Apocalypse Now on DVD and Blu-ray

Discuss North American DVDs and Blu-rays or other DVD and Blu-ray-related topics.
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Nothing
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Re: Apocalypse Now on DVD and Blu-ray

#301 Post by Nothing » Wed Jan 12, 2011 10:50 am

Highway 61 wrote:I suspect that their conception of the film changed once they began working with Herr, who understood the war better than anyone else involved in the entire production.
Apocalypse Now is a strong piece of work, but it says little to nothing about the American war/genocide in Indochina. Full Metal Jacket comes close (that being Herr too, of course), but it remains a subject that the medium has yet to do justice, unless one counts the Winter Soldier documentary, (and even then the scope is limited to the experiences of American GIs).

Imho, every American child should have to visit the War Remnants Museum in HCMC, just as every German child must visit Dachau or Bergen-Belsen (although the first step would of course be to hang Henry Kissinger).

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aox
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Re: Apocalypse Now on DVD and Blu-ray

#302 Post by aox » Wed Jan 12, 2011 11:06 am

Nothing wrote:
Highway 61 wrote:I suspect that their conception of the film changed once they began working with Herr, who understood the war better than anyone else involved in the entire production.
Apocalypse Now is a strong piece of work, but it says little to nothing about the American war/genocide in Indochina.
I am not 100% convinced that it set out to do this. Out of the 50-100 times I have seen the film (it's been my favorite or Top three since I was 8), and the older I have gotten, I almost see it as being a generic statement, and much more faithful to Conrad's story than people give it credit for. As my years stack, I see it less and less about the American war in Vietnam, and more about imperialism in general.

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matrixschmatrix
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Re: Apocalypse Now on DVD and Blu-ray

#303 Post by matrixschmatrix » Wed Jan 12, 2011 12:00 pm

MyNameCriterionForum wrote: I think the word you're looking for to describe Milius is "jingoist," not "fascist." And dude, RELAX -- it's just a film, not actual foreign policy, yo. Maybe when Democrats (or whichever bipolar-partisan-party you may favor) stop dropping as many bombs as Republicans, your rage will make sense; until then, it's all the same bunch of folks pressing the button.

And how do you know it's not the residue of Terry Malick's work on Dirty Harry that you find so offensive?

Anyway, films like Saving Private Ryan are far more wretched as they're little more than pro-war films tempered with a little white-liberal hand-wringing. At least Dirty Harry doesn't pretend otherwise (it's also far more entertaining).
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!

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MyNameCriterionForum
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Re: Apocalypse Now on DVD and Blu-ray

#304 Post by MyNameCriterionForum » Wed Jan 12, 2011 12:53 pm

matrixschmatrix wrote: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.

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Tom Amolad
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Re: Apocalypse Now on DVD and Blu-ray

#305 Post by Tom Amolad » Wed Jan 12, 2011 7:04 pm

matrixschmatrix wrote: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.

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matrixschmatrix
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Re: Apocalypse Now on DVD and Blu-ray

#306 Post by matrixschmatrix » Wed Jan 12, 2011 7:34 pm

Tom Amolad wrote:
matrixschmatrix wrote: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.

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Re: Apocalypse Now on DVD and Blu-ray

#307 Post by Nothing » Thu Jan 13, 2011 12:34 am

aox wrote: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.
MyNameCriterionForum wrote: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.

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Tom Hagen
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Re: Apocalypse Now on DVD and Blu-ray

#308 Post by Tom Hagen » Thu Jan 13, 2011 1:19 am

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

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Apocalypse

#309 Post by Flike » Mon May 30, 2011 5:19 pm

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

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ccfixx
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Re: Apocalypse Now on DVD and Blu-ray

#310 Post by ccfixx » Mon May 30, 2011 7:47 pm

Flike wrote: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.

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Tom Hagen
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Re: Apocalypse Now on DVD and Blu-ray

#311 Post by Tom Hagen » Wed Jun 08, 2011 6:53 pm

"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 . . .

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Re: Apocalypse Now on DVD and Blu-ray

#312 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Thu Oct 16, 2014 10:25 pm

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?

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Feiereisel
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Re: Apocalypse Now on DVD and Blu-ray

#313 Post by Feiereisel » Thu Oct 16, 2014 11:27 pm

flyonthewall2983 wrote: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.

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Re: Apocalypse Now on DVD and Blu-ray

#314 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Fri Oct 17, 2014 12:00 am

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.

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hearthesilence
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Re: Apocalypse Now on DVD and Blu-ray

#315 Post by hearthesilence » Fri Oct 17, 2014 12:29 am

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.

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Re: Apocalypse Now on DVD and Blu-ray

#316 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Wed Oct 22, 2014 12:24 am

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.

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Re: Apocalypse Now on DVD and Blu-ray

#317 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Mon Apr 04, 2016 2:40 pm

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.

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Ashirg
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Re: Apocalypse Now on DVD and Blu-ray

#318 Post by Ashirg » Mon Apr 04, 2016 2:44 pm

Amazon has it for June 7.

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hearthesilence
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Re: Apocalypse Now on DVD and Blu-ray

#319 Post by hearthesilence » Mon Apr 04, 2016 3:44 pm

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.

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