Shouldn't Nicholson's character have confessed to ordering the Code Red?



And aren't women in as just as much danger flying combat missions in Apaches than they would be in the infantry?

edit: I meant Nicholson should have admitted so from the very beginning.



And the link to the Falling Down cop-out is the same as the IMDB one to A Few Good Men.

Ouch. That was<i/> painfully pre-9/11. It was also pre-Gulf War II--do you still consider the U.S. military ineffective?

Timothy:



This actually was a technology war, more killing than combat. Anytime we met resistance we called in the bombs. I don't think this proves much about our capacity to fight a ground war against a serious enemy force. Luckily, I don't think there are any serious enemy forces and I still don't think there'll ever be a meaningful ground war again. Even against N. Korea, where we'll have to use massive ground forces, most of the heavy lifting will be done by aerial warfare. And, if we ever did face an enormous Chinese horde, I continue to believe we'd just nuke them or, considering the effects of MOABs and the like, do essentially the same thing with conventional but grotesquely destructive bombs.

Ali:



Thanks, I think I fixed it.



If he confessed right away there's no movie.

OJ -



The Chinese, however, unlike most of the rest of the world, seem to have generals with a clue.



Whether that would be enough against our technology, I have no idea, but they're certainly paying very careful attention to our conflicts.

mike:



What do you base that on? When's the last time the Chinese beat a non-Chinese army?

Ali:



I personally would not see women put in danger at all, but I'm prehistoric. Flying missions, though they get the benefit of reduced requirements to qualify, seems least objectionable because there is so little personal contact during combat or opportunity for fraternization to matter.

Mr. Judd--



My husband and I went to lunch with one of his clients and her niece who was an emergency reponse worker. She revealed that they could never schedule two women together as a team because none of the women had the upper body strength to work the "jaws of life" machine that gets people out of vehicles after an accident. Maybe I am prehistoric, too, but it seems that before you get a job you should be able to operate the machinary.

Re Falling down Cop-out.



Its been several years since I watched it, so my memory might not be entirely correct. I thought the movie was about how the acceptability of violence is highly subjective and variable.



The viewer starts out in agreement with the minor and "justified violence" on display. However, by the end of the movie, the character is clearly over the line.



What I found disturbing was my personal failure to recognise exactly when the character actually crossed the "line", and/or what details formed the basis for that line.



As such, the use of domestic violence was not a copout, but an effective plot device to set the viewer up into examining their own perceptions of what the character portrayed. The character's behavior was consistent throughout the movie, what changed was the viewers perception of his behavior and its acceptability.



I thought the director had sucked the viewer (myself at least) into initially accepting a behavior that was unacceptable by the end of the movie.



I did not see it as a cop-out. My suspicion is that rather then confront your uneasiness of your own personal values, you shut off the message the director was trying to present. This is not a criticism, as I too find myself doing the same thing with A Few Good Men. I carefully divorce the Nicholson speech from his character. It rings of truth, yet it is painful to hear it from someone we cannot entirely admire or condone. So I disassociate the speech from its speaker. This is the same as the violence in Falling Down.

BO:



I had less problem with the domestic violence than with the implication that he'd abused his child. But as to both, the concept of the film is the embattled white middle class, so to turn him too into a threat to his family is indeed a cop out. In fact, by the end of the film the most obvious threat to the family is the white middle class father, which I think we can agree was not the point of the first three quarters of the story nor does it approximate reality.

I am
a lawyer, with friends in the military, and half of my family is or is going into medicine.



And I loved that movie.

RE: A few Good Men: I was Marine Corps JAG and thought the folm was pretty good. There were a couple of glitches in procedure and evidence, but in general the characters and situations were rather true to life. I once ran across a batallion CO very much like the Nicholson character, who was in fact relieved for mental disorders after having abused his Marines, the facts of the case having been developed during pretrial preparations, much in the matter depicted in the movie. Furthermore, the characters of all the lawyers and the MJ were reminescent of individuals I had encountered.