I thought Heart of Darkness was the book Apocalypse Now was based on. 

first post, double post, gahd i suck 

it is. 

kell,

I dont recall seeing that one on the orignal dvd? There's something about the destruction of the kurtz compound with commentary but I havent heard that yet. Is it by chance on the redux dvd? Also, does the heart of darknes commentary explain coppola's reason(s) for the redux version?

starbuck,

recommend any other lynch movies? I would like to see some of his other stuff but dont know which ones. I thought Mulholland Drive was pretty good (although to be honest the last half an hour sucked IMHO, but the sheer atmosphere and weirdness of the first two hours made me like it) and Lost Highway blew goats. Blue Velvet and Eraserhead both look interesting but which one is more mulhollandish and which one more lost highwayish? 

Heart Of Darkness is indeed the novella by Joseph Conrad on which Apocalypse Now is based ( recommended reading ).
Hearts Of Darkness: A Filmaker's Apocalypse is a documentary made some years ago by a group of student filmakers. It consists of interviews with Coppola, his wife Eleanor Coppola and some of the actors interpsersed with footage that Eleanor filmed while the movie was being made. It also has her narrating segements from the diary that she kept during the same period. The diary is available as the book Notes On The Making Of Apocalypse Now.
Extract:
I heard there are some real cadavers in body bags at the Kurtz Compound set. I asked the propman about it; he said, "The script says 'a pile of burning bodies'; it doesn't say a pile of burning dummies."

I got the movie in widescreen plus the documenatry and book in a VHS boxed set years ago. I don't know if they appeared in any other form. 

Eraserhead and Blue Velvet are two very different films, so its quite hard to compare them really. They are both much better than Lost Highway though.

Eraserhead is much older, 1976 i think, with Blue Velvet coming 10 years later. Eraserhead is also much more surreal, in fact it's pretty insane. It unfolds in a free-form, almost poem-like way, so if you're looking for a more conventional movie format, you might prefer Blue Velvet. Blue velvet is still top of my list for cinematography as well, it perfectly suits a film this intense. So basically, it's down to you really, what you prefer...also i'd recommend Dune, though it is a little long, and wild at heart. 

Anyone else see 8 1/2?
I just have... and O M G!!

I'm still glowing. It's almost like there's this vast repository of great cinema that I've never heard of before ... oooh la la

nitin: I thought Mulholland Drive was pretty good (although to be honest the last half an hour sucked IMHO,

Come on, the end was like, the best part. The begining was the setup; the symbolic palette that paints the masterpiece, which is my end. 

I disagree. Yes the beginning was the setup, but the ending just didnt work for me. There was a lot of hit and miss stuff there. 

weird, i saw x2 and thought it was so much better than the first one (disclaimer: this is coming from comic fanboy with a stack of jim lee x-men stashed in a box). like they didnt have to go through the explanation of the x-men ethos and mutant evolution, etc which i think took alot out of the first movie (every interview i read with brian singer said he agreed). but x2 WAS ridiculous amounts of action, with a very well-adapted story from the comics (weapon-x, lady deathstrike, jean grey dieing, etc). the only thing i didnt really like was the fact that a good portion of the middle of the movie was spent in the blackbird jet with their arch enemie(s) they fought from the previous movie, you know, that almost wiped out the population of new york. also just large amounts of wolverine being the best at what he does :) 

fair enough, but IMHO the first one was alot more focused and to the point. X2 seemed overlong and juggling way too much in one movie to be effective, well in my books anyway. I was hoping that they had concentrated more on 1 or 2 of those plotlines so that each one didnt look so rushed (specifically pyro's conversion, iceman's family problems and more importantly jean's dilemma were pretty awfully executed) and also it would have allowed for longer action scenes. When I saw nightcrawler's white house attack, I was hoping for more of the same but the few decent action bits were few and far between. IMHO, the wolverine vs deathstrike scenes was too quick and averagely executed when it could have been a mjor highlight. 

apocalypse now is awesome. I've seen "the making of" which was quite interesting too "you know why it was so accurate.. because we WERE in the jungle, AND on drugs!"
also read heart of darkness, and some other joseph conrad stuff. all very good. however the redux version is way crappier.

A very good film is Dark City, from 1999. You have to hand it to a movie that comes up with a logical, if screwed up, explanation for someone being chased through halls, then out a door out of the side of a building, by a demon baby who bites his hands while he's hanging from a cliff.

requiem for a dream and pi are both by the same director, both very good. also, the thing of course and in the mouth of madness are both good as well. fallen with denzel washington is a nice creepy demon movie. and with x2, I thought it was quite good, however, they neglected to include the best character for a second time - gambit. 

where was gambit?

hopefully, gambit and the juggernaut make an appearance sometime soon. 

when most people ask 'where was <name of character that was at one time an x-man>, its usually that they were never an actual student at the acadamy, as is the case for gambit (in fact, he also never 'taught' like the others did/do, it would also be weird as in the comics at least he had a thing with rogue who is all young in the comics). as for juggernaut, i dont know if he'll ever appear, he was with the brotherhood but mainly is a solo character (and god knows even if the effects for him were done well, itd be hard to give such a one dimensional character some depth). probably more likely to see cyclops' brother and pheonix/whatever jean grey reincarnation they come up with.

besides, if you think there was too much going on already, what do you think will happen if they add x number of characters to each film? this is the issue with producing comic books that seems to venture into their respective films.

btw, i also hated the fact in x2 they never even made a single allusion to the fact that mystique is (supposedly) nightcrawler's mom. would have been so easy to do.

(yes, i AM a fanboy) 

thanks for clearing that up, I never read the comics I just saw some of the cartoons.

I was just mentioning that in terms of me preferring a character like gambit introduced over iceman. 

Well, hardly ever anyway. The two of note I've seen in the last few years:

Spirited Away - glad to see this got a few mentions =). Wonderful bonkers anime Alice In Wonderland. Stylish, atmospheric, hilarious in parts....and the train journey through the water is the most beautiful and touching scene I've seen...

LOTR: FOTR - the best public ambassador for fantasy there has been. Just a really good fantasy film, pity TTT succumbed to the heinous temptations of Hollywoodism. The whole Moria Mines scene is perhaps the best thing I've seen on screen...

Other than that I've a few oldies that are favourites:

Alien/s/3 (all great in different ways), Delicatessan (very funky and twisted), Falling Down (delightfully cynical and very accurate), Jacob's Ladder (dark and gripping), Remains Of The Day (great study of British repression, nice music), The Matrix (not as cool as it thought it was but still good), Robocop (just cool in lots of ways), Platoon (it just works)... 

shambler you are clearly out of your mind :)

I do admit to loving the alien view camerawork near the end.

And if you thought the matrix was pretend cool a bit too much, watch Matric reloaded.

Or dont.

On a side note, I just saw Luc Besson's The Professional, quite a good film. Anyone know if the director's cut (international version) is worth getting or if it's like the T2 director's cut, reasonable but you could see why it was cut, it doesnt add anything.

Oh yeah, and I put in a vote for Batman and Bamtan Returns for best superhero movies ever. Burton's style was perfect for Batman. 

I must say... I did not enjoy Mulholland Drive at all. I watched it wide awake and got drowsy during it... it opens with long slow pans through dark fog and just seems to be taking up a lot of time for the sake of making the movie longer. I didnt care for the rearranging of the chapters either, to me it didnt seem clever, it seemed like it was hiding a rather flat story that wasnt interesting to begin with. Not even the shallow promise of lesbian scenes enhanced it in the juvenile sense one must ocassionally employ to get into a movie. It just felt rather flat... If Im gonna watch a scene shuffling movie, Im gonna watch one that does it well with a rewarding sense and a fair mix of different reactions, that movie being Memento.

Aside from Memento I really liked Amelie in its quirkyness, its little touches (such as when Nino 'joins the mujahadijn'(sp?)). It has some nice side stories which leave a good sensation and overall a good movie, and being the standard pessimistic lonely depressed kid, the ending didnt leave me as unsettled as most movies do, despite the way it did end.

random list of stuff Ive enjoyed

Nightmare Before Christmas
From Hell
Sleepy Hollow
Ranger Gone Bad 2
Frailty
Lilo and Stitch (Stitch is just the damned coolest animated char ever...)
The Shawshank Redempt
The Doom Generation (or is it A Doomed ? cant rmbr, campy movie, good for watching in the middle of the night after a lot of caffeine and weird conversation with friends)
A.I. yes, i enjoyed it
Equilibrium yeah im one of those people who got into this much more then The Matrix, but it seems deeper as a movie to me, although The Matrix is deeper in its theory, its also far far less probable.
The Ring
LOTR
i admit that i also have enjoyed both Harry Potter films (and all 4 books)
The Shining was quite good
and a bunch of other movies
my memory dances around on me sometimes 

no, it's evil :) Actually, Jude Law's character was quite cool and Haley Joel was pretty good too but it felt just like Minority Report, mesmerising for about 30 mins and then downhill from there.

The Shining I liked even though it was too arty for its own good. The Ring was enjoyable but WTF was up witht eh little kid. he seems like one of the rejected auditioners from the Sixth sense or somehting. 

saw these finally.

Eraserhead was very David Lynch, albeit raw David Lynch. I dont think it's a great film but you can see Lych's techniques before they were refined. Worth watching.

Blue Velvet must be his most accessible and 'normal' film barring some of the scenes with Frank in it (notably the Baby wants to fuck scene). Not bad but I didnt find it particularly interesting, probably because the characters seemed too inconsistent. Still, worth a watch.

Also saw Platoon recently, classy stuff. The little details made it stand out unlike say Black Hawk Down, which was a glorified war movie. 

I saw Eraserhead recently myself. It makes recent David Lynch movies look down right coherent. I think a better director would be able to make movies equally weird while keeping the movie logical within itself. I didn't really like the cinema verite angle either.

Platoon is over-rated. I thought Black Hawk Down was pretty good, especially the music. I'm not particularly drawn to either glorification or condemnation of war. Apocalypse Now is one of my favorite movies, although Mull Metal Jacket is good too. 

perhaps you would like blue velvet then, it's a fairly standard movie that's got weird touches too.

Actually, if you can get over the glorification in black hawk down, the actual cinematography + camerawork is pretty stunning IMHO, and the tactical touch is a bit different too. Still to see Full Metal Jacket, maybe after exams. 

I'll give blue velvet a look then, thanks. 

Oceans 11
Chicago

my two enthralling movies of the moment 

if you're looking for a "weird" kind of movie, filled with symbolic imagery etc, then get the excellent 8 1/2. Federico Fellini, the director, is marvelously talented, and the cinematography is full and beautiful. It's a black and white movie, subbed from Italian, but that should not stop you.

Lynch is a hack compared to Fellini. While I stand by what I said about the end of Mulholland Drive being the best part, to be honest that isn't saying a whole lot. 

A long time ago an action movie was mentioned on PennyArcade which I think had some sort of relation to Minority Report. I've just decided now that I want to see that movie. Anyone know which one that is?