Taps dvd movie.|
Taps dvd videos, dvd movies reviews |
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List Price: $14.98 Features • Anamorphic • Closed-captioned • Color • Widescreen • NTSC In Theaters : 20 December, 1981 DVD Release : 05 March, 2002 |
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Taps description Memorable mostly as the film that introduced filmgoers to Tom Cruise and Sean Penn, both of whom nearly steal the film from its nominal star, Timothy Hutton. Hutton, fresh from his Oscar for Ordinary People, plays the top cadet at a private military school run by George C. Scott. When the announcement is made that the school will be closed, the ... review details |
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| ♥♥♥♥♥ | "When they ask why they died . . . " |
| This movie is 25 years old now and to say it was prescient of anything, including the extraordinary careers to be enjoyed by Penn and Cruise, requires a heady dose of disbelief suspension.
When Alfred Lord Tennyson's son was killed at the Battle of the Somme, the greatest slaughter of humankind in any one day in the history of the world, he wrote, "When they ask you why they died, tell them because their fathers lied." And I think that's the key to the movie. Penn's 'surrender with honor' and Cruise's 'death before dishonor' and Hutton's Hamlet-like indecisiveness, are the troika of what war embraces. Should we be at war, ever? Certainly not. Will we continue to be at war? Of course. And the battle within the mind is that there is no finish line of resolution. Certainly it is not decided by who euphemistically "won." And here is the tougher question. Of the three roles portrayed by Hutton, Cruise and Penn, who was right? Well I submit to you that as long as we are going to pursue this folly, war, they all were right. And, they all were wrong. And to add to the confusion, again picking on Hutton, Cruise and Penn, what if we don't have the Academy representing a kind of a medieval Honor Code, but we call it a church in San Antonio. Or a hotel in Ruwanda. What do you do then? It's kind of like drugs. Good drugs? Bad drugs? Who decides? And you can even take it into the future and say what if unstable nations, some sworn to destroy the Great Satan, America, arm themselves with nuclear rockets? See I don't think Cadet Shawn (Cruise) is wrong any more than I think Cadet Dwyer (Penn) is right. They are regrettably both right and wrong. I gave it 4 stars because there are other movies, Paths of Glory for example, who don't fool you with child stars. They don't give you the easy way out. Do you build a bridge because you are in a Japanese prison camp in Burma or do you build the best bridge anyone built, better than the Japanese could build themselves? But it is a good movie and it is thought provoking. 4 stars. Larry Scantlebury |
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