THREE KINGS (1999)



By all accounts, writer/director David O. Russell is the kind of tantrum-throwing brat even Christian Bale would recommend for anger management classes. George Clooney came to blows with him on the set of Three Kings, and Lily Tomlin surely contemplated crushing his nuts during his notorious freak-out on the set of I ♥ Huckabees...but even Clooney admits the dude’s got chops, and Russell’s tale of U.S. soldiers attempting to heist millions in Kuwaiti bullion from Saddam Hussein during the Persian Gulf War is still the best (fictional) cinematic depiction of America’s poisonous love-hate relationship with Hussein and Iraq. I learned more about our nation’s cynical, fucked-up Middle East policy from Russell’s entertaining “comedy” caper than I did from ten years of Bush family press conferences. The moral of the story: there’s definitely money to be made in Iraq, if your conscience isn’t bothered (like Clooney’s Major Archie Gates) by the thought of letting innocent civilians die as collateral damage, or (like Nora Dunn’s TV reporter Adriana Cruz) by the sight of birds dying in war-made oil slicks, or (like Mark Wahlberg’s Sgt. Troy Barlow) the realization that even the bad guys (here represented by Saïd Taghmaoui’s electrifying Iraqi interrogator) are suffering while the war profiteers get plenty rich, plenty quick. (AO)

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10. FULL METAL JACKET (1987)



The big rap against Full Metal Jacket has always been that it peaks too soon – that the episodic second half of the movie doesn't live up to the tight, intense and brutally funny boot camp sequence it follows. (The other knock on Jacket is that it was filmed in England. Please. You people don't think 2001 was actually shot in outer space, do you?) Despite countless homages and parodies of R. Lee Ermey's indelible drill instructor Sgt. Hartman (many of them courtesy of Ermey himself), however, it is the Vietnam portion of Full Metal Jacket that has proved most influential on war movies of recent vintage. Efforts ranging from Jarhead to Redacted to HBO's recent Generation Kill have drawn on its loose structure, black humor and profanely poetic dialogue (much of which is ripped directly from the pages of Gustav Hasford's novel, The Short-Timers). The complaint has never made much sense to me anyway, as it seems clear that Kubrick is deliberately contrasting the regimented structure of basic training with the free-form chaos of actual warfare. None of this is meant as a knock on the movie's endlessly rewatchable (not to mention quotable) first half, but merely to suggest that Kubrick's film as a whole has held up far better than many of its contemporaries, and deserves a spot on any list of the greatest war movies.

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The other day we caught up with the congenial David O. Russell, the director who rassled George Clooney while making Three Kings and whose tirade against I Heart Huckabees star Lily Tomlin became a YouTube sensation. At the time, all we knew was that James Caan had left the set of Russell’s latest opus, Nailed, for the usual reason: “creative differences.” Now that we know what those differences were, the story is even better.

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A new David O. Russell film is in production, which must mean that the notoriously prickly filmmaker isn’t getting along with somebody. George Clooney was the first to report that Russell might not be all sunshine and roses on the set; actor and director famously had “creative differences” while making Three Kings. Clooney elaborated in an interview with Playboy in 2000. “David is in many ways a genius, though I learned that he's not a genius when it comes to people skills...He yelled and screamed at people all day, from day one...he screamed at the script supervisor and made her cry. I wrote him a letter and said, 'Look, I don't know why you do this. You've written a brilliant script, and I think you're a good director. Let's not have a set like this. I don't like it and I don't work well like this.'...He turned on me and said, 'Why don't you just worry about your fucked-up act? You're being a dick. You want to hit me? You want to hit me? Come on, pussy, hit me.' I'm looking at him like he's out of his mind. Then he started banging me on the head with his head. He goes, 'Hit me, you pussy. Hit me.' Then he got me by the throat and I went nuts. I had him by the throat. I was going to kill him. Kill him.”

So that went well, and although it’s sad that there’s no video evidence of this dust-up – at least, none that’s surfaced so far – the same can’t be said for I Heart Huckabees.

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