"APOCALYPSE" WOW

          It's one of the best movies ever made.
          During the Vietnam War, an Army captain is sent on a secret mission into Cambodia to assassinate a Green Beret colonel acting on his own authority and living like a god among local tribes people.
          Martin Sheen plays the captain, Willard, and Marlon Brando is the colonel, Kurtz. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola, Apocalypse Now is the movie that splits the whole cinematic program and takes its orders from the jungle.
          Like Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey ten years earlier, the 1979 instant classic is a high-water mark in film to which other movies regularly refer.
          At times almost Expressionist in its striking use of shadow, the surreal, and twisted storylines, this loose adaptation of Joseph Conrad's short novel Heart of Darkness features unforgettable images and performances.
          The horror of war and the madness of war are the film's central themes, and in scene after scene these themes are thoroughly explored.
          For example, early in his journey upriver to find Kurtz, Willard meets Colonel Kilgore (Duvall). Like General Jack D. Ripper in Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, Kilgore is a certifiable guy in a position of military authority. All Kilgore really wants to do is surf. Even under heavy fire. He gets a little misty-eyed when he thinks about the war one day ending. If his boys won't surf with him, he might just shoot them. And if the waves aren't good enough, he apologizes with deep contrition.
          Insanity, Willard realizes, isn't the real complaint against Kurtz. The problem is independent action--especially when it achieves results.
          Tales around the making of Apocalypse Now are as interesting as the film itself. Evidently Coppola had a hard time getting some of the actors to learn their lines--Marlon Brando, Dennis Hopper--and yet the performances are legendary. As Coppola battled to make the movie, his wife Eleanor filmed him with her own camera. The result is an incredible 1991 documentary, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse.
          In 2001 Coppola released a re-edited version of his film, Apocalypse Now Redux. Containing an additional 49 minutes of footage not included in the original, Redux is worth seeing even though the additional material ultimately does not improve the film, but rather slows it down. In particular, a long scene on a French plantation was correctly cut from the 1979 release.
          "Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, and pure" are the words which Kurtz uses to describe his realization regarding the enemy's strength. But he might just as well have been talking about the movie. And the real horror would be not to see it.




APOCALYPSE NOW
Starring Marlon Brando,
Martin Sheen,
Robert Duvall,
Frederic Forrest,
Sam Bottoms,
Laurence Fishburne,
Harrison Ford,
Dennis Hopper
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
Written by Francis Ford Coppola, John Milius
Runtime 153 minutes
Rated R

DREAM PROJECT

Whether he's called Natty Bumppo, the Deerslayer, the Pathfinder, Leather-Stocking, La Longue Carabine or Hawk-eye, he's America's first literary hero, inspired in large measure by Daniel Boone, a distant relative of mine. When I learned in my youth of his being my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, I became emotionally invested in investigating his life. This path eventually led me to find the five novels in James Fenimore Cooper's cycle of stories.


In The Deerslayer, Hawk-eye is about 23; in The Last of the Mohicans he's about 36; in The Pathfinder he's about 38; but then in The Pioneers he's 71 or 72, and in The Prairie about 81 or 82. Strangely, what we have is a gap of thirty-plus years in Hawk-eye's life during his prime.


So, this feeling keeps growing in mind that these stories exist and want to be found.

I see Leather-Stocking, Tomahawk, and Nathaniel as working titles for three works focusing on events in the hero's life during his 40s, 50s, and 60s.


In order to take on the challenging task of writing this sort of fan fiction, I would want to create as much of the proper tone and feeling as possible for verisimilitude, but would not attempt to write stories intended to fool anyone into thinking that these were "lost works" of JFC. They'd be novellas, heavily influenced by Daniel Boone's experiences, not focusing on huge battles, but rather his time perhaps held hostage by a tribe.


I mention this here just because I know if I don't then there's no chance of anything.

"WONDER WOMAN" A KNOCKOUT

          Big hit.
          Gal Gadot owns the role of the superhero who first appeared in All-Star Comics #8, 1941.
          Diana (Gadot), princess of Paradise Island, daughter of Hippolyta, is an Amazon warrior whose hidden land is discovered by an American pilot (Pine) running from the Germans in WWI. When she learns of the conflict in the outside world, she accompanies the pilot with the intention of dispatching the cause of the trouble: Ares, God of War.
          In keeping with the Dark Knight trilogy, we have another DC character not referred to by the regular old name. At no point in the film are the words "Wonder Woman" ever uttered. We may therefore take from this that the filmmakers want the positive value of the character name brand without any of the negative baggage.
          This reinvention of a character largely associated with a cheesecake-heavy 1970's TV show faces the uphill battle of presenting a woman equally as rugged as she is good-looking. And without being Jennifer Lawrence.
          Gal Gadot. Perfectly cast.
          She's the Janis Joplin of superheroes. When she runs into a tank, it wobbles. She can smash rocks with her fists and jump about twenty feet in the air. These aren't things we expect to see and are therefore more visually appealing than the same old stuff.
          For example: In Batman v Superman (the movie where Gadot's Wonder Woman first appears), by virtue of riches, Batman makes a super-suit that lets him go toe-to-toe with Superman. Causing us to wonder, well hey, if could do that, why did he ever be regular Batman? When actually, if he was to fight Diana barehanded, he'd flat-out lose. Batman's just a dude. If he runs into a tank, that hurts him, not the tank.
          Kinda sorta, DC makes Ares their Loki. Marvel has Norse deities running around, and DC gets the Greeks. At some level one does feel the palpable desire on the part of DC to de-throne Marvel at the box-office. And at another level one also detects the intent to finally have a superhero movie starring for once a woman, and for that film to not only be successful, but successful for the right reasons.
          Not because of a skimpy outfit. Not because of getting saved by somebody else. The right reasons.
          Finally...Bingo!


WONDER WOMAN
Starring Gal Gadot,
Chris Pine,
Connie Nelson,
Robin Wright,
Danny Huston,
David Thewlis,
Eugene Brave Rock,
Said Taghmaoui,
Ewen Bremner,
Elena Anaya
Directed by Patty Jenkins
Written by Allan Heinberg, Zack Snyder, Jason Fuchs
Based on the character created by William Moulton Maston
Runtime 141 minutes
Rated PG-13




Stewart Kirby writes for