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The Greatest War Movie Ever Made
[National Review] The second-to-last comment made by Colonel Walter E. Kurtz is this: "Their commanders won’t allow them to write ’F***’ on their airplanes because it’s obscene." In Apocalypse Now we’ve seen a cavalry officer wipe out a village and call in a napalm strike to make a beach safe for surfing. We’ve seen the hero of the piece fatally shoot a badly wounded woman because he doesn’t want the hassle of bringing her to a hospital. Kurtz lives in an infernal empire of rotting corpses and severed heads. Words are obscene? War is obscene. Maybe one war in particular.

Regardless of whether that assertion is true, Apocalypse Now is a vision of fierce but controlled passion, grotesque and beautiful. If it ended at the 45-minute mark, after Colonel Kilgore extols the fragrance of a.m. napalm, it would still be the dean of all war movies, the sharpest and most haunting.

Apocalypse Now is returning to theaters for one night, August 15, exactly 40 years after its original release, and then being reissued in a "final cut" DVD. The original version ran 153 minutes, but after movie nerds started enthusing about the supposedly superior version containing "lost footage," director Francis Ford Coppola delivered the sprawling Apocalypse Now Redux in 2002. He now says that version was "a little too long" at three hours and 22 minutes. Wrong: it was way too long. The "final cut" version is three hours and three minutes, and although some of the restored material is interesting, none of it is essential. The best cut remains the first theatrical release.
Posted by: Besoeker 2019-08-10
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=547700