Platoon review

 Number 192 on the top 1000 films of all time is Oliver Stone's war film 'Platoon.'

Platoon follows a group of soldiers fighting within the Vietnam War. The main character is the young, liberal Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen) who quickly becomes disillusioned. His superior officers, the hot-headed and psychotic Sergeant Barnes (Tom Berenger) and the more enlightened Elias (Willem Dafoe) clash on the best way to lead their troops. Keith David, Forest Whitaker and Johnny Depp all co-star.

Since I started this challenge, I've watched my fair share of Vietnam war films and I don't think that Platoon was anything special. It didn't bring anything new to the table. Sure it was entertaining and watchable. It was frenetic, fast-paced and dramatic, but there wasn't enough to delineate it from some of its contemporaries. I think a lot of that was down to the characterisation. The cast was large and confusing with the different characters not being clearly delineated enough from each other. In fact, the three main characters are really the only ones I can remember with any certainty. The heinous Sergeant Barnes was definitely recognisable, but all of his cronies blended into one. And Willem Dafoe and Charlie Sheen always stand out anywhere. And like with many war films, all of the characters are dressed the same - in uniforms and helmets only serving to make things more confusing.

Furthermore, the characters were all just so unlikeable. Okay, Sergeant Barnes is the villain - he kills a Vietmanese woman in cold blood and later tries to rape two Vietmanese girls - so you would expect him to be nasty. Barnes has plenty of cronies that are just as bad as him. But there really wasn't any likeable characters that you wanted to root for.  Even the protagonist Chris shows signs of instability, at times, blindly shooting at anything in sight. True, at times, he does do the right things like preventing Barnes from raping those girls, but there wasn't anything in him that made me want him to succeed. Part of that was down to Charlie Sheen. Honestly, I don't think he's the greatest actor in the world. 

The platoon's commanding officer was Lieutenant Wolfe (Mark Moses) but he was too young and ineffective to be any good. And another of the sergeants - O'Neil (John C. Mcginley) is a coward and spends most of the battles hiding in the foxholes. Largely, the film is just nasty people doing nasty things. I get it, war changes people. War can turn the best men into monsters. But it doesn't make them the most likeable of characters.

Platoon was certainly watchable enough, but I'm not sure how much I actually enjoyed it. It was just horrible people being horrible to each other.

Fantastic Mr Fox review

 Number 496 on the top 1000 films of all time is Wes Anderson's animated comedy Fantastic Mr Fox.

Based on Roald Dahl's 1970 story, Fantastic Mr Fox follows Foxy Fox (George Clooney) who regularly thieves from three farmers: Boggis (Robin Hurlstone,) Bunce (Hugo Guiness) and Bean (Michael Gambon.) These farmers swear revenge on Foxy Fox endangering him, his wife Felicity (Meryl Streep) and his family and friends.

This was a stop-motion film and the animation was absolutely gorgeous. I loved the rich Autumnal colour schemes. The colour truly popped. All the different animals looked adorable too from Foxy Fox to his badger lawyer voiced by Bill Murray to the villainous rat voiced by Willem Defoe.

However, this star-studded cast and lovely animation wasn't enough to stop this ultimately being a film made for kids. I was hoping that it would be a family friendly film that would appeal to children and parents alike a la Monsters Inc or Toy Story, but this really was meant for little children. And that did hurt its watchability factor. Maybe I'm just a grumpy old man, but maybe it was seemingly obvious that this film was always meant for kids. Children would love the bright colour scheme and the adorable animal characters.

Nevertheless, the conflicts were very juvenile such as the subplot of Mr Fox's son Ash Fox and his rivalry with his cousin Kristofferson. Ash feels threatened and jealous of his seemingly perfect cousin. This is a subplot that would be obviously appealing to little kids but not grumpy, old curmudgeons like me. All the violence bordered on cartoonish, like Mr Fox and his oppossum sidekick climbing up an electric fence. With every climb, the electric shocks x-ray their entire bodies. 

And a lot of the dialogue was contrived. It didn't seem natural and I think that some of that was down to George Clooney himself. I noticed that in a lot of conversations Mr Fox had with his son there were these strange hesitations at the end of each line. You could argue that, at first, this signifies their strained relationship. But their relationship fixes throughout the film, so why are there still the strange hesitations?

I think if I was twenty years younger I would have loved this film, but, now,  I'm far too much of a grumpy old man. It was good as far as it went, but that wasn't very far at all.