Apocalypse Now on DVD and Blu-ray

[MyNameCriterionForum]

I don't want to get into the whole definition of fascist argument, but I believe that I meant precisely what I said. Nice job on the 'all politicians are basically the same therefore your politics are irrelevant' argument, though, I've never seen that one busted out in such short order.

I don't really have any idea of what Saving Private Ryan has to do with this conversation, Armond, but Dirty Harry isn't about war. It does have a lot of attacks on the ideas of rights and a lot of fairly pathetic propaganda, which I find it difficult to enjoy. Perhaps that was Malick's contribution, but I haven't found any of Malick's other scripts difficult to enjoy for that reason, so who knows!

Of course you "don't want to get into the whole definition of fascist argument" because you gave no examples of how Milius is in any way Fascist. And yes, I'm an Anarchist, so I believe "all politicians are basically the same" -- and almost entirely harmful.

"Armond"? I've not read his work, so your jab is lost on me. Shit man, Pauline Kael is more "Fascist" than John Milius.

[Tom Amolad]

I was actually surprised to find out Apocalypse Now was Milius-scripted, since it's a favorite and I generally hate the man. I'm going to have to try my best not to see fascist bugbears all over the place next time I watch it.

Jonathan Rosenbaum is interesting on the politics of this film. I share his ambivalence.

[matrixschmatrix]

I was actually surprised to find out Apocalypse Now was Milius-scripted, since it's a favorite and I generally hate the man. I'm going to have to try my best not to see fascist bugbears all over the place next time I watch it.

Jonathan Rosenbaum is interesting on the politics of this film. I share his ambivalence.

Thanks- I don't often agree with Rosenbaum, but I always think he's worth reading.

[Nothing]

I am not 100% convinced that it set out to do this.

I agree, and don't think it did, or does - and I'm not convinced by this argument that Herr radically reshaped Coppola's conception of the film during post (and I prefer elements of the bootleg cut, including the lack of voiceover). I'm not generally keen on Rosenbaum, but he does nail many of the film's moral and political failings in that article, and also Coppola's artistic failing in comparison to Ray, a nice touch.

I'm an Anarchist

Really? I'm not sure if I see any material difference between capitalism and anarchy - an environment that encourages the triumph of the strong over the weak. Morally-grounded authoritarianism is necessary, surely, to control the baser instincts of humanity.

[Tom Hagen]

Rosenbaum, as always, with a goddanmed Orson Welles tangent.

[Flike]

Is the Apocalypse Now BD already OOP? No longer available on Amazon... ugh...

[ccfixx]

Is the Apocalypse Now BD already OOP? No longer available on Amazon... ugh...

Well, if you don't need the 3-disc "Full Disclosure" edition, then you can pick up the 2-disc edition from Amazon.

[Tom Hagen]

"Full Discolure" edition available from Lionsgate for half off in, uh, honor of Father's Day. So if your dad loves the smell of napalm in the morning . . .

[flyonthewall2983]

Watched a bit of this again last night. Is it me, or does the voice-over edge the film more into something like film-noir?

[Feiereisel]

Watched a bit of this again last night. Is it me, or does the voice-over edge the film more into something like film-noir?

It's an interesting idea. Leaving aside the voice-over, other elements of the film match up with common noir tropes: the man on a mission plot, the sense of pessimism and alienation, questions/lack of morality, institutionalized corruption, etc.

But the film is too...animal. Noir is gritted teeth, not bared fangs. Beyond the superficial similarities, I can't frame the film as something even approaching noir for three ironclad reasons.

The first is that the film is in color. Muted and stylized color, sure, but still.

The second is the conspicuous lack of any type of urban setting, which is an essential element of film noir. Willard has left all of that behind--the film's first scene positions him in a post-noir space, and he only moves further away from there as the film progresses. Instead of an urban jungle, there's just a jungle; instead of urban decay; there's just decay.

The third is the time of the film's production. If we keep to the "Touch of Evil is the last film noir" guideline, noir was twenty years gone by the time the film was conceived, made, and released. Therefore it's neo-noir, if anything--and I'm not sure I'd even go that far.

The "something like" qualifier is tripping me up--it's nebulous. Can you be more precise about what you're getting at? Make a case.

[flyonthewall2983]

Fair enough. I'm actually not much of an expert on Noir at all, so maybe describing it as "something like" was a misnomer. Maybe comparing it to something part of the past was erroneous too. I first saw it in 2003 and despite being set in a very specific time and place, it felt very modern to me. There is a great charm for a film to be of it's time, and a lot of the great movies of the 70's had that. But this has a different feel to it for me than that. It's hard to nail down why I feel this way, but I'm sure whatever it is is a big reason why it's one of my favorites.

[hearthesilence]

Hah, Jonathan Rosenbaum's blog recently posted the extended review he wrote for the "Redux" reissue:

To confuse matters, the ironic, wisecracking offscreen narration of Willard, written by Herr, may show more signs of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe than it does of Conrad’s Marlow. Willard has been enlisted as a mercenary to “terminate” Kurtz, an American officer fighting in Vietnam and Cambodia who’s gone murderously insane, and as Willard pages through the man’s dossier during his long journey, he implicitly becomes a kind of private detective attempting to solve the “mystery” of the man. Could this be because the American “translation” of Marlow as a mediating moral consciousness somehow leads us to the more noirish figure of Chandler’s hero? Whatever the reason, this isn’t the first time such an arresting thematic and stylistic sea change has taken place in American movies. In 1946 Welles’s innovative subjective-camera idea [developed for his aborted film adaptation of Heart of Darkness] was finally used throughout an entire Hollywood feature, Robert Montgomery’s clunky Chandler adaptation Lady in the Lake. Montgomery missed the whole point of Welles’s interest in the device — as a way of dramatizing Marlow’s and the audience’s ambivalent attraction-repulsion response to Kurtz. In Apocalypse Now, the shift from Marlow to Marlowe seems more defensible, at least as long as Willard qualifies as a moral commentator on what he’s observing, as someone who can voice the viewer’s questions — such as why Kurtz is deemed crazy by the U.S. military and Kilgore is not.

[flyonthewall2983]

Willard definitely has a sense of morality, but one that's been weakened by the war bringing out all these personal demons that lead him at times to identify with Kurtz. Even still there's quite a lot of mystery to Willard. The simple act of shutting off the squawk box at the end was such a striking moment, because while it may have simply meant calling off the air strike, it also felt like the character was letting go of something in a way that maybe Kurtz himself had before.

[flyonthewall2983]

Blu-ray.com just listed a pre-order (no release date yet though) for a new 2-disc version with the Hearts of Darkness disc replacing the special features from previous editions.

[Ashirg]

Amazon has it for June 7.

[hearthesilence]

Not really worth it unless they drop the price. You can get the three-disc Full Disclosure version for $3 or 4 more, which would have everything mentioned.