For the week of August 26th, Lionsgate Home Entertainment is offering a 4K restoration of Francis Ford Coppola's deranged, staggering masterwork Apocalypse Now. Maybe ten minutes into the film, G.D. Spradlin's General Corman blurts out the film's central thesis. You can't be blamed for missing it; Corman is a comparatively minor character. But as Corman pitches Sheen's Captain Willard on the necessity of assassinating the mad, brilliant Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando, who plays the part like a meme in search of a movie), Corman states, "in this war, things get confused out there." No kidding. For a film with a reputation as chaotic and fraught as Apocalypse Now has, it adheres rigorously to that idea. The film unfolds like a series of fractals, with every scene in John Milius' script (and Coppola's on-set improvisations) examining that core "confusion." We're confused in the early goings, as Willard tries to process his hangover/probable suicide attempt against Corman's incongruously formal lunch meeting; Coppola makes palpable Willard's stunned disbelief at how these men can pivot so fluidly from joking about shrimp and roast beef to ordering Kurtz's death. We're no better off when we meet Robert Duvall's fearsome Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore, who orders a violent air-cavalry assault on a quiet Vietnamese village mainly so he can clear the beaches and surf alongside a enlisted professional surfer. And so it goes, galvanizing moments large (the Playboy Playmate rally that turns into a riot) and small (everything with Dennis Hopper's babbling Kurtz sycophant and photojournalist). That fixed attention to theme unlocks Apocalypse Now's universal power. This film shouldn't work and probably shouldn't exist. Watch Hearts of Darkness, and you'll see the degree to which the fates aligned against Coppola and his mad folly. Yet the film somehow escaped and became a blockbuster smash. To some extent, I suspect that old adage, that necessity is the mother of invention: when all about him, everyone was losing it and blaming things on Coppola, he kept enough of his head to submit to the chaos and engineer it into the movie. But I've read Coppola's original script, and although the film ballooned in both size and ambition (fun fact: Coppola wrote a low-budget affair that George Lucas was supposed to shoot in 16mm), it made that confusion core to the text. Coppola has talked about how he wanted to comment of the nature of war and the culture that breeds it. Certainly, war makes beasts of us all, especially within the context of the 1960s; the film is studded with small-but-poignant references to Lyndon Johnson, racial inequality, and Charles Manson. However, here's where I think Apocalypse Now got away from Coppola, and in the best possible way. It isn't just war that muddles our hearts - it's life, full stop. In the film's most maligned sequence, Willard and his team drift into a crumbling French plantation where Willard smokes opium and lazily lets a French aristocrat (Aurore Clément) seduce him. It is Clement's character who clarifies Corman's words from the beginning of the film. As Willard drifts into an opium haze, she intones that in every person, "there are two of you...One that kills and one that loves." It's telling that she makes this claim removed from the heat of battle - we don't need war to exist on this maddening, confusing dialectic. It's our natural state.
From Warner Home Entertainment comes the blockbuster kaiju sequel Godzilla: King of the Monsters. I was no fan of the film's 2014 predecessor: director Gareth Edwards pulled off some witty sleight-of-hand with regard to the film's monster attacks (he keeps obscuring the action when you expect it to go wide, and so the scope feels so much more massive), but he couldn't generate any interest in the film's beyond-boring human cast. But the previews for King of the Monsters suggested that Trick 'r Treat writer-director Michael Dougherty might be capable of righting the scales, balancing both a horde of kajius (besides Godzilla, we get Mothra, Rodan, and King Ghidorah) against a stacked cast of human ringers (Ken Watanabe, David Strathairn, and Sally Hawkins return, and they're joined by Millie Bobby Brown, Charles Dance, Thomas Middleditch, Ziyi Zhang, Bradley Whitford, O'Shea Jackson Jr., Kyle Chandler, and Vera Farmiga). However, it's my sad duty to report that not only is King of the Monsters somehow worse than Godzilla, but it might also be the least exciting studio blockbuster of 2019. If you hated how little screentime Godzilla had in the Edwards Godzilla, King of the Monsters will only aggravate you further. The big green lizard feels like he has less to do here given the focus on the other legacy kaijus who are...definitely very CGI? Outside of a neat little touch Dougherty brings to Ghidorah (its heads do not like one another), the beasts have no real distinction beyond slithering pixels. It does not help that Dougherty cannot stage a kaiju battle to save his life. All the best shots are in the trailers - in practice, the monsters kinda just scream and slam into each other as Lawrence Sher's camera bathes them in Gatorade Frost-colored lights (this is, like, the bluest movie ever made). But the humans are no more interesting. Watanabe comes off best, as is often the case (although his big moment feels rushed and hastily conceived). With regard to the rest of the cast, we're looking at diminishing results right down the line. Chandler and Farmiga are desperately trying to bring some pathos (they lost a kid in the first Godzilla, which drove her madness and him to sullen isolation) to a movie that has no use for that emotion. Brown isn't in the movie as much as you'd expect. Dance seems openly contemptuous of the material, which is entertaining to watch, while Hawkins tries to recede into the background so no one will notice her. Zhang is playing a dual role that the film barely acknowledges - as other critics have noted, you'd have to be closely looking at the differences in her characters' haircuts to know you're looking at a different person. And Whitford and Middleditch are horrible, improvising poorly like they're trying to be Jeff Goldblum from Jurassic Park but coming off instead like Justice Smith from Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. After this, Godzilla, and Kong: Skull Island (which barely ekes out a "Best in Show" title), this franchise feels like the "Telephone Game" of studio filmmaking: throw in all the proper elements second-hand, and with no idea how to synthesize them together.
In his Blu-ray review, Randy Miller III wrote that the film "was obviously crafted with die-hard Godzilla fans in mind, and ones who will thoroughly enjoy picking up the little shout-outs and Easter eggs that pay respect to earlier installments. These small but important moments feel celebratory and authentic, not like some sort of shortsighted decision by committee to please the broadest possible audience. The wanton destruction and visual effects, excessive as they can be at times, are very well done for the most part and convey a suitably enormous sense of scale. Bear McCreary's score is another highlight, carrying many of the dramatic moments nicely while likewise paying respect to classic cues. I'd call it an overall toss-up with Gareth Edwards' 2014 film and a big step up from that 1998 dumpster fire, but wouldn't dare rank it on a scale with the almost three dozen Toho films that began in 1954 and have no intention of stopping in the near future. I can only say that, for all its blatant human faults and overstuffed ideas, King of the Monsters feels spiritually closer in tone to the better Toho productions than either of its two previous Hollywood namesakes. Even if that's not good enough for you, give this one a shot and decide for yourself."
Finally, Paramount Home Media Distribution is bringing Rocketman to Blu-ray. If the best way to criticize one movie is by making another, then Rocketman stands as a brutal takedown of Fox's loathsome Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody . It's uncanny. The films hit the same narrative beats. They subscribe to the same biopic clichés. They even venerate gay British rockers with similar Top 40 appeals. But whereas Bohemian Rhapsody sands away the rough edges of Queen and Freddie Mercury until all you're left with is a pop-friendly nubbin', Rocketman elects for something resembling honest grit. Don't get it twisted. This is not a conventionally "good" movie by any stretch of the imagination. It's more-than-a-little embarrassing, and it often defaults to biopic shorthands that should have been taken into a field and shot a long time ago. To wit: the whole subplot between Elton John (Taron Egerton) and his monstrously selfish mother (Bryce Dallas Howard, terrible) feels like the Rocketman crew saw the "The wrong kid died" gag from Walk Hard, didn't realize it was supposed to be funny, and then kept emulating it every twenty or so minutes. Plus, it loves Elton John too much. I take no issue with Taron Egerton, who's wonderful in the role. No, I blame screenwriter Lee Hall, director Dexter Fletcher, producer Matthew Vaughn, basically anyone who defaults to hagiography when telling tales of the rich and famous. Rocketman's version of Elton John can do no wrong. He's a lovesick little boy who just wanted love from his parents. Even when he's inhaling drugs/alcohol and sexual favors, the film casts his indiscretions as a clear escape from trauma. If we weren't sure we were getting the John Estate Sanctioned Version of the "truth," the end credits underline the extent of movie's hero worship: title cards cast John as a whimsical sprite who cured AIDS and put family above all else and never did an unkind thing to anyone. I look at what I've written to this point, and I see that it reads pretty negatively. But in the wake of Bohemian Rhapsody's troubling, improbable success, Rocketman seems all the more admirable. So many of its decisions play like welcome correctives. Bohemian Rhapsody was the laziest possible jukebox musical, one that tossed Queen's hits on screen and deemed the music alone an adequate substitute for drama. Rocketman has an actual point of view. Structurally, it plays like Across the Universe meets All That Jazz as John uses an intense rehab session to drift throughout his past. The film doesn't just play the hits but instead tries to use his music in surprising/ironic ways, whether that's casting "I Want Love" as a medley conveying his family's dysfunction or "Rocketman" as the backdrop for John's suicide attempt. John's great "Take Me to the Pilot" scores his first significant sexual escapade with Richard Madden's duplicitous manager. The Rocketman performance scenes are more visceral (and every venue seems larger than whatever community rec center Bohemian Rhapsody used to shoot its concert footage), and the filmmaking is more inspired. Fletcher stages a complex one-r around "Saturday Night's All Right (For Fighting)," and sure, it's a little sloppy and rushed in its choreography and digital manipulation, but at least it's aspiring to something more cinematically vital. I don't like Rocketman much, but dammit, I do respect it. That's enough, I guess.
Jeffrey Kauffman's Blu-ray review noted that "at least has the courage of its stylistic convictions, for better and/or worse, and utilizes this kind of odd approach to arguably fitful effect, but the film is often bright and breezy despite its subtext of potential overuse of that vaunted trifecta of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. This is certainly miles away from the sort of revisionist Hollywood biopics of folks like, for example, Cole Porter in Night and Day and it's obviously trying to make a point about show business artifice masking some deep psychological traumas (as evidenced by the late reveal of Elton "losing" the fantastic 12 step getup that opens the film), but this is a 'biography' that is intentionally as much 'show' as it is 'business. ' In that regard, it's kind of interesting that this edition comes replete with a little booklet written by Elton which is obviously a PR stunt to promote his upcoming autobiography Me, but which gets into both his life and the liberties Rocketman has taken with it. 'It wasn't all true, but it was the truth,' is Elton's summation of the situation, and that statement (advice?) should probably be taken to heart when watching the film."