Word: kurtz
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Scott Shuger, longtime author of Slate's Today's Papers, dubbed it "an August news drought classsic." Television, meanwhile, scours the arid landscape for naturally sprouting (and hopefully telegenic) phenomena like the heat, sharks, or Al Gore's beard. On a good day, says Washington Post media maven Howard Kurtz, "they're hoping for a tropical storm that turns into a hurricane...
...tale, based on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, is about an Army officer, Captain Willard (Sheen), sent to find and "terminate with extreme prejudice" the renegade Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), who has "gone insane" and set himself up in Cambodia as lord of an army of Montagnard headhunters. On his long trek up the Mekong River, Willard learns that in this war, man is ever at risk of becoming the thing he hates, the unknown he fears...
...Duvall's demented surfer stud Kilgore, who thinks napalm "smells like victory") and a group of Sirens (the Playboy Playmates who entertain the horny troops). Coppola, deep into his own Big Muddy in the Philippines, was calling his film "the Idiodyssey." He soon felt himself devolving from Willard to Kurtz--from the man on a quest to the madman at its end. But he was enough of a showman to release a picture of Academy-consideration length. Now he's enough of an artist to lay out the full story...
...includes scenes on the boat, as Willard gets to know its crew (including a very young Larry Fishburne); the crew's sexual encounter with two of the Playmates, who, like the young men, are in Vietnam on a mission of mercy that will degrade them; a new scene with Kurtz, in which he puts Willard in a cage and reads from a TIME article about the war; and a long, ghostly reverie set on a French plantation. There Willard finds a fractious old colonial family and is seduced by a young widow (the ever beautiful Aurore Clement...
...King Leopold's Ghost" describes the early colonization and exploitation of the Congo. Long before Sierra Leone, Belgium's colonial army encouraged the amputation of body parts as proof that native soldiers had actually killed their enemies. Former Financial Times correspondent Michela Wrong's "In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz" details Joseph Desire Mobutu's rise to power and his descent into paranoia, isolation and self destruction. Mobutu's Congo, Wrong writes, was a modern-day kleptocracy - a nation state that institutionalized theft...