'Platoon'

I've seen some awful movies in my day, but this one takes the cake.

It also took home a Best Picture Academy Award and all kinds of acclaim.

For the time, it was probably pretty awesome. Watching it today, in fact, right now, you won't find a more stereotypical, poorly written, poorly acted and highly transparent piece of shit in all of filmdom.

Notes:
1. So, Oliver Stone was pouring all of this time and money into this harrowing and jaw-dropping Vietnam War film and we couldn't at least give our main actors haircuts from the actual 1970s? Charlie Sheen looked like someone off the set of "Family Ties."

2. Speaking of, Sheen, Tom Berenger and about 95 percent of the rest of the cast couldn't act themselves out of a wet paper bag. Sheen with the super-fake agony as he's being lifted out of Vietnam in the helicopter after the big fight ... it's breathtakingly bad.

3. Stone crammed all of the archetypes, stereotypes and canned Marine talk as he could in this film. It's dumb. The "deep" narration from Sheen's character, the wide-eyed college kid that signed up for the Marines because he didn't think it right that only the poor should be fighting the war. Bullshit. Then, suddenly, he smokes a little pot (like he wasn't already in college ... in the 1960s!), puts on a red bandana and suddenly he's the biggest badass in the world? Seriously?

4. Willem Dafoe's character is a bit of a cartoon character, too. The guy with the conscience that goes toe to toe with Beranger's hellraising sociopathic nutcase. He doesn't wear a helmet. Just goes around the jungle on his own basically killing every member of the Vietcong. Hell, why not just send him out there to win the war? Meanwhile, the rest of the platoon could spend 2,00 rounds of ammo and fail to hit the broadside of a barn.

5. The writing. Cripes. "Tag 'em and bag 'em!" Let me put it this way, when one of Max Fischer's plays in Rushmore have better writing, you're in trouble.

An idiotic waste of my time. Never again.