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But she will settle for having him lead her sons through safely and send them home. I loved this book. It's short, fast-paced, and it really grabbed me. It is neither pro- nor anti-war, does not idealize war, and does not demonize the Viet Cong. It just tells it like it was.
It shows you the action or the pathos or the humor, letting it hit you the way it hit the author at the time. I recommend it to everyone who wants to know what it was like to participate in the Vietnam War. As a female college student without any friends or relatives fighting in the war, I didn't read a lot about the war when it was happening. Of course, I saw the unsettling pictures of the fighting in magazines and on the TV news, and I attended many war "teach-ins" and discussions on campus. But it wasn't until reading this book that I really understood what the soldiers experienced over there.
Everyone should read it. I'll be sending copies of it as Christmas gifts this year. This book is so descriptive of infantry combat that you can smell it, feel it, and fear it. I spent two tours in Vietnam, and this book is the best description I have ever read of what an infantryman experienced day and night. The author's apt descriptions of an infantryman's life left me thinking of the vivid scenes long after I laid the book aside.
Without a single reservation, I don't think that any author has written a more accurate description of a "grunt" fighting the war in Vietnam. You'll perceive their anxiety, sense the danger, and feel their hidden emotions as anguished young men face disfigurement or death in the rice paddies and jungles of Vietnam.
Simply put, this is a great book. A facinating account that is so well written one section flows seamlessly into the next - and you can't put it down. This is a great diet book: Without realizing it you're taken effortlessly to a place and a time during the Vietnam war. By the time you've reached the last page, you have been there See all 6 reviews. Want to see more reviews on this item? As a result, Lucas commissioned help from friend Haskell Wexler , who was credited as the "visual consultant". After Fields' departure, Lucas struggled with editing the film's story structure.
He had originally written the script so that the four Curt, Steve, John, and Toad storylines were always presented in the same sequence an "ABCD" plot structure. The first cut of American Graffiti was three and a half hours long, and in order to whittle the film down to a more manageable two hours, many scenes had to be cut, shortened, or combined.
As a result the film's structure became increasingly loose and no longer adhered to Lucas's original "ABCD" presentation. Lucas's choice of background music was crucial to the mood of each scene, but he was realistic about the complexities of copyright clearances and suggested a number of alternative tracks. Universal wanted Lucas and producer Gary Kurtz to hire an orchestra for sound-alikes.
The studio eventually proposed a flat deal that offered every music publisher the same amount of money. This was acceptable to most of the companies representing Lucas' first choices, but not to RCA —with the consequence that Elvis Presley is conspicuously absent from the soundtrack. The album contains all the songs used in the film with the exception of "Gee" by the Crows, which was subsequently included on a second soundtrack album , presented in the order in which they appeared in the film.
Despite unanimous praise at a January test screening attended by Universal executive Ned Tanen , the studio told Lucas they wanted to re-edit his original cut of American Graffiti. When Coppola's The Godfather won the Academy Award for Best Picture in March , Universal relented, and agreed to cut only three scenes about four minutes from Lucas' cut—an encounter between Toad and a fast-talking car salesman, an argument between Steve and his former teacher Mr. Kroot at the sock hop, and an effort by Bob Falfa to serenade Laurie with " Some Enchanted Evening "—but decided that the film was fit for release only as a television movie.
However, various studio employees who had seen the film began talking it up, and its reputation grew through word of mouth. The reissue included stereophonic sound [32] and the additional four minutes the studio had removed from Lucas' original cut. All home video releases also included these scenes. At the end of its theatrical run, American Graffiti had one of the greatest cost-to-profit ratios of a motion picture ever. Producer Francis Ford Coppola regretted having not financed the film himself. He never got over it and he still kicks himself. Universal released the film on Blu-ray with a new digitally remastered picture supervised by George Lucas on May 31, American Graffiti received widespread critical acclaim.
Murphy from Variety felt American Graffiti was a vivid "recall of teenage attitudes and morals, told with outstanding empathy and compassion through an exceptionally talented cast of unknown actors". Few films have shown quite so well the eagerness, the sadness, the ambitions and small defeats of a generation of young Americans.
The images aren't as visually striking as they would be if only there were a mind behind them; the movie has no resonance except from the jukebox sound and the eerie, nocturnal jukebox look.
American Graffiti depicts multiple characters going through a coming of age , such as the decisions to attend college or reside in a small town. The musical backdrop also links between the early years of rock 'n' roll in the mid-to-late s i. The setting is also before the outbreaks of the Vietnam War and the John F. Kennedy assassination [7] and before the peak years of the counterculture movement. American Graffiti evokes mankind's relationship with machines, notably the elaborate number of hot rods —having been called a "classic car flick", representative of the motor car's importance to American culture at the time it was made.
The film is recognized by American Film Institute in these lists:. Internet reviewer MaryAnn Johanson acknowledged that American Graffiti rekindled public and entertainment interest in the s and s, and influenced other films such as The Lords of Flatbush and Cooley High and the TV series Happy Days. He gave an amount of the film's profits to Haskell Wexler for his visual consulting help during filming, and to Wolfman Jack for "inspiration". Episode II — Attack of the Clones features references to the film.
Given the popularity of the film's cars with customizers and hot rodders in the years since its release, their fate immediately after the film is ironic. All were offered for sale in San Francisco newspaper ads; only the '58 Impala driven by Ronny Howard attracted a buyer, selling for only a few hundred dollars. The story outline indicated the series takes place around and the cast is composed mainly of the original characters' offspring, creating the opportunity for many of the cast to return to their respective roles.
The new series is meant to invoke a feeling of nostalgia for the '90s and early s tuner automotive era in America. The story outline aims to both reignite interest in the continued story for fans of the original film, while also attracting a new generation to the franchise. The working title for the story outline was "American Graffiti: Another Slow Night in Modesto". From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Theatrical release poster by Mort Drucker. Francis Ford Coppola Gary Kurtz. Ron Eveslage Jan D'Alquen. Verna Fields Marcia Lucas.
Retrieved January 30, Universal Studios Home Entertainment. Retrieved April 30, Archived from the original on May 9, Retrieved April 22, Happy Days began airing only a few months after Graffiti came out, and much of the plotline revolved around Howard's character, Richie Cunningham, who was almost an exact clone of Steve in the film.
There have been many prizes since then, and his prowess as a storyteller is much admired, though he's seen in some quarters as an ultra-distinguished, talented and honourable upper-middlebrow writer. Lucas was dismayed when he returned to America in June and read Walter's script, which was written in the style and tone of an exploitation film , similar to 's Hot Rods to Hell. In Buster Keaton 's Sherlock, Jr. He is gracious, however, when it comes to the question of condescending notices, saying that "posterity is not our business" and being stoical about reviews. You are indeed fortunate to escape this terrible fate by finding this safe conduct pass which points the way for you to come across and live under the protection of the government of the Republic of Vietnam.
Archived from the original on April 25, Retrieved May 9, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. Retrieved January 2, Archived from the original on April 16, Retrieved May 3, Archived from the original on May 4, Archived from the original on January 22, Retrieved May 5, Retrieved May 4, The New York Times. Murphy June 20, In Buster Keaton 's Sherlock, Jr. A similar device is used in the seminal music video Take on me by A-ha , which features a young woman entering a cartoon universe.
Conversely, Woody Allen 's Purple Rose of Cairo is about a movie character exiting the movie to interact with the real world. Allen's earlier film Play it Again, Sam featured liberal use of characters, dialogue and clips from the film classic Casablanca as a central device. The film presents The Shrinking Lover in the form of a black-and-white silent melodrama.
To prove his love to a scientist girlfriend, The Shrinking Lover protagonist drinks a potion that makes him progressively smaller.
The resulting seven-minute scene, which is readily intelligible and enjoyable as a stand-alone short subject, is considerably more overtly comic than the rest of Talk to Her —the protagonist climbs giant breasts as if they were rock formations and even ventures his way inside a compared to him gigantic vagina. Critics have noted that The Shrinking Lover essentially is a sex metaphor. Later in Talk to Her, the comatose Alicia is discovered to be pregnant and Benigno is sentenced to jail for rape. The Shrinking Lover was named Best Scene of in the Skandies , an annual survey of online cinephiles and critics invited each year by critic Mike D'Angelo.
Tropic Thunder is a comedy film revolving around a group of prima donna actors making a Vietnam War film itself also named "Tropic Thunder" when their fed-up writer and director decide to abandon them in the middle of the jungle, forcing them to fight their way out. The concept was perhaps inspired by the comedy Three Amigos , where three washed-up silent film stars are expected to live out a real-life version of their old hit movies.
The same idea of life being forced to imitate art was also reprised in the Star Trek parody Galaxy Quest. The first episode of the anime series The Melancholy Of Haruhi Suzumiya consists almost entirely of a poorly made film that the protagonists created, complete with Kyon 's typical, sarcastic commentary. Chuck Jones 's cartoon Duck Amuck shows Daffy Duck trapped in a cartoon that an unseen animator repeatedly manipulates. At the end, it is revealed that the whole cartoon was being controlled by Bugs Bunny.
The Duck Amuck plot was essentially replicated in one of Jones' later cartoons, Rabbit Rampage , in which Bugs Bunny turns out to be the victim of the sadistic animator Elmer Fudd. A similar plot was also included in an episode of Baby Looney Tunes , in which Bugs was the victim, Daffy was the animator, and it was made on a computer instead of a pencil and paper. In Nekromantik , the protagonist goes to the cinema to see the fictional slasher film Vera.
Quentin Tarantino 's Inglourious Basterds depicts a Nazi propaganda film called Nation's Pride , which glorifies a soldier in the German army. Nation's Pride is directed by Eli Roth. The martial arts epic Hero presented the same narrative several different times, as recounted by different storytellers, but with both factual and aesthetic differences. Similarly, in the whimsical Terry Gilliam film The Adventures of Baron Munchausen , and the Tim Burton film Big Fish , the bulk of the film is a series of stories told by an extremely unreliable narrator.
In the Tarsem film The Fall , an injured silent-movie stuntman tells heroic fantasy stories to a little girl with a broken arm to pass time in the hospital, which the film visualizes and presents with the stuntman's voice becoming voiceover narration. The fantasy tale bleeds back into and comments on the film's "present-tense" story. The same conceit of an unreliable narrator was used to very different effect in the crime drama The Usual Suspects which garnered an Oscar for Kevin Spacey 's performance. The seminal Japanese film Rashomon , based on the Japanese short story " In a Grove " , utilizes the flashback -within-a-flashback technique.
The story unfolds in flashback as the four witnesses in the story—the bandit, the murdered samurai , his wife, and the nameless woodcutter—recount the events of one afternoon in a grove. But it is also a flashback within a flashback, because the accounts of the witnesses are being retold by a woodcutter and a priest to a ribald commoner as they wait out a rainstorm in a ruined gatehouse. The movie Inception has a deeply nested structure that is itself part of the setting, as the characters travel deeper and deeper into layers of dreams within dreams.
Similarly, in the beginning of the music video for the Michael Jackson song " Thriller ", the heroine is terrorized by her monster boyfriend in what turns out to be a movie within a dream. The film Grand Budapest Hotel has four layers of narration; starting with a young girl at the author's memorial reading his book, it cuts to the old author in telling of an incident in when he, as a young author, stayed at the hotel and met the owner, old Zero.
He was then told the story of young Zero and M Gustave, from , which makes up most of the narrative. The film Moulin Rouge! The Ernst Lubitsch comedy To Be or Not to Be confuses the audience in the opening scenes with a play, "The Naughty Nazis", about Adolf Hitler which appears to be taking place within the actual plot of the film. Hamlet also serves as an important throughline in the film, as suggested by the title.
Laurence Olivier sets the opening scene of his film of Henry V in the tiring room of the old Globe Theatre as the actors prepare for their roles on stage. The early part of the film follows the actors in these "stage" performances and only later does the action almost imperceptibly expand to the full realism of the Battle of Agincourt. By way of increasingly more artificial sets based on mediaeval paintings the film finally returns to The Globe. Mel Brook's film, The Producers , revolves around a scheme to make money by producing a disastrously bad Broadway musical, Springtime For Hitler.
Ironically the film itself was later made into its own Broadway musical although a more intentionally successful one. The Outkast music video for the song "Roses" is a short film about a high school musical. The main plot device in Repo! The Genetic Opera is an opera which is going to be held the night of the events of the movie.
All of the principal characters of the film play a role in the opera, though the audience watching the opera is unaware that some of the events portrayed are more than drama. The biopic Korczak , about the last days of a Jewish children's orphanage in Nazi occupied Poland, features an amateur production of Rabindranath Tagore 's The Post Office , which was selected by the orphanage's visionary leader as a way of preparing his charges for their own impending death. That same production is also featured in the stage play Korczak's Children, also inspired by the same historical events.
The film adaptation [16] of Peter Nichols 's play, [17] The National Health features a send-up of a typical American hospital soap-opera being shown on a television situated in an underfunded, unmistakably British NHS hospital.
The Jim Carey film The Truman Show is about a person who grows to adulthood without ever realizing that he is the unwitting hero of the immersive eponymous television show. The first example of a video game within a video game is almost certainly Tim Stryker 's 80s era text-only game Fazuul also the world's first online multiplayer game , in which one of the objects that the player can create is a minigame.
Another early use of this trope was in Cliff Johnson 's hit The Fool's Errand , a thematically linked narrative puzzle game, in which several of the puzzles were semi-independent games played against NPCs. Power Factor has been cited as a rare example of a video game in which the entire concept is a video game within a video game: The player takes on the role of a character who is playing a "Virtual Reality Simulator", in which he in turn takes on the role of the hero Redd Ace. Protagonists Kite and Haseo try to uncover the mysteries of the events surrounding The World.
More commonly, however, the video game within a video game device takes the form of mini-games that are non-plot oriented, and optional to the completion of the game. For example, in the Yakuza and Shenmue franchises, there are playable arcade machines featuring other Sega games that are scattered throughout the game world. In Animal Crossing , the player can acquire individual NES emulations through various means and place them within their house, where they are playable in their entirety. When placed in the house, the games take the form of a Nintendo Entertainment System.
In Fallout 4 , and Fallout 76 the protagonist can find several cartridges throughout the wasteland that can be played on his pip-boy an electronic device that exists only in the world of the game or any terminal computer. The Simpsons also parodied this structure with numerous 'layers' of sub-stories in the Season 17 episode " The Seemingly Never-Ending Story ". On the show Dear White People , the Scandal parody Defamation offers a ironic commentary on the main show's theme of interracial relationships.
Similarly, on the HBO show Insecure the slavery-era soap opera Due North is an obsession for the show's main characters. The Irish television series Father Ted features a television show, Father Ben , which has characters and storylines almost identical to that of Father Ted. An extended plotline on the semi-autobiographical sitcom Seinfeld dealt with the main characters developing a sitcom about their lives. The gag was reprised on Curb Your Enthusiasm , another semi-autobiographical show by and about Seinfeld co-creator Larry David, when the long-anticipated Seinfeld reunion was staged entirely inside the new show.
The USS Callister episode of the Black Mirror anthology television series is about a man obsessed with a Star-Trek like show, who recreates it as part of a virtual reality game. The concept of a film within a television series is employed in the Macross universe. The Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Do You Remember Love?
Seinfeld had a number of reoccurring fictional films, most notably Rochelle, Rochelle , a parody of artsy but exploitative foreign films, while the trippy, metaphysically loopy thriller Death Castle is a central element of the Master of None episode New York, I Love You. Stories inside stories can allow for genre changes. Arthur Ransome uses the device to let his young characters in the Swallows and Amazons series of children's books, set in the recognisable everyday world, take part in fantastic adventures of piracy in distant lands: The film version of The Wizard of Oz does the same thing by making its inner story into a dream.
Lewis Carroll's celebrated Alice books use the same device of a dream as an excuse for fantasy, while Carroll's less well-known Sylvie and Bruno subverts the trope by allowing the dream figures to enter and interact with the "real" world. Some stories feature what might be called a literary version of the Droste effect , where an image contains a smaller version of itself also a common feature in many fractals. Among the stories that include versions of themselves are Neil Gaiman 's The Sandman: Worlds' End which contains several instances of multiple storytelling levels, including Cerements issue 55 where one of the inmost levels corresponds to one of the outer levels, turning the story-within-a-story structure into an infinite regression.
Similarly, in Charlie Kaufman 's film Synecdoche, New York , the main character Caden Cotard is a skilled director of plays who receives a grant, and ends up creating a remarkable theater piece intended as a carbon copy of the outside world. The layers of copies of the world ends up several layers deep. The long-running musical A Chorus Line dramatizes its own creation, and the life stories of its own original cast members. The famous final number does double duty as the showstopper for both the musical the audience is watching and the one the characters are appearing in.
Michael Ende's classic children's novel The Neverending Story prominently features a book of the same title. This is later revealed to be the same book the audience is reading, when it begins to be retold again from the beginning, thus creating an infinite regression that features as a plot element. Similarly, in the Will Ferrell comedy Stranger than Fiction the main character discovers he is a character in a book that along with its author also exists in the same universe.
Within this narrative, which itself is somewhat self-referential, the two characters find a book entitled "Provocative Adventures of Achilles and the Tortoise Taking Place in Sundry Spots of the Globe", which they begin to read, the Tortoise taking the part of Achilles, and Achilles taking the part of the Tortoise. A mini-theater and small audience appear on stage to watch the musical-within-a-musical, and at some point, within that second musical a yet-smaller theater and audience appear. Episode 14 of the anime series Martian Successor Nadesico is essentially a clip show, but has several newly animated segments based on Gekigangar III , an anime that exists within its universe and that many characters are fans of, that involves the characters of that show watching Nadesico.
The episode ends with the crew of the Nadesico watching the very same episode of Gekigangar, causing a paradox. Austin Powers in Goldmember begins with an action film opening, which turns out to be a sequence being filmed by Steven Spielberg. Near the ending, the events of the film itself are revealed to be a movie being enjoyed by the characters.
The Tim Burton film Pee-Wee's Big Adventure ends with the main characters watching a film version of their own adventures, but as reimagined as a Hollywood blockbuster action film, with James Brolin as a more stereotypically manly version of the Paul Reubens title character. Mel Brooks 's comedy Blazing Saddles leaves its Western setting when the climactic fight scene breaks out, revealing the setting to have been a set in the Warner Bros.