Word: wayes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...About a tough hombre who burst into the world of letters with boundless energy, a hungry heart and a typewriter stuffed with lusty words. He churned out blockbusters like The Carpetbaggers, The Adventurers and The Inheritors, books crammed with characters who caress and curse, curse and caress their way through life. "I'm a people writer," he has explained. And right he is: though critics may jeer his work is "tripe" and "crud," the people have made him a millionaire many times over. A mansion in Beverly Hills! A villa in Cannes! And an empire of readers throughout...
...Captain Willard (Martin Sheen), an officer who is commanded to travel upriver from Saigon to Cambodia. His mission is to assassinate Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a once exemplary Green Beret who has now gone crazy and set up a kingdom of murder in the 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...
...ending fails not only intellectually but also as plain theater. Like the apocalyptic space journey in Kubrick's very similarly structured 2001: A Space Odyssey, Willard's 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...
...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...
...medical system can be said to be using Cadillacs to do a tractor's job." That may not be the kindest analogy, but the Department of Health, Education and Welfare agrees with the basic analysis: it has endorsed wider use of nurse practitioners in medical care as one way of keeping costs down...