Stanley Kubrick and the Mysterious Adam Baldwin

Let me just say that Stanley Kubrick only made three watchable films: "The Shining", "Dr. Strangelove" and "Full Metal Jacket". I know, I know, there are film scholars that will tell you that "2001" is the greatest movie ever made. Well I'll get on board if anyone of them can tell me what the fuck happens at the end of the movie. No one knows and no one can make sense of it. In the "poetics" Aristotle set up very simple rules as to what constitutes Literary art. One of those rules was that a story had to have a beginning, and end? As far as I can tell this movie breaks this quite simple convention. Now you can say what you will but if me and Aristotle got a chance to see this movie together we'd agree: "this thing is a piece of shit". BUT "Full Metal Jacket" has one of the est endings I've ever seen. It ends with a troop of Marines walking against the background of a burning city singing the theme song to the Mickey Mos Club. The meeting of soilder and boy have never been portrayed more clearly.
As it happens "Full Metal Jacket" has been on heavy rotation on HBO and I happened to catch the end of it tonight. I just realized that a dude named Adam Baldwin played the character Animal Mother in it. Who's Adam Baldwin you ask? Well he's not one of the Baldwin Brothers, but he was in the recently released movie "Serenity" a spin off of the TV show Firefly where he caught my attention as the most interesting character on the show. The funny thing is this: in Full Metal Jacket Adam Baldwin gets second billing, right between Matthew Modine and Vincent D'Nofrio. It got me thinking about the vagaries of hollywood so I looked him up on IMDB. Just to see what he'd been up to in the 20 year span from "Full Metal Jacket" to "Firefly" the answer: nothing. He's done bit parts in any little TV show that came around for like 15 years before he got a steady paycheck again. Just imagine : going from second billing on a Stanley Kubrick movie to being broke for years on end? Talk about a dream deferred. Hollywood is a cold land .