The Favorites - Apocalypse Now (#61)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. Apocalypse Now (1979/USA/dir. Francis Ford Coppola) appeared at #61 on my original list.

Due to technical difficulties, this entry is a few hours late - and my previous post on Barry Lyndon was delayed nearly a week before going up early this morning. Next week, the Favorites will return to its normal schedule of Friday morning, 7am PST, and stick with it for all remaining entries.

What it is • Capt. Willard (Martin Sheen) has been given a mission that doesn't officially exist: terminate Col. Kurtz's (Marlon Brando's) command with extreme prejudice. His hallucinatory death trip proceeds down the Nung River - already a mythic, imaginary element in one of the first major films about the Vietnam War. A decade after the story takes place (and was written), four years after the war ended (and work on the film really began), Apocalypse Now debuted to controversy and acclaim. Close enough to the raw experience to capture its mood (a mood that still hovered in the air on the cusp of the Reagan era), but far enough away to mythologize this national trauma, the result is a cross-cultural epic collage. Had the film been produced in the early seventies, as initially planned, the original director George Lucas wanted to shoot it guerrilla-style inside the actual war zone. The final film lacks any such gritty, documentary quality, except inasmuch as it captures what it was like to shoot Apocalypse Now. In a way, then, the film hovers right on that precarious borderline that defined many New Hollywood classics. Is it more about reflecting the surrounding world, depicting events, circumstances, and sensibilities that had shaped modern society but had been underrepresented on the cinema screen? Or is it more about celebrating that very screen, an immersion in and mutation of the history of movies, whose primary subject is simply the joy and agony of making cinema? Such fruitful tension between the documentary and "magical" qualities of the seventh art was maintained throughout the seventies before collapsing, and essentially splitting the American cinema into two camps, shortly after Apocalypse Now. The film is the end of an era, and the inevitable outcome of its plot also echoes that larger phenomenon.

Why I like it •

'Neath the Marquee Moon 1976 - 1980 • "32 Days of Movies" Day 23

Twenty-third chapter in "32 Days of Movies", an audiovisual tour through 366 films
(2015 update: included Vimeo embed after the jump)

View "Chapter 23: 'Neath the Marquee Moon"

'Neath the Marquee Moon

A decadent chapter for a decadent decade, but whereas disco, leisure suits, and cocaine excess dominated late seventies pop culture, these clips have a bit more class. Okay, coke features a couple times, but so do lush color (and even lusher black-and-white), artfully nightmarish imagery, and killer music. There's an otherworldly feel to today's selections, from the blue lasers of a final concert to the surreal, almost lunar landscapes of two different warzones to the Manhattan skyline twinkling like an earthbound Milky Way...indeed the (original, thank you) scene with an actual alien may be the least far-out of all. Though we only see the Moon once (or twice, if you want to be clever about it), it seems to exert a tidal pull on the zeitgeist, at least as represented here.

(continued below, along with NSFW & spoiler warnings)

Apocalypse Now Redux

Apocalypse Now Redux, 1979 (revised in 2000), directed by Francis Ford Coppola

The Story: Capt. Willard, an increasingly strung-out Special Forces commando, is assigned a top-secret mission in late 60s Vietnam: travel up the Da Nang river to assassinate the renegade Col. Kurtz, a mysterious military genius who has set up a private empire in the wilderness. Along the way, Willard and his shipmates encounter increasingly bizarre characters and situations, and by the time they arrive in Kurtz’s unholy domain, it has become clear that the colonel is only as mad as the war around him.

When the troubled production of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now was mired for years in the Philippines, Hollywood wags dubbed the film “Apocalypse Later.” The implication, of course, being that such a crazy idea – an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, transposed to Vietnam, and shot in conditions which were themselves often warlike (literally, the crew had to negotiate with both sides of a civil war which was raging around them) – could only exist on paper or perhaps in Coppola’s crazed, grandiose mind. When the film arrived at Cannes finally, at the tail end of the 70s, it could have merely been a footnote to the legendary turmoil of its making, something like the later big-budget flop Heaven’s Gate, labeled a “folly” and quickly cast aside.