Cheap Hearts and Minds (Video) (Peter Davis (II)) Price

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Customer Reviews of Hearts and Minds

Powerful But One Sided
This film is graphically powerful and shocking. By now some of the footage should be familiar to people. In addition, it is a good wake up call to the current political situation and how we are only repeating what happenned in Vietnam. My appreciation for the film ends there. Of course, there were brutalities and atrocities in the Vietnam War and it was an unwinnable war that had no purpose. However, the soldiers were drafted and it is disappointing to see them portrayed as the enemy rather than victims of the military propoganda. I much prefer the film Wintersoldiers (which I believe is due for release on dvd) that extensively interviews former soldiers from Vietnam who are now against the war and speak out against it as activists. In addition, for all people's criticisms of Michael Moore he presents in Farenheit 9-11, the military industrial complex as using poor people looking for a way out of poverty to become soldiers rather than Hearts and Minds that revels in the stereotype of the "ugly American" and doesn't bother to interview many average Americans (as opposed to a few shots of your usual hippies singing "give peace a chance") who were against the war and were afraid to express it or were not given a voice. Even though yes, the film is against the Vietnam War so that to some conservatives that would make it one sided, what more concerns me is that it divided America into two sides rather than going into more subtle nuances about how the Vietnam War permeated American life and politics in complex ways that still have reprecussions to this day.

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31 years later and it still packs a punch
This is an important documentary about a war that started to involve the US from about 1946 and shouldn't have at all. It was compounded by advisors and leaders into a situation where more and more human resources were thrown at a losing situation. The anti-war sentiment, destruction and official statements are all etched into this film. The historical background is missing here. This film is a graphic snapshot of what it was like at the time. It should not be missed.

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The Truth is Disturbingly Heartbreaking and Grotesque...
The images from Hearts and Minds are disturbingly heartbreaking and grotesque. For example, a naked little girl is shown running down a road with skin pealing off her body as napalm continues to eat into her flesh. American soldiers watch the girl running by them, until it seems as if the camera that is capturing the moment urges the soldiers to help the girl. A Viet Cong suspect is shot point blank in the head on the street and his body falls to the ground with blood pulsating out of his temple. A child cries in agony by the grave of someone close to him while the grave diggers take a break with a cool Coca Cola. These unsettling scenes slowly descend into some unused space of the brain as they will return to consciousness in order to haunt the viewer of the horrors of the Vietnam War at a later time. <
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>Peter Davis had accumulated over 200 hours of footage before beginning the long process of editing down the film into a feasible 112 minutes. During these 112 minutes the audience gets to follow how the American mindset which is created from young age, and how it influenced the decisions of the war. Davis brings the audience to a high school football game where young minds are formed into believing that what they do is right and that they have to win at all costs. Similar mentality saturates the thinking behind the American decision makers as President Lyndon B. Johnson increased the American participation in the war, to which he stated, "The ultimate victory will depend on the hearts and minds of the people who actually live out there." The President's statement also became the title for the film. <
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>The Vietnamese people, whose living standards were and are much different from the typical American lifestyle, fought for independence and freedom while the United States fought against the fear of Communism. This political and fundamental difference in perceiving the war was monumental as Communism, in essence, become the liberator for the Vietnamese people, and the Americans were perceived as the evil invaders. Most Vietnamese were opposed to the American's, as most people in Vietnam are poor, and those who promoted the so-called Americanism of Vietnam were war profiteers and people in high positions. The war continued into a dirty slaughter of civilians and children through dropping millions of bombs, spraying the herbicide Agent Orange, burning villages to the ground, and killing suspect Viet Cong as the American soldiers were in constant fear of being shot in the back. <
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>Interesting comments were made by several characters such as General Westmoreland who said that "the Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does the Westerner." This followed by a shot of a child weeping in misery by a grave, which brings across the message of the ignorance that some of the leading military staff possessed. However, General Westmoreland continued to make derogatory comments about the Vietnamese people and continued to come across as a bigot and a racist. <
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>Hearts and Minds was initially delayed in the United States for a year as a result of the distributors, Columbia, being afraid of legal repercussions. However, the film went on to win the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature in 1975, and the Oscar's positive appraisal of Hearts and Minds led to a massive controversy. Nonetheless, Hearts and Minds message was out as it was the biggest documentary of the time with a million dollar budget. <
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>Ultimately, the audience will have traveled a rough cinematic journey, which could be summed up by Daniel Ellsworth's quote "We weren't on the wrong side -- we were the wrong side." This notion is offered through several perspectives while viewing the horrors of war, as families were destroyed, children burnt to unidentifiable lumps of meat, and men wished they were home with their loved ones. Hearts and Minds provides the audience several interesting notions to ponder, but the most vivid idea would be that war should be avoided at all costs as people are mutilated and die on all sides. <
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