Word: wars
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Remake Remarque? Yes indeed: a new film version of Erich Maria Remarque's World War I classic, All Quiet on the Western Front, shot in Czechoslovakia, will be aired on CBS in November. In the 1930 production, Lew Ayres starred as the young German soldier named Paul Baumer; today he is played by Richard Thomas, the onetime John Boy of The Waltons. Ernest Borgnine portrays Stanislaus Katczinsky, the Polish veteran who instructs the raw army recruits. Borgnine and the rest of the cast had to take gamma globulin shots to protect themselves against a countrywide epidemic of a hepatic...
...tinkered right to the end-long after a lesser director would have cut his losses-but his movie remains a collection of footage. While much of the footage is breathtaking, Apocalypse Now is emotionally obtuse and intellectually empty. It is not so much an epic account of a grueling war as an incongruous, extravagant monument to artistic self-defeat...
...darkest jungle. "There is no way to tell [Kurtz's] story without telling my own," Willard explains early on. Coppola apparently hoped that by dramatizing both Kurtz's and Willard's descents into savagery, he would arrive face to face with the moral horror of the war...
Unfortunately, the director never does get around to telling the story of either character's personal apocalypse. Instead, he uses part of Willard's river journey as a pretext to unveil a series of large-scale, self-contained set pieces-an impersonal tour of the war front. Though these sequences do not add up to a movie, they are feverishly imagined and brilliantly shot (by Bertolucci's favorite cinematographer, Vittorio Storaro). Indeed, the first of these war scenes may be the most spectacular battle ever created for a film. With a megalomaniacal officer (Robert Duvall) leading...
...journey is designed as a psychedelic trip. Each stop along the way is 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...