Megadoc (2025)

January 7, 2026January 7, 2026 / swampflix / 3 Comments

There’s a moment early in Megadoc in which Francis Ford Coppola is giving a speech to his assembled Megalopolis actors on the first day of rehearsals, and it feels very much like the first day of a high school theatre course. He quotes Dante’s Inferno, specifically the quote “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here,” which is posted at Hell’s gates, but then says that he has his own version, which is “Abandon worry, all ye who enter here,” which he notes should be on a sign in there in the large rehearsal space. “I have a sign and you’ll see it,” he says; “It’s supposed to be up,” revealing that, even in these early moments, things are already off schedule despite all the decades spent preparing for the film. “In this space,” he adds, “during this time, nobody can be bad, nobody can get in trouble.” Here, filmmaker Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas) zooms his camera in on Shia LaBeouf, and I don’t know if that was a live decision or one that came up in the edit, but it’s prescient nonetheless.

Figgis was invited by Coppola to document the creation of Megalopolis, a movie that I ranted about at length starting about 29 minutes into our podcast episode about Destroy All Monsters. I won’t recount the whole thing, but I summed it up at the time thus: “Bloated, hollow, ugly, infantile, pompous, stupid, pretentious, hubristic, insipid, hideous, homophobic, talent-wasting, facile, nepotistic, provocative (derogatory), neoliberal, lifeless, inconsistently performed, self-fellating, tiresome, shallow garbage.” In its own way, Megadoc is a perfect metatext for the film around which it revolves, namely in that just as Coppola couldn’t help but write a flawless avatar for himself in the form of Cesar Catilinia, he of the riches of the Emersonian mind. Inserting himself into the narrative obtrusively, Figgis is also far too much a presence in this “documentary;” it is, at best, an elevated behind the scenes featurette, albeit quite a long one. Initially, all the subjects present seem put off by his camera’s presence, other than Aubrey Plaza, who was not only the only person in Megalopolis who knew what kind of movie she was in but also the only person in Megadoc who knew what kind of movie they were in. She moves in quickly and adopts Figgis’s viewpoint as if it were the omnipresent camera of her character Wow Platinum. She’s an early delight in the finished Megadoc as the first person to be willing to do candid interviews, although it’s unclear exactly where Plaza ends and Platinum begins here, all to the film’s enrichment.

After that first day playing warm-up theatre games, things get more serious. Megalopolis takes on a conceptual art designer who is initially over the moon about getting to work with Coppola, and her office is adorned with concept images of the various applications of Megalon. By the midpoint of the film, Coppola gets into an argument with the on-set art director where it seems like the director just isn’t understanding that it would be a good idea to put a blue screen at the rear of a shot. He mocks the man, saying “This gets back into why I like live effects, because although, in your opinion, they’re not as extraordinary and wonderful as the other kinds, I don’t agree with you.” The way he puts a little edge in on the words “extraordinary” and “wonderful,” you can tell that he’s just trying to needle the guy to make a point, and after he’s fired the team and brought on the kind of lean art department to which he was more accustomed, he sneers while saying “The last film they did was Guardians of the Galaxy.” We cut back to that concept artist in her office, and all the images have been taken down from the wall behind her, and you can tell that she’s drawing on a lifetime of practicing speaking very deliberately and politically about the egos she’s encountered as she says, “I’ve wondered if we missed the signs earlier on that he wanted to approach the movie differently. I do wonder if he didn’t communicate it as clearly.”

This firing of the art department and hiring of a new one is only one of many woes that contributes to Megalopolis’s budget problems. Although I didn’t care for Figgis’s insertion of some of his own on-set video diaries, one cannot say that he doesn’t have a good head for comedic timing, as he’ll often pair footage of Coppola making spur-of-the-moment creative changes and decisions that have major financial consequences with on-screen text revealing just how much money was spent on inconsequential fluff. There are several minutes of rehearsal and test footage from Coppola’s failed attempt at getting Megalopolis off the ground in 2001, and they’re some of the most interesting things on display here, as we get to see Virginia Madsen perform a scene as Wow Platinum and a sequence of Ryan Gosling as LaBeouf’s character Clodio, with (I think) Scott Bairstow as his flunkie Huey. There’s a table read attended by Uma Thurman at which Billy Crudup learns that he’s been cast as Cesar rather than as Clodio as he believed. This shows us that, at that point in his career, Coppola was actually doing screen tests and taking other necessary steps in the filmmaking process that seem to have been completely absent from the production of the Megalopolis that made it to screen. Coppola is old and grumpy by his own admission, sometimes directing from his trailer so as not to explode at cast and crew, but he’s also gathered a huge crew at his own great expense to stand about while he and his son Roman fart around with trying to make an in-camera effect happen, when that’s the kind of detail that should absolutely be figured out and locked down by the time you get actors into costumes and make-up. It’s the kind of colossal waste of capital that one would expect when spending a studio’s limitless funds, not one’s own money obtained by selling off vineyards.

The film spends time on the conflict between Coppola and LaBeouf, and it is legitimately fascinating. Although I don’t think he’s a very good person and that his history doesn’t give him any excuses regarding his behavior, I also have sympathy for most former child stars who have a hard time maturing. It was once a VH1 reality show cottage industry to point and laugh at aged child actors of the seventies like Danny Bonduce and Peter Knight as they struggled with their demons (and frequently lost), which was gross then and remains so today. What we can learn from them is that although there are successes like the Fanning sisters and Scarlett Johansson, they are the exceptions to the rule that early life stardom is a machine that creates mental illnesses down the line. LaBeouf has a few moments of raw human vulnerability here about how this is his first chance to work with a director from the old guard rather than just taking a job because he was a “starving kid,” (I’m no Crystal Skull fan, but on behalf of Spielberg, ouch), but then he also spends a lot of his screen time arguing with Coppola, trying to perhaps stretch his acting muscles while the exasperated octogenarian is clearly just trying to get things done, either because he’s elderly and tired or because every second of this is hemorrhaging his wallet. Late in Megadoc, LaBeouf recounts the fact that Coppola told him he was the worst actor he had ever worked with; “He says, ‘You know, I have one regret on this show.’ I said, ‘Okay, what’s the one regret?’ He goes, ‘You. You have been the biggest pain in my fucking ass,’—the only time he cursed—‘You’ve been the biggest pain in my fucking ass of any actor I’ve ever worked with.’ I said, ‘Really? Really? Any actor? Did I show up fucking 700 pounds overweight in the jungle? Really, any actor? Did I quit ten days before we wrap? Really, any actor?” It’s relatively good stuff and the only thing that really elevates it above the kind of thing you would have seen in a DVD special features section fifteen years ago.

In his review of Megalopolis, Brandon noted that one of the modern ills that Coppola attacked via his fictional proxy was “journalists framing great men for fabricated sex crimes,” which relates to why this film barely counts as a documentary, if at all. Figgis and Coppola are, if not friends, at least amicable colleagues, and Megadoc does not address the allegations against Coppola, which first came to public attention roughly around the time of the film’s release. Although there’s been no resolution to the legal ramifications at the time of this writing, it’s telling that Megadoc ends its insight into the film’s creation not with the wide release to the public in September 2024, but at the Cannes premiere in May of 2024, with no additional dialogue or insight over what amounts to little more than cable red carpet coverage. It’s perhaps because Megadoc revealed moments before that Coppola’s wife Eleanor died in April of that year, right after footage of their sixtieth anniversary party on the set of Megalopolis. It verges on the disrespectful in its pre-emptive use of Coppola’s grief to end on a poignant note instead of addressing what is ultimately the most controversial thing about Megalopolis’s production. Tsk.

The most magnetic person on screen, however, remains Plaza. Even in her Zoom audition, she’s funny and fantastic, and it reminds you that she truly is one of the great comedic minds of her generation. There’s a quietly disturbing scene in which we get to see the result of her petitioning to improv a scene with Dustin Hoffman, which jumps immediately to the two of them arm wrestling and Hoffman is flirting with her, and although he might be doing it “in character,” it makes one’s skin crawl regardless. It’s the only thing that seems like it’s not completely tempered by a need to skirt around the edges of anyone’s ego, but it’s not enough to save it. As a documentary, it’s functionally informative but not very insightful, but that’s not to say that it doesn’t have decent entertainment value, which is more than I would say about Megalopolis.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: The Conversation (1974)

February 22, 2025January 7, 2026 / swampflix / 3 Comments

For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 surveillance paranoia thriller The Conversation, which recently screened at Prytania’s Classic Movie Series.

00:00 Welcome

05:08 George Dureau: New Orleans Artist (2023)
19:10 The Roommate (2011)
32:35 Crimes of Passion (1984)

45:08 The Conversation (1974)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Barfly (1987)

January 27, 2025January 27, 2025 / swampflix / 1 Comment

I have a friend whose resolution for the new year was to ensure that he try a new restaurant every week, after having spent nearly a decade in Austin without properly branching out into the cuisine scene. When discussing where to dine this past weekend, I asked if he had tried Golden Horn yet, a newish eatery on the ground floor under Barfly’s, a bar that our friend group frequents. “Oh, he said! Like in Barfly!” Off of my puzzled look, he said “You know! ‘Your mother’s cunt smells like carpet cleaner’!” I had no idea what he was quoting until, after dinner (which ended up not being at Golden Horn after all), he showed a group of us this film, in which Mickey Rourke says this line to Frank Stallone in an alleyway while goading him into a fight. And wouldn’t you know it, this takes place right behind the Golden Horn, and damned if they didn’t copy the sign from the movie down to the last neon stroke:

The Golden Horn in Barfly (1987)

The Golden Horn below Barfly’s, from their Instagram.

I love the food at this place, but I can’t say that I loved this movie very much, unfortunately. Produced by Francis Ford Coppola and directed by Barbet Schroeder from a script by Charles Bukowski, Barfly is one in a line of pieces of fiction about Bukowski’s literary alter ego Henry Chinaski (Rourke). Chinaski is a nearly permanent fixture at The Golden Horn, a corner dive bar directly beneath the slummy long-term hotel that he occupies. Although he has a close relationship with one of the bartenders, Jim (J.C. Quinn), he’s constantly in conflict with the muscular Eddie (Stallone), hence his frequent goading of the latter into fistfights in the alley. Other fixtures include elderly prostitute Grandma Moses (Gloria LeRoy) and Janice (Sandy Martin, a.k.a. Mac’s mom from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia). When Chinaski manages to best Eddie one night, he’s convinced on the following evening to drink elsewhere, and initially declines any more than a few dollars from Jim, just enough to get a drink or two. He finds himself in a different bar, where he meets Wanda Wilcox (Faye Dunaway), another unrepentant drunk whose standards are so far underground that she finds him sufficiently charming. After Wanda acquires more liquor and beer for them for the evening on credit from her sugar daddy, the two spend a night together, and she gives him a key the next morning and tells him to move in. She warns him, however, that she’ll go home with any man who has a fifth of whiskey, and she does so that very night, with Eddie. Meanwhile, a sneaky man (Jack Nance) is lurking around Chinaski’s old place and The Golden Horn, and he reports back to the beautiful Tully Sorenson (Alice Krige) that Chinaski is the man that they’ve been looking for. Tully eventually catches up with him and reveals that she works for one of the countless publishers to whom Chinaski has been unsuccessfully submitting his work. An upper-class woman, she finds herself completely taken by Chinaski’s bohemian lifestyle and wants to be his patron, publisher, and lover.

The morning after I saw this movie, I texted a friend who was absent the previous night that we had watched a terrible movie, and when he asked what it was, I responded “It was called Barfly, from 1987, written by Charles Bukowski and boy did it show.” He was unfamiliar, so I elaborated, “Bukowski was a poet/novelist/screenwriter who was widely beloved in his day and still is by a certain kind of youngish, roguish, predominantly white, edgelord type who thinks they’re the first person to mistake their amateur collegiate alcoholism for literary significance. If you were to know someone with a Fight Club poster and they had a favorite poet, their favorite poet would be Bukowski.” And I stand by that! Which is not to say that the Buke’s alcoholism was amateur; if one could drink at a professional level, the man did so. What I tried to articulate to my viewing companions that night was that this was a movie about drinking that was at once both portraying alcoholism as harrowing but also, you know, kinda fun. Make no mistake, the people in this film who suffer from alcoholism do the sorts of things that addicts (functional and dysfunctional) might do, and when viewed objectively, are horrible to witness. In a euphoric drunken state, Wanda steals some corn from where someone is growing it on the street near her apartment despite Chinaski warning her that it’s not ready to be eaten. Later, she grouses that nothing in her life works as she spits partially masticated, unripe green corn into a napkin. Grandma Moses is forced to haggle with her johns over the price of a blow job, and Chinaski himself ends up stabbing a man in a neighboring apartment in an altercation that arose from overhearing violent sexual roleplay (if he ever faces consequences for it, we don’t learn about it).

This isn’t Trainspotting or some other film that commits to treating the haunting experiences of its characters as traumas, however. As one would expect from the screenwriter, Barfly treats drunkenness as next to godliness, with the quotidian given meaning via dual-wielding a pen in one hand and a handle of bourbon in the other. When Chinaski seeks out employment so that he can help pay the rent at Wanda’s hovel, his overt drunkenness means that he was never going to get past the interview that he attends, but attention is drawn to his rejection of norms in all forms. He instinctually bristles against the nature of completing applications and rejects the meanings of the questions he’s asked in favor of answering them with flamboyance; he’s too cool to get bogged down in all that stuff, man. He’s insufferable, and the film supports Chinaski’s masturbatory self-congratulation: he’s the author’s self-insert character! The most obvious example of this comes in the form of his two “love” interests. Wanda is a mostly functional alcoholic who manages to put on the appearance of a responsible citizen when she goes out in public (at least when she isn’t thieving corn) but whose drunkenness rivals Chinaski’s, and we get the sense that she’s his “true equal.” Tully, on the other hand, is like the walking embodiment of the girlfriend in Pulp’s “Common People,” a professional woman who finds the slovenly, slurring Chinaski’s work deeply moving and profound and, confusing the art with the artist, finds herself drawn to Chinaski sexually. Everywhere Tully goes, she’s perpetually clad in billowing white outfits, floating above it all, untouched by the filth of Chinaski’s life.

The authorial fantasy of this, being pursued by two beautiful women, is unmistakable, and it boggles the mind. Recently, I’ve been watching Deadwood, and there are many scenes of Ian McShane as Ed Swearengen getting out of bed in his unwashed union suit and pissing in a bucket in the corner, and you have to be really disgusting for that to compare favorably, and Chinaski obliges. We never see him bathe or change clothes, and his undergarments are fascinatingly nauseating. There’s no visible soiling of his boxers, but they’re so boxy and greasy looking that one can only imagine how filthy he is. Despite this, Wanda falls for him overnight, and Tully even tracks him down to The Golden Horn after he leaves her place and gets into a bar fight with Wanda over him. Bukowski, via his proxy in Chinaski, gets the sleep with two gorgeous women who—despite their own disparate classes—are still both far, far too good for him, and he even gets to reject one and her “gilded cage” and then watch her be humiliated socially. Wanda even rips out a chuck of her hair! Alcoholism has never been more romanticized.

Where there is something to be praised here, it’s in the cinematography. All of these smoky, hazy bars are gorgeously photographed. There’s a magic to making a dingy dive, with its vinyl bumpers held together with duct tape and hideous clientele, into a tableaux of beauty. The lighting is also worth noting, and there are so many perfect compositions of neon signs and the glow that they cast that it’s a shame that this movie is largely unwatchable. This is a pre-boxing Rourke, and there are attempts to ugly up his pretty mug to make him seem more bedraggled, and they’re intermittently successful. Dunaway steals the spotlight from him in every scene that she’s in, however, and it’s a quietly understated performance from her. This was a decade after her Oscar win for Network, and there was a feeling I got when she gets into a tub at one point in the film and shows off her chest that she decided that the time was right to immortalize her breasts on screen. I was surprised to learn later from the film’s Wikipedia page that a glamor shot of her legs had been filmed at her insistence, which I think lends some credence to my theory. If I looked as good as she does here, I would do the same.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) vs. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994)

October 24, 2023October 24, 2023 / swampflix / 11 Comments

For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss two literary horror adaptations produced by American Zoetrope in the 1990s: Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) and Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994).

00:00 Welcome

01:35 Eyes Without a Face (1960)
04:30 Prom Night (1980)
07:45 Multiple Maniacs (1970)
09:55 Exorcist III (1990)
11:55 The Infernal Cauldron (1903)
13:53 Sorry, Charlie (2023)
15:40 Mission: Impossible, Dead Reckoning Part 1 (2023)
25:40 Lake Mungo (2008)
28:00 Life After Beth (2014)
33:20 The Brood (1979)
40:40 Dracula’s Daughter (1936)
45:22 Opera (1987)
50:11 The Creeping Flesh (1973)
55:02 Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)
59:48 A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)
1:04:28 Dicks: The Musical (2023)
1:07:48 The Cassandra Cat (1963)

1:13:00 Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) vs. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

-The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Dementia 13 (1963)

May 19, 2018May 19, 2018 / swampflix / Leave a comment

Before the New Hollywood movement busted up the established dinosaurs of the Studio System, one of the best ways for young outsiders to break into filmmaking was through the Roger Corman Film School. Because the maniacally frugal producer would hand off cheap, quick film shoots to anyone he suspected might be competent enough to handle the task, many young filmmakers who would later define the New Hollywood era cut their teeth with on-the-job training making films for Roger Corman & AIP: Scorsese, Bogdanovich, Fonda, Hopper, Demme, etc. There was a kind of freedom to this pedal-to-the-floor cheapo genre film production cycle, but many projects Corman handed to his de facto “students” were . . . less than ideal, considering their art cinema sensibilities. That’s how the world was gifted weird mishmash projects like Peter Bogdanovich getting his start directing Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women by smashing together scenes of over-dubbed Soviet sci-fi films with new footage of beachside bikini babes. Another future New Hollywood upstart, Frances Ford Coppola, got his foot in the door recutting & dubbing those same Russian sci-fi films alongside Bogdanovich in the editing room. Coppola also got his own start directing “mainstream” narrative features (as opposed to his earlier nudie cutie work) through a hodgepodge project Corman handed to him in a rush. Hastily slapped together on the back of $20,000 of budgetary leftovers from another AIP production, Coppola’s Dementia 13 is one of those Corman projects like Blood Bath or The Terror that are left almost entirely incomprehensible by their corner-cutting, behind the scenes shenanigans. The film afforded Coppola the opportunity to experiment with his sense of craft on the job, though, as he strived to make a more serious, artful picture than what’s usually expected from Croman fare. The results were mixed, but worthwhile.

Urged by AIP to deliver a quick, cheap riff on Psycho, Coppola filters a Hitchcockian mad-killer plot through a Gothic haunted house template. Packed with axe-murders, underwater doll parts, badly dubbed performances, and gradual descents into madness, the film often feels like a cheap black & white take on giallo surreality. Like giallo, it values imagery over narrative coherence, requiring a Wikipedia read-through of its basic plot after the end credits roll. It opens with a Psycho/Carnival of Souls-style setup of a lone woman in flight from her past crises. In this case, she’s a money-hungry schemer who pretends that her late husband is still alive so she can ingratiate herself to his mother for inheritance money. She moves in with the “not” dead husband’s family in their Gothic manor, which is lousy with hidden passageways and dark family secrets. The family is unhealthily obsessed with the drowning of their youngest daughter years in the past, a weakness the woman hopes to exploit to con them out of their money. What happens from there is up for interpretation, as the past drowning death and a series of current axe murders open the film up to hazily-defined mysteries befitting of the world’s most incomprehensible gialli. Although the producer afforded Coppola total freedom to write & direct the film he wanted, Corman was frustrated with its incomprehensible plot, which he decided to punch up with a series of changes that dampened its art film appeal: Irish accents dubbed over with unenthused American ones; Jack Hill-directed inserts of comic relief; a runtime-padding intro that administered a mental stability test to the audience in a William Castle-style gimmick. Corman didn’t clarify the plot of Coppola’s film so much as he compromised its overall artistic vision. If there’s any consolation, it’s that it’s clear the film would have would have been a total mess either way.

What an interesting mess, though! Although not as fun as similarly incomprehensible horror cheapies like Blood Bath or A Night to Dismember, Dementia 13 at the very least provides a stage for a young Coppola to test out his visual experiments to varying success, without any real stakes for them having to pay off (it wouldn’t be the first or last time someone wasted AIP money). As it opened on a double bill with the excellent sci-fi horror The Man with the X-Ray Eyes, possibly Corman’s best directorial effort outside The Masque of the Red Death, it’s clear that the student had yet to become the master. Like many other future New Hollywood film nerds, though, Coppola was better for the Roger Corman Film School having afforded him an opportunity to gain mainstream experience behind the camera, even if the immediate results weren’t as compelling as a Targets or even a Death Race 2000.

-Brandon Ledet

Roger Ebert Film School, Lesson 3: Apocalypse Now (1979)

February 24, 2016April 22, 2016 / swampflix / 11 Comments

EPSON MFP image

Roger Ebert Film School is a recurring feature in which Brandon attempts to watch & review all 200+ movies referenced in the print & film versions of Roger Ebert’s (auto)biography Life Itself.

Where Apocalypse Now (1979) is referenced in Life Itself: In the first edition hardback, Apocalypse Now is referenced on page 2. Roger mentions that when “The Ride of the Valkyres”plays during a helicopter attack in the film, he got a rare, tingling sensation of “reality realigning itself,” the same feeling he had when he proposed marriage to Chaz & the day his father announced he was dying of cancer. In the film version of Life Itself, Ebert is shown arguing the merits of Apocalypse Now to a nonplussed Gene Siskel on two separate occasions. He seemed especially aggravated that Siskel enjoyed Full Metal Jacket more than Apocalypse Now.

What Ebert had to say in his reviews: “Years and years from now, when Coppola’s budget and his problems have long been forgotten, ‘Apocalypse’ will still stand, I think, as a grand and grave and insanely inspired gesture of filmmaking — of moments that are operatic in their style and scope, and of other moments so silent we can almost hear the director thinking to himself.” – From his 1979 review for the Chicago Sun Times

“Other important films such as ‘Platoon,’ ‘The Deer Hunter,’ ‘Full Metal Jacket’ and ‘Casualties of War’ take their own approaches to Vietnam. Once at the Hawaii Film Festival I saw five North Vietnamese films about the war. (They never mentioned ‘America,’ only ‘the enemy,’ and one director told me, ‘It is all the same–we have been invaded by China, France, the U.S. . . .’) But ‘Apocalypse Now’ is the best Vietnam film, one of the greatest of all films, because it pushes beyond the others, into the dark places of the soul. It is not about war so much as about how war reveals truths we would be happy never to discover.” -From his 1999 review for his “Great Movies” series

It’s near impossible to tell whether or not I’ve seen Apocalypse Now before. Surely, there are plenty of scenes in the film that are vivid to me out of context, but I might’ve picked those up incidentally by catching them on a Greatest Movies of All Time clip show or playing on television while channel surfing. The reason I’m unsure if I’ve ever watched Apocalypse Now in its entirety before is that I feel like I’d more clearly remember a viewing experience as weighty as the film’s 3+hour runtime. I hate to be the kind of cinematic philistine who knocks a slow-paced “classic” for testing my patience, but Apocalypse Now is too damn long. There is a wealth of individual scenes in the film that carry a forceful impact in isolation, but when they’re broken up by a slow trudge upriver & Batman-gritty narration about “the horror, the horror” of war, Apocalypse Now reveals itself to be a huge commitment of time & effort that might not deliver everything it promises. As a literary adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness I think the film is a fresh, interesting take that reveals new truths about its source material by shifting its setting & narrative detail, but the truth is I found Heart of Darkness to be just as much of a chore as consuming Apocalypse Now in one sitting. This is a great adaptation of a novel I don’t care for & a runtime that spiraled out of control even before its extended “Redux” treatment. There’s no denying that the film is packing several powerful punches, though, and it’s all too easy to see how someone could fall in love with the film as a massive whole.

A lot of Apocalypse Now‘s imagery & one-liners are perhaps a little too over-familiar after years of reverent repetition: the ceiling fan blades fading into helicopter sounds, Martin Sheen’s mud-painted face emerging form the bog, the utterance of “I love the smell of napalm in the morning”, etc. However, it’s clear as day with two stretches of the film still play freshest in 2016. I feel like I’ve seen a lot of the film’s war-is-Hell grittiness covered thoroughly in other works. the alcohol-fueled PTSD, overbearing narration, and off-hand soldier quips like, “You’re in the asshole of the world, Captain” all feel like old hat at this point, whether or not they were groundbreaking representation in 1979. What does feel important & unique still is the film’s approach to representing madness among soldiers. Robert Duvall’s colonel might be remembered most for what he likes to smell in the morning, but his emotionally detached obsession with surfing under fire is what stands out most in modern viewings. While dodging bombs & bullets from the Viet Cong, Duvall orders his terrified young men to surf the incoming tide as if they were kicking back beers on a California beach instead of fearing for their lives under fire in Vietnam. It’s a perfect representation of how the war left many men emotionally detached & downright deranged.

Of course, Duvall’s colonel is just a small taste of wartime madness before the main feast: Marlon Brando’s Colonel Kurtz. It takes a three hour effort for Martin Sheen’s broken shell of a captain to make it upriver to meet Kurtz & decide whether or not to complete his mission of assassinating the defected madman. A lot of anticipation is built by the time Martin Sheen & Marlon Brando share their infamous face to face in the film’s third act and it’s amazing just how much Brando delivers under that pressure. His intensely weird performance as Kurtz is a tangible, skin-crawling kind of madness that feels inseparable from Brando as an actor, especially in light of the recent documentary Listen to Me Marlon that hits a lot of the same deranged, hypnotic notes. A lot of audiences in 1979 believed that, like Kurtz, Brando “had gone totally insane & that [his] methods were unsound.” However, if his performance were indeed a work of madness, it’s undeniably of the mad genius variety.

As Ebert points out in this review, any movie is lucky to have one or two great scenes & Apocalypse Now has many. The film gets on a particular roll in its final sequence once Kurtz’s mania graces the screen and the imagery & music combine to create a sort of wartime tone poem that just screams “art house darling” in every frame. There was a lot made of the troubled, over-budget production that plagued Apocalypse Now at the time of its release & there was indeed enough snafus during filming to support a feature length documentary, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse. The prevailing wisdom of the time is that director Francis Ford Coppola, was in the middle of a winning streak that included titles like The Godfather & The Outsiders might’ve bitten off more than he could chew with Apocalypse Now & the resulting film was somewhat of an untethered mess that couldn’t quite match its ambition with a unifying sense of discipline. Discerning critics like Ebert, who heralded the film like a masterpiece, had a completely different take, lauding the film as an impeccably visualized descent into madness, an entirely new & powerful way of representing war’s savage effect on the fragile human mind.

I think the truth probably lies somewhere between these two takes. The third, Kurtz-focused hour of the film really does feel like it taps into a troubled soldier’s plight in a way that few film scan claim to do, with much of the credit for that accomplishment resting firmly on Marlon Brando’s beyond mad shoulders & Coppola’s eye for haunting visuals. However, the film’s sprawling runtime & three separate versions (including the “Redux” & an infamous bootleg of a workprint) point to a director who may have flew a little too close to the sun to fully realize his vision. I respect Apocalypse Now‘s ambition & find its messy approach to Vietnam War cinema to be a lot more satisfying than more cookie-cutter examples of the genre, but I also find the idea of the film being a masterpiece to be a somewhat flimsy argument. It really does have more truly great scenes than most movies could dream to bring to the screen, but the film itself never feels like more than the sum of its parts. Much like Sheen’s protagonist, Apocalypse Now goes on a dangerous, mind-threatening journey upriver to seek great existential truths, only to discover it’s not sure what to do once it reaches its destination.