1979: Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola)

1979: Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola)
Count me among the group that is in absolute awe of Coppola in the seventies.  Four films, four masterpieces in my book, and a run that has maybe never been matched in American cinema.  Best analogy I can make, Michael Jordan scoring over fifty points in four straight games.  

Apocalypse Now is a film that makes as great of an argument as any for the preservation of the theater experience.  You watch it at home, and it feels like it's about to overwhelm the television.  It's that grand.  

Walter Murch did the sound design, and it may very well have the most expressive, effective sound of any movie ever made.  Wow, that's a bold statement!  But Murch's work here is that mind-blowing.  And like a game of chicken, Vittorio Storaro is working at the same level as Murch.  The visuals here are staggering -- hallucinatory, brain-poppingly colorful, and heavy in grandeur and effect.  

I won't even mention the cast here.  Let's just say they're perfect, too. Just like in the two Godfather films and The Conversation.

Making movies is a risky business.  And whenever the risk gets me a little intimidated, I think about Coppola and all he went through to get this on screen.  He's a great filmmaker, a great dreamer, but most of all (and it's a quality that's often undervalued in our business), he had great courage.

Other contenders for 1979: I still have several titles to see from this year.  These include: Joseph Losey's Don Giovanni, Volker Schlondorff's The Tin Drum, Terry Jones' Life of Brian, Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker, John Huston's Wise Blood, David Cronenberg's The Brood, Catherine Breillat's Trouble at Night, Stephen Frears' Bloody Kids, Jean Eustache's La Rosiere de Pessac, Maurice Pialat's Graduate First, Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Marriage of Maria Braun, and Shohei Imamura's Vengeance Is Mine.  I need to revisit Steven Spielberg's 1941 and George Miller's Mad Max as it's been too long since I've seen either of them to know where they'd place on this list.  But from this year I really like Carroll Ballard's The Black Stallion. I love Jeff Margolis' Richard Pryor: Live in Concert and Woody Allen's Manhattan.  And my closest runner-up is Ridley Scott's Alien.


6/27/11 I watched Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Marriage of Maria Braun.  Absurd, dark, and a little under the influence of Godard.   I'm still fairly new to the cinema of Fassbinder and am not totally sure what to make of it all. But this one has a good bit to say on monogamous love and the loss of humanity that can come at the price of wealth.  


8/12/11 I watched Shohei Imamura's Vengeance Is Mine.  Artful but incredibly disturbing tale of a serial killer.  Imamura proves quite the ambitious storyteller, balancing many tones and linear shifts.  But this one is cold as can be and ultimately didn't leave feeling much other than dirty.  


8/24/11 I watched Joseph Losey's Don Giovanni.  Perhaps one of the best examples ever of opera on film.  But in spite of its strong execution, I could not keep interest.  Simply not my thing.  

11/17/13 I watched Gillian Armstrong's My Brilliant Career.  Armstrong demonstrates great poetry of feeling and image in this restrained, challenging story.  The chemistry that comes off the screen from Davis and Neill is intoxicating, and although Davis' decisions run counter to where we want the story to go, Armstrong delivers a wonderful statement on artistic sacrifice.  In fact, it must rank up there with the greatest of all filmed illustrations of the life one must lead at times to be true to one's self at the expense of all else including the longing for physical and emotional connection.  

1/9/14 I watched Mark Cousins' The Story of Film: American Cinema of the 70s.  Never as exciting as I want something to be about perhaps my favorite period of all in film.  But I did particularly like hearing Schrader talk about those elements that got lost as postmodern cinema took over - balance, harmony, beauty.

1/9/14 I watched Mark Cousins' The Story of Film: Movies to Change the World.  Of course I loved the section about Wenders.  And I enjoyed his treatment of Ken Russell, Performance, and Walkabout.  New names for me were Mambety, Gerima, and Goren. 

5/17/17 I watched William Richert's Winter Kills.  A New Hollywood film that I had heard about for years features interesting performances from Jeff Bridges and John Huston.  It pretty well sustains its tone of paranoia throughout and contains a couple of interesting scenes including the introduction of Sterling Hayden and the final set piece.  

5/21/17 I watched John Sayles' Return of the Secaucus Seven.  Sayles has never really been my thing and from his first feature here his approach is already pretty well formed.  He has very little cinema style and his films are loose, soft, and even slackerish.  He is not that far from Linklater although Linklater has a better feel for music and a better sense of humor. 

10/28/18 I watched Jeff Stein's The Kids Are Alright.  A fascinating, loose doc on The Who that captures their talent, their members and most important their personality. 

1/16/20 I watched Paul Schrader's Hardcore.  Schrader is tough for me and this one I liked but didn't love.  I deeply admire his intelligence and really like a couple of films.  At this point I would have to say Affliction is my favorite.  His films are always personal and never feel compromised.  But maybe it is their complete lack of humor that I find a little off-putting or perhaps it is some of his stylistic choices that seem curious, like his choice of music here.  

7/26/20 I watched Albert Brooks' Real Life.  Maybe interesting in how prescient it is with regards to reality TV but otherwise I got weary pretty quickly watching it.

3/7/21 I watched Paul Vecchiali's Corps a Coeur.  The main actor Nicolas Silberg bears an uncanny resemblance to early Brando.  He is perfectly cast and dressed in wonderful clothes throughout.  This was my first Vecchiali film and it all feels like it has a bit of a fever.  It is keyed up and the logic often scattered like the way one thinks when one is suffering in bed with a high temperature.  The direction reminded me a bit of Pialat's hard-nosed naturalism - it is intimate and raw yet seen with the eye of a painter.   

10/31/21 I watched Abbas Kiarostami's First Case, Second Case.  From a standpoint of morals and ethics, it got me thinking about Rohmer.  But it is far more political than the type of films the French filmmaker tended to make.  The whole film is a metaphor for the state of Iran at the time.  I just wish I better understood the situation to fully appreciate Kiarostami's setup.  

12/12/21 I watched Robert Altman's A Perfect Couple.  Altman's effort at a new type of musical fell flat for me as the music was grating and never moved me.  

12/12/22 I watched Peter Bogdanovich's Saint Jack.  Reminds me of other films that play more as two halves than one whole - films like The Passenger, Tropical Melody and Mulholland Drive.  While the first half does a good enough job setting our world and the cast of characters surrounding Jack, it is the second part where Bogdanovich really impresses.  He uses silence and several inspired set pieces - the scheme to take down the senator, William's death, the kidnapping of Jack - to masterfully stretch time and remind us he could in moments rise to the level of the great filmmakers of his generation. 

Coppola, Zoetrope, and The Black Stallion

I'm sure there are many of us.  But I'm definitely one of those that wishes Francis Ford Coppola made more movies and (maybe even more important) that his dreams for his Zoetrope Studios were still very much alive and well.  He desperately wanted to bottle that potent seventies concoction -- personal filmmmaking with Hollywood-size budgets.  But instead, after a few budget overruns and box office disappointments, One from the Heart being the worst, his dreams fizzled out pretty quickly.

Yet, at least we're still left with a few signs of what Coppola might have produced if someone had reigned him in a bit more.  And one of the best examples of this, I think, is The Black Stallion.  I saw the film as a kid and could clearly remember sections here and there.  But this is the first time I've watched it again in twenty-five years, owing the re-visit to David Thomson and his excellent book "Have You Seen...?"

The Black Stallion is everything you probably remember -- a feel-good fable with a beautiful horse and a kid you wish you could be.  But there are also some things you might not remember.  It sports some very brave cinematography by Caleb Deschanel.  He's not afraid to go deep into the blacks (for instance, the scene when they show off the horse hoping to land a spot in the big race).  And, as a result, Deschanel pulls off this unusually hazy, magic quality that I would imagine is exactly what he was hoping to achieve.  Also backing Stallion is one of the greatest sound technicians in the history of the medium, Alan Splet.  Splet was David Lynch's regular collaborator before passing away in the early nineties.  All you have to do is listen to the symphony of sounds he creates in the final race to get a sense of Splet's special talent. 

I even felt a part of Coppola here.  He's produced many films throughout his career.  But this is the first one where I could really feel his directorial hand, too (in a good way).  I'm not even sure what it is exactly.  But in the final race, once the flashbacks kick in, I entered that Apocalypse Now trance-like state that Coppola pulls off so well in his own 1979 film.

Zoetrope might not have lasted.  But I have to give it to Coppola.  He bet it all more than once in his career.  And our 114 year-old medium is so much better because of it.