Is the making-of ‘Apocalypse Now' doc the greatest ever? Plus the week's best movies

Los Angeles Times

3 days ago

Hello! I'm Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.
Writer-director Ari Aster has refashioned himself from a maker of art-house horror films like 'Hereditary' and 'Midsommar' into a more overt social satirist with 'Beau Is Afraid' and his latest film, 'Eddington,' which opens this week.
Pointedly set in the spring of 2020 in a small town in New Mexico — a moment when uncertainty, paranoia and division over the response to COVID were maximally disorienting — the film's story concerns a sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) who tosses his hat in the ring to run against an incumbent mayor (Pedro Pascal). Each spouts their own complicated, spiraling rhetoric as the race between them becomes more intense, and they seem swept away by circumstances much larger than they can understand or control.
In her review of the film Amy Nicholson wrote, 'Aster's feistiest move is that he refuses to reveal the truth. When you step back at the end to take in the full landscape, you can put most of the story together. (Watch 'Eddington' once, talk it out over margaritas and then watch it again.) Aster makes the viewer say their theories out loud afterwards, and when you do, you sound just as unhinged as everyone else in the movie. I dig that kind of culpability: a film that doesn't point sanctimonious fingers but insists we're all to blame.
'But there are winners and losers and winners who feel like losers and schemers who get away with their misdeeds scot-free. Five years after the events of this movie, we're still standing in the ashes of the aggrieved. But at least if we're cackling at ourselves together in the theater, we're less alone.'
Carlos Aguilar spoke to acclaimed cinematographer Darius Khondji, a former collaborator of David Fincher, James Gray and the Safdies, about working with Aster for the first time on 'Eddington.'
'Ari and I have a common language,' Khondji said. 'We discovered quite early on working together that we have a very similar taste for dark films, not dark in lighting but in storytelling.'
The 1991 film 'Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse' is widely thought of as among the greatest behind-the-scenes documentaries ever made. Directed by Fax Bahr with George Hickenlooper from documentary footage directed by Eleanor Coppola, the film explores the epically complicated production of Francis Ford Coppola's 'Apocalypse Now.' A new 4K restoration of 'Hearts of Darkness' will have a limited run at the American Cinematheque beginning Sunday, with Bahr in-person for multiple Q&As.
When Eleanor Coppola went to the Philippines in 1976 with her husband and their three children for the production of his hallucinatory Vietnam War saga 'Apocalypse Now,' he enlisted her to shoot doc footage in part to save on additional crew and also to give her something to do.
Drawing from Eleanor's remarkable footage, surreptitious audio recordings she made and her written memoir of the experience, 'Notes: On the Making of 'Apocalypse Now,'' 'Hearts of Darkness' becomes a portrait of the struggle to maintain creativity, composure and sanity amid chaos as everything that could possibly go wrong seemingly does. Military helicopters are redeployed during takes, star Martin Sheen suffers a heart attack, monsoons destroy sets, Marlon Brando is immovable on scheduling and the ending of what all this is leading toward remains elusive.
'I think it's really held up and survived,' said Bahr of the documentary in an interview this week. 'It works as a complement to this extraordinary film that Francis produced. Of course, ['Apocalypse Now'] would be what it is without this, but I do think for people who really want to go deeper into the 'Apocalypse' experience, this is really a necessary journey to take.'
When 'Apocalypse Now' first premiered at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival, Francis Ford Coppola infamously said, 'The way we made it was very much like the way the Americans were in Vietnam. We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment and little by little we went insane.'
The years between the lengthy production of 'Apocalypse Now,' its turbulent release and the subsequent years before the 'Hearts of Darkness' project came to be likely eased the Coppolas into participating with such candor and full-fledged access.
'I think having almost 10 years after 'Apocalypse Now' was helpful,' said James T. Mockoski, who oversaw the restoration for Coppola's company American Zoetrope. 'It would've been a much different documentary when it was supposed to come out. It was supposed to support the publicity and the marketing of the film at that time. 'Apocalypse' was very difficult, as we have seen, obviously. I don't know how much they would've had the hunger to revisit the film and go right into a documentary. It was a rather difficult, challenging time for them. And I think 10 years gave them a perspective that was needed.'
'He gambled it all and he won,' said Bahr. 'And what I hope we really achieved with 'Hearts' was showing the despair that really all artists go through in the creative process. And even though you go there, if you keep at it and your goal is true then you achieve artistic greatness.'
According to Mockoski, Francis Ford Coppola has seen his own relationship to the documentary change over the years. While at times unflattering, and certainly showing the filmmaker racked by doubt and in deep creative crisis, 'Hearts' also shows him as someone, improbably, finding his way.
'It's a very hard relationship with the documentary, but he has grown over the years to be more accepting of it,' said Mockoski. 'He doesn't like the films to ever be shown together. If anyone wants to book it, they shouldn't be on the same day. There should be some distance. And he doesn't really want people to watch the documentary and then just figure out, where's Francis and what is his state of mind at this point? They're two separate things for him. And he would rather people watch 'Apocalypse' just for the experience of that, not to be clouded by 'Hearts.''
In his original review of 'Hearts of Darkness,' Michael Wilmington wrote, 'In the first two 'Godfather' movies, Coppola seemed to achieve the impossible: combining major artistic achievement with spectacular box-office success, mastering art and business. In 'Apocalypse Now,' he wanted to score another double coup: create a huge, adrenaline-churning Irwin Allenish spectacle and something deeper, more private, filled with the times' terror. Amazingly, he almost did. And the horror behind that 'almost' — Kurtz's Horror, the horror of Vietnam, of ambition itself — is what 'Hearts of Darkness' gives us so wrenchingly well.'
'What 'Hearts' is great about is that it shows you a period of filmmaking that's just not seen today,' said Mockoski. 'You look at this and you look at ['Apocalypse'] and there's just no way we could make this film. Would we ever allow an actor to go to that extreme situation with Martin Sheen? Would we be allowed to set that much gasoline on fire in the jungle? Hollywood was sort of slow to evolve, they were making films like that up from the silent era, these epic films, going to extremes to just do art. It just captured a moment in time that I don't think we'll ever see again.'
Having premiered at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival and screened only a few times since, Quentin Tarantino's 'Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair' will play twice daily at the Vista Theater from July 18-28.
Clocking in at over 4 hours and screening from Tarantino's personal 35mm print (complete with French subtitles), it combines the films known as 'Kill Bill Vol. 1' and 'Kill Bill Vol. 2' into a single experience with a few small changes. The main difference is simply taking it all in as 'The Whole Bloody Affair,' an epic tale of revenge as a woman mostly known as 'The Bride' (Uma Thurman in a career-defining performance) seeks to find those who tried to kill her on her wedding day. (I'll be seeing the combined cut for the first time myself during this run at the Vista.)
Manohla Dargis' Los Angeles Times reviews of the two films when they were first released in October 2003 and April 2004 still make for some of the most incisive writing on Tarantino as a filmmaker.
Dargis' review of 'Vol. 2' inadvertently helps sell the idea of the totalizing 'The Whole Bloody Affair' experience by saying, 'An adrenaline shot to the movie heart, soul and mind, Quentin Tarantino's 'Kill Bill Vol. 2' is a blast of pure pop pleasure. The second half of Tarantino's long-gestating epic, 'Vol. 2' firmly lays to rest the doubts raised by 'Vol. 1' as to whether the filmmaker had retained his chops after years of silence and, as important, had anything to offer beyond pyrotechnics and bloodshed. Tarantino does have something to say, although most of what he does have to say can be boiled down to two words: Movies rock.
'In a world of commodity filmmaking in which marketing suits offer notes on scripts, this is no small thing. Personal vision is as rare in Hollywood as humility, but personal vision — old, new, borrowed and true blue to the filmmaker's inspirations — shapes 'Vol. 2,' giving it texture and density. Personal vision makes Tarantino special, but it isn't what makes him Quentin Tarantino. What does distinguish him, beyond a noggin full of film references, a candy-coated visual style and a deep-tissue understanding of how pop music has shaped contemporary life, affecting our very rhythms, is his old-time faith in the movies. Few filmmakers love movies as intensely; fewer still have the ability to remind us why we fell for movies in the first place.'
'2046' in 35mm
Showing at Vidiots on Friday night in 35mm will be Wong Kar-wai's '2046,' the 2004 follow-up to his cherished 'In the Mood for Love.' Loosely connected to both 'In the Mood for Love' and Wong's earlier 'Days of Being Wild,' '2046' stars Tony Leung as a writer in late 1960s Hong Kong who has encounters with a series of women, played by the likes of Maggie Cheung, Faye Wong, Gong Li, Carina Lau and Zhang Ziyi. (He may be imagining them.) Fans of Wong's stylish, smoky romanticism will not be disappointed.
In her original review of the film, Carina Chocano called it 'a gorgeous, fevered dream of a movie that blends recollection, imagination and temporal dislocation to create an emotional portrait of chaos in the aftermath of heartbreak.'
'Lost in America' + 'Modern Romance'
On Tuesday and Wednesday, the New Beverly will screen a 35mm double bill of Albert Brooks' 1985 'Lost in America' and 1981's 'Modern Romance.' Directed by, co-written by (with Monica Johnson) and starring Brooks, both films are fine showcases for his lacerating comedic sensibilities.
A satire of the lost values of the 1960s generation in the face of the materialism of 1980s, 'Lost in America' has Brooks as an advertising executive who convinces his wife (Julie Hagerty) to join him in quitting their jobs, selling everything they own and setting out in a deluxe RV to explore the country, 'Easy Rider'-style.
In a review of 'Lost in America,' Patrick Goldstein wrote, 'Appearing in his usual disguise, that of the deliriously self-absorbed maniac, Brooks turns his comic energies on his favorite target — himself — painting an agonizingly accurate portrait of a man imprisoned in his own fantasies. … You get the feeling that Brooks has fashioned an unerring parody of someone who's somehow lost his way in our lush, consumer paradise. Here's a man who can't tell where the desert ends and the oasis begins.'
'Modern Romance,' features Brooks as a lovelorn film editor in Los Angeles desperate to win back his ex-girlfriend (Kathryn Harrold).
In his original review of 'Modern Romance,' Kevin Thomas wrote, 'You have to hand it to Albert Brooks. To put it mildly he's not afraid to present himself unsympathetically.'
In a 1981 interview with Goldstein, Brooks said, 'As a comedian it's really my job to be the monster. People either love me or hate me. If I wanted to be a nice guy, I'd make a movie about someone who saves animals.'
(Brooks would, of course, go on to appear as a voice actor in 'Finding Nemo' and 'Finding Dory.')
'The Little Mermaid'
For the next installment of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.'s ongoing series at the Egyptian, there will be a screening on Thursday, July 24, of 1989's 'The Little Mermaid' with directors Ron Clements and John Musker present for a Q&A moderated by Carlos Aguilar.
'The Little Mermaid' received LAFCA's inaugural award for animation, the first of its kind among critics groups.