Having gotten around to viewing Francis Ford Coppola's complete 3 hour and 17 minute version......
Kurtz's Krazy Kult Lives! What a relief to hear from FFC himself that the film's end credit sequence...(the napalming of Col.Kurtz's jungle lair)....is completely meaningless and has nothing to do with the ending of either version of the film itself.....and isn't even attached to end of the film anymore. It was simply a pyrotechnical way to dismantle the set. So praise the Movie Gods...we're all free to imagine Scott Glenn and the tribesman still randomly slaughtering anyone they come across in the jungle......the horror, the horror....continues.
Dude, Where's My Board? Still scratching our heads over this additional cap to the Kilgore (Robert Duvall) episode. Swiping his surfboard? Really? Smacks of "Animal House Goes To War".....but then we came to realize, if you think of the whole Kilgore sequence as the darkest of comedies.....what better way to wrap it up, with Kilgore's copters in pursuit, loudspeakers blaring a plea for return of a surfboard....
Boffing The Bunnies We don't even want to go near discussing how this scene now looks given today's current events and cultural climate........but if nothing else, it's a bluntly accurate rendition of how men viewed Playboy Bunnies and how Hefner presented these girls to 20th century culture.......as living, breathing, inflatable sex toys. And the script has the perfect topping off dialogue exchange....("Who are you?" "I'm next...")
The French Colonist "Lost Boys" Fascinating idea.......and you can envision a whole other movie altogether struggling to emerge from this sequence. But the glacial pace of it brings the "Apocalypse Now" to a grinding halt.......it plays like an oil painting held up in front of the camera for 15 minutes......you don't even have to look at the screen when it's on, you can listen in while you check your e-mails and not miss anything.....
And what stays with us.....always.....the film's view of the Vietnam war as a delirious, seductively lunatic fantasy, devoid of all reason and sanity. For us, the key to the film resides in Brando's monologue about his awe and admiration of the Viet Cong's atrocity on vaccinated children........hearing it again, we couldn't helping pondering our seemingly never-ending wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.....attempting to comprehend and battle people who've descended to the pure savagery of insects......at what point do we hear Jim Morrison singing "this is the end....."
With or without all the extra footage, "Apocalypse" remains a 5 star experience (*****) a FIND OF FINDS. Watching it now, while we're afflicted with a President who's far crazier and divorced from reality than Duvall's Lt.Col Kilgore (Baby Orange loves the smell of Red Carpet in the evening........smells like victory).....makes it all the more timely.
No comments:
Post a Comment