Holy Apocalypse!

Insomnia’s back, but the good news is I caught the last hour or so of Apocalypse Now on TCM at around 3 a.m. What a corny damn movie. I mean, I love it, that movie is one of those I’ve seen so many times and is chock full of original, unforgettable moments, but it’s also plenty goofy. Picking it up a third of the way through and not going up river with it from the beginning probably adds to its cartoonish quality and horseshit grandiose existential/mythic posturing, too. It seems like the product of a male adolescent fantasy from a smart, moderately well read teenager. It gets points for daring to being so brash, bold and epic, but unfortunately all that works against it where it counts. And we won’t even go into the problematic, exploitative Phillipines production.

One quality of the film that will always stand the test of time, and guarantees it a spot in the canon, is Vittorio Storaro’s cinematography. It’s an absolutely beautiful film, capturing both the golden light of the Phillipines and the chiaroscuro with which Coppola could seem  obsessed. A few minutes after I turned it on, I saw the scene where Lance is preparing Chief’s body for a water burial, and I’d never really noticed how Coppola gets the light reflecting on the water between their two bodies, blinding the viewer and obscuring the actors, holding the shot for much longer than necessary. It’s a nice moment.

I was fortunate enough to have been living in London in 1996, during the 100th anniversary  of cinema. Theaters all around town were showing classic films in celebration, and I watched a 70mm print of Apocalypse Now. The presence of the opening scene with the napalming of the forest was unlike anything I’ve seen before or since. (Later I saw three Bresson movies back to back, which as a whole were also unlike anything I’ve seen before or since.)

So yeah, it’s a mess, but a beautiful one, and one of the few marriages of European art house cinema with commercial Hollywood production. I don’t know that I’ve ever been so fascinated with a film I have so many problems with.

Speaking of messes, I finally got around to watching Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain. I can’t unequivocally recommend it, but for once I thought the original trailer included on the DVD got it exactly right:

“Nothing in your education or experience can have prepared you for this film. It’s a film completely outside the tradition of motion picture art.

It is outside the tradition of modern theater.

It is a film outside the tradition of criticism and review.”

And how. This movie is most definitely on its own trip, and the mind boggles with each surreal set piece. It doesn’t really succeed by most objective takes on “film art,” and it doesn’t care to. There are shades of Bunuel and his religious taboo breaking/baiting, but this goes way farther and is not as grounded. I honestly can’t imagine anything like it ever being made again. Former Beatles’ manager Allen Klein must have sunk a lot of money into this thing as producer, because it’s the most epic surreal movie ever made.

Oddly, when looking in various film reference books, Jodorowsky seems to have been written out of film history. Even Amos Vogel’s otherwise comprehensive and excellent Film as a Subversive Art blackballs him. I guess with the recent release of his films on DVD he’s being reexamined/rediscovered, but you get the sense most traditional film scholars don’t really want to deal with the guy. Sure, he’s not  that great of a filmmaker, but neither is John Waters, and people can’t say enough about him.

So that old school trailer knew this day would come.

Here’s a link to the crazy ass trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_55FmpWLLM