August 13, 2009

• i was watching a bit of Apocalypse Now on cable last night.  it was that scene with Col. Kilgore and the Air Cavalry where they go plop plop on a vietnamese village like the fucking blitzkrieg on a cocaine bender.  you know that little twist where the colonel is coincidentally an avid surfer and fan of Lance Johnson?  that made me think of what i said about Gran Torino and how i found every stupid step of that movie to be contrived and unbelievable.  now, how likely is it that in the middle of a brutal and unpredictable battle, a colonel, the one guy that can help the mission, happens to be such a huge fan of surfing that he completes his segment of the mission just to hold a beach to surf on it with a surfing legend that just so happens to be with Willard?  highly unlikely, right? 

  right. 

  but it works in Apocalypse Now.  it’s not contrived.  i couldn’t swallow something way more mundane and common happening in Gran Torino.  why is that?  (i don’t know the answer.  i’m just thinking out loud here.)  how does Apocalypse Now set up a story that allows the most unpredictable and insane things to happen and we just accept it as awesome coincidence? 

  (you didn’t see it but i just paused with my fingers on the keyboard, my mouth open and eyes to the ceiling as i contemplated this.)

  the answer that should have been obvious just popped into my head:  Apocalypse Now is about the descent into madness, set in a place that resists all definitions of normal, therefore the uncommon seems commonplace.  therefore we accept Kilgore as someone in his natural element, behaving like he normally would.  crazily. 

  but still.  if that itself were the reason we can accept Col Kilgore’s coincidental and highly uncommon portion of the story, then we should be just as likely to accept a team of vietnamese fishermen dressed up as circus clowns casting their nets while blowing on kazoos, but i don’t think i would.  that would be crazy. 

  there’s something more complete about way the characters in Apocalypse Now were set up and fleshed out,  about how the landscape of vietnam was introduced as an alternate reality, all of that proper set up that let events happen naturally, even if they were crazy.  i’m not a fan of voiceover narration but it worked extremely well here, especially in the interests of time economy.  Willard started out half nuts.  Chef was a neurotic.  Clean was a punk ass city kid.  Vietnam was hot as shit (aka crazy).  the mission had no moral basis. 

  as opposed to Gran Torino that glossed over all the essential things thereby rendering them completely uni-dimensional.  but you never get the sense that Eastwood wanted to make a simple film like he did.  i can guess that his goals are actually extremely complex, digging into the depths of moral grayness.  but for some reason he treats the pieces in his complicated stories so sloppily.

  i am now realizing what an unfair comparison this is.  Apocalypse Now is one of the greatest film masterpieces of all time.  i love Unforgiven but Clint Eastwood is a sloppy story teller.  the end.

  • 9:42 am
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