Word: kurtz
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...records mean record companies; Mistah Kurtz, he alive over at Warner Brothers. Record companies knew that the New Wave could be reduced to formulas and cranked out of the mill, that like everything else this exciting new music was susceptible to the process that had become a metaphor for the decade--cloning. They knew that they could sell overproduced pseudo-New Wave to most of its fans, artsy fartsy students with plenty of money and charge cards from Mom and Dad, ugly girls without taste or talent, nouveau hipsters who found Talking Heads "well, you kneu, so bizarre...
...worst offenders, the IRS says, are self-employed workers, ranging from lawyers to street peddlers, who failed to report an estimated 40% of their income, or $39.5 billion. Employees of independent contractors - electricians, carpenters and the like - seem to be the most artful dodgers. Charged IRS Chief Jerome Kurtz: "At least 47% reported absolutely none of their compensation...
Coppola appears to believe that if Kurtz soliloquizes about "horror" and "moral terror," the audience will think that the movie has actually dealt with these matters. But when Willard assassinates Kurtz, we still do not know why the Green Beret went mad, the genesis of his large cult or even the identity of the many gruesome corpses and severed heads that lie strewn about his domain. Nor do we know why Willard, a sudden convert to Kurtz's undefined cause, goes ahead and kills him. By withholding this information, Coppola gives up his final chance to confront the issues...
...meant to be more phantasmagoric than the last. In 2001, Kubrick successfully escalated his film at each stage, even topping the seemingly unbeatable light show with a more bizarre finale. Coppola, while creating progressively weirder war scenes, runs dry before he reaches his crucial imaginative leap: Kurtz's fastidiously designed compound looks as tame as a set in an oldtime jungle horror movie. His murder, which is archly intercut with the ritual slaughter of a carabao, is the film's only poorly shot death scene. Apocalypse Now's much talked-about discarded ending - another air raid - would...
...real sadness of the movie, however, is not that Kurtz eludes Coppola's grasp, but that Viet Nam does. In its cold, haphazard way, Apocalypse Now does remind us that war is hell, but that is not the same thing as confronting the conflicts, agonies and moral chaos of this particular war. Yet, lest we lose our perspective in contemplating this disappointing effort, it should be remembered that the failure of an ambitious $30 million film is not a tragedy. The Viet Nam War was a tragedy. Apocalypse Now is but this decade's most extraordinary Hollywood folly...