R. Lee Ermey died of pneumonia complications on Sunday at the age of 74. The former Marine Corps drill instructor started his acting career as an uncredited helicopter pilot during the famous “Ride of the Valkyries” strike in Apocalypse Now!, but it was another seminal Vietnam war movie, Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, that brought him fame. If you pukes want to reacquaint yourself with his tough-talking character, Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, you’ll have no less than three opportunities to enter a world of shit in the coming weeks.
First off, the recently renovated Quad Cinema is screening Full Metal Jacket tonight at 6:45pm and again on April 19 at 4:25pm.
If that’s late notice, no worries: Village East Cinema will screen the film on April 25 as part of its Heeere’s Kubrick series, which continues with a screening of A Clockwork Orange tomorrow, April 18. Make sure to get tickets in advance; last week’s screening of The Shining was pretty packed. (Village East will also present 50th anniversary, 70mm screenings of 2001: A Space Odyssey starting May 18.)
Finally, on May 11, Metrograph opens its Kubrick x 8 series. Showtimes have yet to be announced, but Full Metal Jacket is definitely in the mix. The series will also include the opening of Filmworker, a documentary about Kubrick’s right-hand man Leon Vitali, who acted in Barry Lyndon and served as Kubrick’s personal assistant and sometime casting director throughout the rest of the director’s career. Filmworker isn’t the first documentary about a Kubrick associate; S Is For Stanley tells the story of Emilio D’Alessandro, the longtime driver and assistant who recently auctioned off items from his personal collection of Kubrick paraphernalia. One of Sergeant Hartman’s hats went for about $2,500.