate portrayals of mid-century small-town life

accurate portrayals of men being fucking pathetic

things i did not love about it:

for the love of god please wear a helmet

idk man it's just a whole-ass movie about how vietnam changed the very definition of masculinity, and that awkward era between wwii and vietnam when guys were rebellious for the aesthetic, rebel without a cause shit, twinks in leather jackets manhood. the movie even points that out, like they're so against rules but then they make all these rules for their silly little biker gang because they're bored. and then allll these vets come home from a war nobody wanted and they're actually rebelling, full anti-establishment, and there's just no more honor anymore because everybody's broken. which is all to say, somebody please come into my ask and be insane about this movie with me.

anyway i'm seeing it again tomorrow and i have already started an ot3 fic goodbye

[toioday]

Tôi đã từng chờ em dài hơn những năm tháng nhạt màu phía trước. Dù thế nào tôi vẫn muốn nhắc lại, em là người dưng tôi thương nhất cuộc đời này.

-Nguyễn Nhật Ánh-

[pedroam-bang]

Full Metal Jacket (1987)

[tygerland]

The Deer Hunter (1978)

[gouldblogger]

Mùa ổi (The season of guavas), directed by ĐẶNG NHẬT MINH

A mentally challenged man spends his days working as an artist’s model and visiting the now-occupied house of his childhood, where his beloved guava tree sits.

[aloneandforsakenbyfateandbyman]

Lê Vân in When the Tenth Month Comes AKA The Love Doesn’t Come Back (1984), the first Vietnamese film to be shown in the West after the Vietnam war.

This film depicts the misery of a young widow whose husband has died in the war. The theme of sadness and the inevitability of death dominate the film and haunt the viewer. Unlike the Hollywood war movies which dehumanize the Vietnamese people and focus only on American soldiers, this sensitive and beautiful film presents the Vietnamese perspective of the horrific war which tore their country apart, and the difficult and emotional path of recovery.

[chamerionwrites]

See I honestly do find the prequels-era Jedi an interesting (and at times painfully recognizable) portrait of institutional violence in that...they aren't cackling villains. They're mostly sympathetic well-intentioned individuals who via a combo of traditionalist inertia, ideological blinders, proximity to power, a dash of plain old arrogance and a liberal seasoning of end-justifies-the-means compromise end up being at best indifferent to and at worst deeply complicit in some pretty heinous injustice. I don't even think this is a completely against-the-grain reading on my part. At the end of the day it's a pretty mild critique, but it's hard to argue that the PT is entirely uncritical of the Jedi imo.

Unfortunately the narrative is never interested in really sinking its teeth into that. And even more unfortunately, a chunk of the fandom will clutch its pearls in horrified outrage if anybody else is interested in sinking their teeth into that

[jeanambrojo]

[sulphurousvisions]

Tam Coc Ninh Binh, Vietnam

Perutz Primera 100 expired in 2005

[woman-with-no-name]

Sgt. Robert "Bob" Barnes | Platoon (1986)

[lotusinjadewell]

Hà Nội. Credit to Như Như Ý.

[bettsfic]

one of the things that really stuck with me about The Bikeriders is that it's all about performative toxic masculinity, but there's no womanizer character. not a single guy who picks up women for the fun of it. there's also no casual, unquestioned infidelity, which is a staple of dudebro narratives. like obviously the badass leader guy is going to have a woman on the side, and both his wife and myriad girlfriends will just be set pieces for him with no characterization whatsoever.

on my first watch i just assumed Johnny has a wife at home and a girlfriend in the club, but then i realized the woman hanging all over him during the picnics is his wife (Betty), as evidenced by this pic from VANDALS, the photobook of the shooting of the film.

sorry for the poor quality. this is a picture of a picture.

the implication here is that Betty is supportive of the club (if not Johnny himself, as we see near the end), at least more so than Kathy, who only dresses in bikerider attire for [spoilers redacted].

it's possible in the present timeline of the film that both of their daughters have grown up and moved out. we see Johnny watching The Wild One on television, a film released in 1953, and two girls run behind him, maybe around 10 years old. the timeline of the story begins in 1963, and the last we see of Johnny's home life is 1971. by all means, their daughters might be in their 20s. in some ways, The Bikeriders is a story of middle-aged boredom.

in multiple instances, we see physical affection between married couples. Benny and Kathy, Johnny and Betty, and Brucie and Gail are all depicted at least once snuggled up beside each other. in many films, if a man is both married and faithful, we see him be at the very least physically neglectful, never touching his wife in a loving way. conversely, we never see men receiving real affection, either, unless it's been earned through the intense action of the film. and even then, it's often something he takes, not something he's given.

i was also surprised by Benny and Kathy's relationship, which i assumed would go south asap, given the intensity of it. and although there's plenty of tension between them, none of it is of the "i fell out of love with you, i regret marrying you" variety of angst. they fall in love and stay in love. and they have problems, but losing interest in each other is not one of them.

i find it very funny that Benny remains covered in dirt even when it makes no sense to be.

to me these are all markers of a story that's about toxic masculinity rather than operating from within toxic masculinity. when we're in a toxically masculine story, we're meant to buy into the fantasy of that masculinity. the protagonist is an ideal, a man who fucks around with any woman he looks at and wins fights and becomes a hero. in The Bikeriders, though, we see from the outside that Johnny is trying to craft that impossible fantasy for himself. he's performing the man he wishes he could be and it's making him miserable. and he tries to put that burden on Benny, who refuses it. Benny is his fantasy. conversely, Johnny is Benny's. they have the other on a pedestal of a male ideal that's impossible to achieve.

in this era of American history, we see increasingly intense narratives of heroism. by the 70s, the sons of WWII veterans had grown up. many men of that time looked up to their fathers as war heroes, fighting on the right side of one of the worst wars in the history of humanity, and winning. but those men were then given the Vietnam War, which arguably had no right side, no front, and no land lost or gained. most importantly, it had no clear beginning or ending*. no closure, no resolution. even outside of war, in industry the task of making something became narrower as merchant trades veered toward assembly line production rather than craftsmanship. Benny refuses to step up in part because he belongs to a generation of men who see no real fruits of their labor. conversely, Johnny is witnessing the slow degradation of honor that comes as a result of losing the concepts of resolution and completion.

*the Fall of Saigon marked the end of the Vietnam War, but by then Nixon had pulled out all US troops.

i keep reading these shallow reviews of The Bikeriders, and they're positive but they don't seem to really get it. like The Holdovers, i think so much of the nuance and meaning comes from the historical context of the action of the film, which can't really be elaborated on (you can only do so much in two hours), and so it's depicted in these broad strokes of cultural knowledge, much of which is either that the Vietnam War is simply a thing that happened, or information that is flat-out wrong. i mean, there were like 18 possible sides to this war and you can't read a single fact about it without having to analyze or consider the side it's writing from. even wikipedia is full of subtle rhetoric that indicates sympathy toward one side over the other.

people ask me a lot, "why are you researching the Vietnam War?" and the answer is that it's everywhere. its failure is woven into the fabric of American identity. it changed the very definition of masculinity, and being as we are in a patriarchal hegemony, that new definition has in turn affected everybody else. whenever i talk to any American around my age about the Vietnam War, they've got a story about it. either their father/grandfather was there or he wasn't. if he was there, that's a story. if he wasn't, that's a story too.

many of us in our 30s and 40s and 50s are gaining the expertise and audience to begin telling these stories, in an attempt to answer the question of what even happened back then, and why were our parents so cruel, and why is everyone so miserable now? and we find ourselves on impossible pedestals handed down to us from a generation defined by failure and loss.

[humanoidhistory]

John Wayne does Vietnam.

[toioday]

Xưa kia ngay dại mà tin rằng: “Chỉ cần tình yêu đủ lớn thì biển nào cũng lội, núi nào cũng leo”.

Lớn lên mới thấy, yếu tố đó cũng chỉ là một phần. Một tình yêu đẹp, một gia đình hạnh phúc cần hội tụ đủ:

- Cùng cấp bậc, giai cấp

- Học thức tương đương

- Nhận thức đồng điệu