Apocalypse Now

Kamala: Uh

Emily: This is one of my all-time favorite movies. Kamala had never seen it before though, and she's still in shock. She generally avoids movies about the Vietnam war. In case you are a loser and you've never seen Apocalypse Now, it's a film directed by Francis Ford Coppola, loosely based on the Joseph Conrad novel, Heart of Darkness. It stars Martin Sheen as a Captain sent on a mission to terminate the command of one Colonel Kurtz, who has gone insane and retreated into the jungle of Cambodia with a small army of Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians and Green Berets who worship him as a god.

Kamala: The entire film was visually striking. I can only imagine what their budget was like. Between the napalm attacks, helicopters, other random stuff that got blown up, and large amount of extras the entire production was of epic proportions. We read on IMDB trivia that the movie was shot over 16 months, mostly in 1976, but not released until 1979 because of the amount of time it took to sort through and edit the over 200 hours of footage that Coppola shot. The editing team's efforts show in the flawless cinematography. There are some films where you are taken out of the story by some weird cut or something that makes you remember you are watching a movie. The only thing that made me remember I was watching a movie was that my Grandma called in the middle.

Emily: Something I hadn't noticed before is that there are no starting credits-no title appears onscreen at the beginning, it just goes straight in with the footage of Martin Sheen's face and jungle burning to The Doors' "The End." At Kurtz's compound, however, the words "Our motto: Apocalypse Now" are seen on a wall. This was put there so the movie could be copyrighted.

Kamala: In terms of cultural importance, this is one of the films (similar to 1941) that made studios want to take some control away from the dirrectors. Coppola took some men into the jungle, subjected them to shooting an emotionally and physically devastating film and came out of the jungle 16 months later with no footage they could use for three years. The actors were genuinely feeling the emotions of their characters. Lawrence Fishburne was actually younger than he should have been during filming, just as he was on the navy boat in the backwoods of Vietnam. Martin Sheen has a scene at the beginning of the movie where he gets drunk, punches a mirror and trashes his room naked was, in actuality, REAL. And there was a real cow sacrificed.

Emily: The dialogue is also something that stays with you long after the movie ends. The voice of Marlon Brando at the beginning of the film ("I saw a snail crawl across the edge of a straight razor. This is my dream. This is my nightmare") haunts the viewer as much as it haunts Sheen's character. Pretty much any scene with Robert Duvall as Captain Killgore is funny in a terrible way- the contrast of the conversation (about surfing, mostly) and the surroundings is absurd. But the movie gets progressively more horrific the farther they get into the jungle. This movie is incredible, and is undeniably the best war movie ever filmed. Nothing even comes close. At the end Kamala and I were silent for about five minutes because honestly what can you say after you've just watched something like that?

Kamala: Oh the horror, the horror.

or schadenfreude, whichever you prefer.

1941

1941 is a Stephen Spielberg action farce about a Japanese attack on Hollywood.

Emily: Sounds great right? Ha ha wrong it sucked. The entire film was like one of those interconnected lives movies where, at the end, all the stories come together, but instead of it being a good example of a film like that (such as Magnolia) it was crappy. The whole premise was that a Japanese submarine, left out of the glory of the attack on Pearl Harbor, sailed (is that the right word for a submarine?) to Los Angeles to try and annihilate Hollywood. The Japanese, led by Akira Kurosawa's favorite Toshiro Mifune, bumble along

Kamala: In a fitting tribute to Jaws, the opening scene was the same actress who played Jaws' first victim skinnydipping at night and ending up stuck on the top of the surfacing submarine's periscope. I say fitting because Jaws' success in box offices across America led to the drive to create movies like this. Interestingly enough, this was one of the movies that helped to make studios realize that maybe they shouldn't give their directors all the freedom in the world. The film was intended as a blockbuster, but really did rather poorly at the box office.

Emily: It was one of those "action-packed" appetite for destruction movies where the last 30-40 minutes consist of the plain and simple destruction of everything possible on the set. Movie theatres, airplanes, gas stations, cars, tanks, ferris wheels, there is even a shot of an entire house falling off a cliff. I am not a person who hates action films, but this was excessive and pointless.

Kamala: I thought it might be funny because Dan Aykroyd was in it and I generally think he is a pretty cool guy, but there was little humor that wasn't that kind of unfunny crude stuff.

1941 is a perfect example of the difference between the interesting films of New Hollywood that pushed the envelope in at least some way, and the schlock produced by studios during the blockbuster boom of the late 1970's.

JAWS!!!!!!!!!

Jaws is the awesome tale of an epic battle between men and a primordial beast. When an absolutely gigantic Great White shark starts preying on the beaches of Amity Island, a summer beach community that seems based on, and was filmed at, Martha's Vineyard. The greasy mayor of the town won't let the wet behind the ears sheriff close the beaches, his greatest source of income, to cut off the shark's food supply. After a few local fishermen's misguided attempts to catch the monster, three men, the sheriff, a salty fisherman, and a shark enthusiast from the "oceanographic institute," set out in what is perhaps too small of a boat to search and destroy Jaws.

This movie is epic. The first scene is epic, the middle bits are pretty epic, and the end is certainly epic. It also isn't a crappy movie. In fact, this movie is considered to be the dividing line between New Hollywood, and the blockbusters that dominated the late seventies and really, continue to dominate movie theaters today.

What is a blockbuster you ask? Technically, a blockbuster is a film that makes over $100,000,000. Jaws was the first movie in history to make over 100 million. But, I want to use the term to mean a film that was created with the intent of making huge amounts of money in the box office. These movies, in my elitist opinion, can easily turn into high budget monstrosities designed for mass appeal. Let's look at the top films in the box offices right now. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the latest installment in a franchise started by Lucasfilm and Spielberg in the eighties, has fallen behind the Sex and the City movie, which I don't want to profane because I will probably see that tonight but is an obviously artless ploy for box office success. Ironman, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, Speed Racer, Made of Honor, it is summer so pretty much all of the movies out now are "blockbusters" in the sense that they don't seek to advance the art form, only to gross as much money as possible. Jaws was followed by The Omen and Star Wars, two movies that, especially Star Wars, made just oh so much money.

Jaws was a great, smart movie with a gripping plot and awesome action. It made so much money in the box office that studios started to want to make more and more and more movies with similar templates: relatable characters, lots of action, and at least one naked woman, like the thousand sequels Universal tried to make, including Jaws 2, Jaws 3-D, Jaws: The Revenge, and Jaws Unleashed (which is a video game but whatever).

All that said, I love Jaws, and anyone who hasn't seen it should watch it unless you are Emily, who refused to watch this with me, and have an actual, diagnosable phobia of sharks.
-Kamala

THX 1138

This movie was George Lucas' first. He adapted it into a full length feature from a short film he made in film school. THX 1138 is the story of the titular character's life in a strict futuristic dystopian society. Sex is outlawed, and mind-controlling drugs are administered forcibly. THX, Robert Duvall's character, and his "roommate" LUH fall in LUHve...

Emily: I'd like to let the readers know that Kamala made that joke just now, not I.

Kamala: Anyways, lets strip away the pretensions here, I'm the one who writes the intros so from now on I'll just attribute it to me. THX, Robert Duvall's character, and his "roommate" LUH fall in love and are jailed for drug evasion (they stop taking their required sedatives) and sexual perversion (because they start actually having sex).

Emily: The role of the movie's other main character, SEN, confused me. He is turned in by THX because he hacked into the computer system to try and switch roommates. He wants THX to be his roommate and it's never really made clear why. In the 2004 re-mastered DVD release of this film, George Lucas made the ties of the three characters (LUH, THX and SEN) more obvious by having LUH and SEN work in the same place monitoring camera footage of houses, and adding footage of SEN and LUH exchanging a meaningful glance when they catch a couple engaging in illicit sexual activity. He escapes from prison with Robert Duvall but they get separated and SEN completely loses it and goes to pray to the state-sponsored deity OMM. I did not get him...

Kamala: The religious aspect was quite interesting. There were numerous scenes where THX would go to one of these confessional booths that had a portrait of Jesus and a recorded voice that spouted platitudes such as "yess...goood....everything will be fine...you are a true believer" etc. I also want to talk about the overall look of the film. I thought it was awesome. The set was white and geometric, with little color. All the regular people wore white and were bald. Their entire society was based on dehumanizing its constituents, through drugs, suppression of sexual instinct, lack of names, and homogeneity. George Lucas did an excellent job of creating this dystopian world. The only strange thing was that about halfway through we noticed some of the special effects were very very very good for 1971. Turns out that the version we watched was the Directors Cut, and Lucas had re-mastered a lot of the special effects.

Emily: Kamala really dislikes the ending. The police stop chasing THX because they've gone too far over the "budget" for re-capturing a felon. Robert Duvall emerges from the shell surrounding the city into a setting sun, with choral music playing over the scene. She said it was corny and cliche. It didn't bother me as much, but it did seem somewhat anti-climactic since the whole rest of the movie was so great.

Kamala: It was cool to see the development of Star Wars in Lucas's earliest film. Some of the very geometric shots of people walking through white hallways looked just like the hallways in Lando's Cloud City.

Emily: Also they called something a Wookiee. I didn't catch exactly what it was referring to but the word was definitely used.

Kamala: Basically this was an awesome sci-fi movie, a beautiful film, and gave you a little something to think about afterwards. I am a huge fan of dystopias of any genre, and THX 1138 reminded me a lot, of course, of some of my favorite dystopias: We, Brave New World/Island, 1984, and Brazil, a film that EVERYONE should see. I would highly recommend THX 1138 to anyone.

Taxi Driver

Because we had both seen this one before, we were able to watch it a little more critically than a first-time viewer. Taxi Driver is the story of an alienated young Vietnam vet driving a Checker Cab in New York City. When he is rejected by the girl he takes to a porno on their date, he goes off the deep end and vows to rid the streets of NYC of all the scum.

Emily: Apparently the screenwriter, Paul Schrader, based the character of Travis Bickle on himself. While living in Los Angeles, he had a nervous breakdown, became really depressed, didn't talk to anyone for weeks, and developed an obsession with guns. Just a little trivia courtesy of imdb.

Kamala: This movie was shopped around by Shrader to a lot of studios, and Columbia took it with the package deal of Scorcese and DeNiro. After seeing Mean Streets, the tale of an epileptic mobster, Harvey Keitel, and his crazy cousin, DeNiro, the studio execs really wanted another Scorcese and DeNiro collaboration. Thank god because the other options for Bickle, according to wikipedia, were like Neal Diamond and Jeff Bridges......

Emily: Travis' monologues describing NYC as an "open sewer," the scene with Martin Scorcese in the back of the cab talking about shooting his wife in the face with a 44 magnum, and every scene shot with Harvey Keitel as the gross child-raping pimp build on the themes of urban decay coupled with the loneliness and isolation of post-Vietnam America. Robert DeNiro's character wants to make his mark on the world, (spoiler alert!) even attempting to assassinate a New York senator-the irony of the ending is that this man is hailed as a vigilante hero when really he's just an unhinged killer. America's fascination with folk heroes never ceases to astonish me.

Kamala: Yeah like Mr. Turner told us this story today about some horned toad called Old Rip that was buried in a corner stone in some building, and years later, when the building was demolished, they found the toad and it was alive!!! They even took it to meet Calvin Coolidge. Bizarre.

Emily: How does that have anything to do with folk heroes?

Kamala: It's got to do with American mythologizing. It's because the toad was underneath a Bible that it survived and it was such a big deal.

Emily: I'm not sure Peter Boyle can be anything but Frankenstein's monster in any movie he has a role in. I look at him and it's all I see. He has a small role as a cabbie.

Kamala: Jodie Foster is great for the role of the baby prostitute because she looks really young but sounds old.

Emily: The movie is really all about Robert DeNiro and his jacked body doing clap push-ups. Rocky won out over this movie for Best Picture in 1976, but watch the scene with DeNiro doing clap push-ups and you will be just as inspired to be the best you can be!

M*A*S*H

Robert Altman made M*A*S*H in 1970 to resemble Vietnam in all ways possible. The studio however, made him preface the film with quotes from Douglas MacArthur and Eisenhower, dating the film to the Korean War. In fact, the studio made him do a lot of things for this movie. Altman is quoted as saying that the film "was not released, it escaped." He experienced troubles akin to those Orson Welles had with Touch of Evil. 20th Century Fox was coming off some serious losses in the late 60's (Cleopatra anyone?) and was not going to take a chance on finicky artists: they had an iron grip on everything coming out of their studio. Despite all of this, M*A*S*H was the first major studio movie to use a certain profanity that rhymes with "duck."

Emily: I really liked this movie even though I was initially skeptical about watching it. Kamala has seen it about 10 times. Donald Sutherland is amazing and it's a shame Robert Altman didn't cast him in any subsequent movies.

Kamala: Apparently Elliot Gould and Donald Sutherland had some complaints about Altman, and only Gould apologized. Robert Altman cast him in The Long Goodbye; thankfully, because that movie is really good, but Altman never worked with Donald Sutherland again.

Emily: I thought the film was an entirely realistic slice of life type portrayal of a few months (I never figured out exactly how long it was...) in the lives of surgeons in the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital. Robert Altman has this technique where he doesn't just focus in on two or three characters reciting a script one after the other, the camera sort of just observes often large groups of people with two or three layered conversations going on at the same time. For instance, in the operating room there would be three separate quiet conversations that a constantly moving camera would switch between. I really liked his style as a director.

Kamala: IMDB movie trivia says that 80% of the dialogue was improvised, which helped to make it seem more realistic. Each actor really was his or her character. Altman also trolled small time improvisational clubs for actors, wanting normal looking unknowns, making for the incredibly long list of "introducing so and so"'s in the credits.

The 1970's!

The 1970's were an interesting time in American Film. As we have said in earlier posts, we want to focus on the larger studio films created by the "New Hollywood" generation of filmmakers. The 1970's saw the flourishing of young, film school educated directors who were given substantial artistic control over the films they created for large studios. However, in no way were George Lucas, Scorcese, Speilberg, Woody Allen, Coppola, and other new hollywood directors independent filmmakers. Their films often resembled independent films in terms of language, violence, sexuality, and theme. Taxi Driver, which we will watch later, is a good example of a film that, because of its extreme violence and misanthropic anti-hero, can seem like an independent film, yet was not by any means. The new hollywood directors blurred the line between independent and big-studio films.

We also want to examine the transition from innovative new hollywood films to the hollywood blockbusters that seem to come a dime a dozen nowadays.