Great Falls Tribune from Great Falls, Montana • Page 72

28F Great Falls Tribune Sunday, March 29, 1987 Oscar predicted for war movie, Tlatoon' 'Vietnam was real different be guys and we never lost, we always won," said Bird. "I think it's taken all this time to assimilate that and to rationalize and be willing in large numbers to take a look at the depiction of that." starred. "Coming Home," a moving anti-war film starring Jane Fonda and Jon Voight, grossed $13.4 million. In 1979, Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now," with its haunting images of wasp-like helicopters and PRESCRIPTION THOROEALTH JT allegorical tale of a military gone amok, grossed $37.9 million. "Vietnam was a blow to the American ego and a real trauma to the American belief coming out of World War II that we were the good Vitamin 400 I.U.

DLA 100 30 Capsules $2.99 frllfjOA "Z-- II il is. Som Vetch, $2.00 Refund 2. Oft By DOLORES A. BARCLAY Associated Press Writer NEW YORK A wide-eved. freshly scrubbed American lad stumbles past stilled plastic bags on a military airstrip in Vietnam.

The dead are going home. He, though, has just arrived. He has come to fight the enemy. Soon enough he plows through the rubble of death and he learns that the real enemy is not in the jungles of Southeast Asia. The story of Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen) is a universal one and is poignantly and graphically told in Oliver Stone's "Platoon," which has been nominated for eight Academy Awards and is considered the front-runner in the race for Hollywood's cinematic plum.

The movie is at the vanguard of a current crop of cinematic treatments of the Vietnam War, an event that encouraged little activity in filmmaking or elsewhere in the arts while it was going on. Other films on the conflict to be released later this year include: Lionel Chetwynd's "The Hanoi Stanley Kubrick's "Full Metal and Francis Ford Coppola's "Gardens of Stone." "Platoon" has won Stone Express," the Director's Guild Award and has been one of the box-office biggies this season. The filmmaker, who was wounded twice as an infantryman in Vietnam, said the movie was a semi-autobiographical account of his experience there in 1967-68. The film has attracted so much attention, he said, because "people are responding to the fact that it's real. They're curious about the war in Vietnam after 20 years.

It's safe to see because the wounds are supposed to have healed although there are similar situations brewing. Possibly people are responding to that fear in Nicaragua, Salvador and Honduras." Unlike World War II, when Frank Capra, George Stevens and other Hollywood greats manufactured war movies reflecting the nation's spirit and the government's politics, Vietnam choked the creative juices. It simply did not inspire. i Vitamin I rui. Vitamin 500 mg 100 30 Tablets $1.79 M85A juv mg II.

J) Md 1W I. U. flam- ujw '5W 100! cause it was well covered by the print and electronic media," said Tom Bird, artistic director of the Vietnam Veterans Ensemble Theater Co. "The visual realities of war became more frequently presented to the American public, and I think people became repelled by the images they saw. "At the 6 o'clock news, the war in Vietnam half a world away would come tramping into your living room.

Who knows, you may have seen a dead American body coming your way." Most filmmakers couldn't get a handle on the Vietnam War because there was none of the patriotism of the past world wars, Frank McCarthy, who produced "Patton" and "MacArthur," has said. "In the end, the Vietnam War was considered a blunder, a mistake, a terrible waste of young men," said producer Robert Blumofe. "That made it a difficult subject for films." It took Stone a decade to make "Platoon." He not only captures the hellish details of daily existence black ants and leeches, ambushes and booby traps but also probes the psyches of cold-blooded killers. "Some vets will tell you it never happened and also that there were no drugs, no black and white problems," Stone said. "Everybody remembers their experience differently, I saw civilians murdered." Of about 50 Vietnam-related movies made since 1964 when the first combat film, "A Yank in Vietnam," was released, "Platoon" is thought of by veterans and critics alike as the most realistic.

John Wayne's hawkish "The Green Berets," which grossed $9.7 million, was one of the few major movies released during the war. It came out in 1968, but it took another 10 years before other major films based on the war found an audience. The Academy Award-winning "The Deer Hunter," which grossed $27.5 million, depicted the effects of the war on a group of friends from a western Pennsylvania factory town. Robert DeNiro and Meryl Streep ing around with The Beyond, but if he'd wanted his Ouija Board movie to spell success, he should have summoned another leading lady and a less laughable ending. "Witchboard" is rated R.

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Todd Allen and Stephen Nichols are her present and former boyfriends who bury the hatchet and join forces to exorcise the devil in Kitaen before her demon friend can bury its hatchet in the rest of the supporting cast. To his credit, writer-director Kevin Tenney understands the late-night tingle you can get from mess 1470 1424 yfade.The Prescribed By: NOW AVAILABLE AT THESE LOCAL OUTLETS: CHESTER Chester Clinic Pharm. Liberty Drug Co. FORT BENTON Benton Pharmacy CHOTEAU Choteou Drug, Inc. GREAT FALLS: Apothecary 24 Clinic Pharmacy Medicine Shoppe Snyder Drug.