Apocalypse Now: The Final Cut (2019): written by Francis Ford Coppola, John Milius, and Michael Herr; loosely based on the novella Heart of Darkness (1899) by Joseph Conrad; directed by Francis Ford Coppola; starring Martin Sheen (Willard), Marlon Brando (Kurtz), Laurence Fishburne (Mr. Clean), Harrison Ford (Lucas), Scott Glenn (Kurtz Convert Lt. Colby)), Robert Duvall (Kilgore), Sam Bottoms (Surfer Lance), Frederic Forrest (Chef), Albert Hall (Chief), Dennis Hopper (Photojournalist), G.D. Spradlin (General Corman), and [Uncredited] Joe Estevez (Stand-in/Partial Voice-over 'Stand-in' for brother Martin Sheen):
Hey, it's Apocalypse Now, so a chance to see it in any cut on a big screen was a treat. And it improves on Apocalypse Now Redux by omitting the dire, momentum-killing 'Crashed Playboy Bunnies' sequence!
However, it keeps the other major addition, the French Plantation sequence, to mixed effect: it's the one part of the film that plays as potentially supernatural, which is not really in keeping with the rest of the movie. However, there are also cues throughout the sequence that it might not really be happening at all -- not least of which is the sudden transition from Willard's opium scene to the boat back on the fog-saturated river.
Brando is great, and on a big screen, almost life-sized! One of no more than a hundred of the greatest movies ever made, all done without CGI! Highly recommended, though you could replicate it by simply omitting a couple of scenes from Redux on a rewatch. The surfboard-stealing scene is also a hoot, though also in Redux. Highly recommended.
The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane: adapted by Laird Koenig from his own novel; directed by Nicholas Gessner; starring Jodie Foster (Rynn), Martin Sheen (Frank Hallet), Alexis Smith (Mrs. Hallet), Mort Shuman (Miglioriti) and Scott Jacoby (Mario) (1976): Oddball 1970's movie that's part horror movie, part distaff Catcher in the Rye.
Jodie Foster, fresh off Taxi Driver, plays main character Rynn, a 13-year-old girl who rents a secluded house in a small town with her reclusive poet father. She's befriended by town cop Miglioriti and his amateur magician nephew Mario, and befiended by the owner of her house and the owner's pedophiliac son, played by a young and intensely creepy Martin Sheen.
Apparently, Foster hated making this movie and has implied that she mailed in her performance. It doesn't show -- Rynn has been written as an emotionally distant character, and Foster's enunciation, facila expressions, and body language convey this quite smartly. As noted, Sheen is creepy, and the other actors are also effective in their roles. Mostly low-key but weirdly affecting and even haunting. Recommended.
The Amazing Spider-man: based on the comic-book character created by Steve Ditko and Stan Lee; written by James Vanderbilt, Alvin Sargent, and Steve Kloves; directed by Marc Webb; starring Andrew Garfield (Spider-man/Peter Parker), Emma Stone (Gwen Stacy), Rhys Ifans (Curt Connors/The Lizard), Denis Leary (Captain Stacy), Martin Sheen (Uncle Ben), and Sally Field (Aunt May) (2012): The Spider-man reboot gets a number of things more right than the first three Sam-Raimi-directed, Tobey-Maquire-starring features.
Peter Parker is now a young super-genius, just as he was in the original comic books, and his cleverness will aid him in his adventures. As comic-book-writer/artist John Byrne would say, only Peter Parker could have been Spider-man. It especially helps that, as in the comic book, he has to build his own web-shooters: they don't just conveniently pop out of his wrists as they did in the Raimi movies, though there they really should have popped out of his bum if we were to be even vaguely realistic about this whole human-spider schlemozzle.
Andrew Garfield is appropriately slighter than Maguire, while Emma Stone makes an appropriately cute Gwen Stacy, moved from her place much later in Peter Parker's life in the comic books to the start of his career. Betty Brant really gets no respect in these movies. This Gwen Stacy is also something of a science prodigy, which means she gets more to do than just scream and offer romantic support to the web-spinner.
The performances are all really quite solid, with Rhys Ifans as the scientist who will become the villainous Lizard and Denis Leary as Gwen's Police Captain father. A complicated back-story for Peter's family looks to be the thread that goes through all these new movies. I like my superheroes with much simpler, original origins; unfortunately, Hollywood Screenwriting 101 has taught us that everyone and everything has to be connected, that there are no coincidences, and that every superhero must ultimately be motivated by revenge rather than altruism.
They do a nice job here of setting up Peter's guilt over his Uncle Ben's death (the whole wrestling story has been discarded, which may be a good idea) and the existence of his capacity for heroism before he gains his powers. Still, his battle with the Lizard is ultimately a personal one because, you know, Motivation 101 and all that crappy studio crappy crap.
The visual effects are mostly serviceable, though nothing stands out as spectacular or even amazing. And I'd really have kept the comic-book Lizard's alligator-like head, complete with snout: here, Spider-man's either fighting the Scorpion or perhaps the Abomination from the second Hulk film. It's a strikingly unoriginal bit of character visualization, and frankly it looks way too blobby and way not enough scaly to be called The Lizard. And where is his giant white lab-coat and giant-lizard-sized purple pants????? Recommended.
Seeking a Friend for the End of the World: written and directed by Lorene Scarfaria; starring Steve Carell (Dodge), Keira Knightley (Penny), Rob Corddry (Warren), Martin Sheen (Frank), Connie Britton (Diane) and William Petersen (Trucker) (2012): A small independent film with an A-list cast, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World got an unfairly limited release last summer. It's a small gem of a romantic comedy set against the backdrop of impending global apocalypse.
Seeking a Friend for the End of the World is the sort of science-fiction film that most people don't realize is a science-fiction film because it's concerned with character and not plot. But it is science fiction of the adult sort that almost never make it into a film, one in which the social implications of the impact of one changed premise upon a society are explored with wit, humour, and a certain amount of poignance.
A giant (actually, a really, really giant, as in ridiculously giant) asteroid will soon destroy life as we know it. On the bright side, the asteroid is named Matilda. Steve Carell's Dodge, whose wife runs out on him with three weeks to go until doomsday, is a slightly repressed and deeply unhappy insurance salesman. Keira Knightley is his free-spirit upstairs neighbour. Some of what happens between them can be predicted, but not all of it.
Forced together into a road trip, she to find a plane to get her back home to England to be with her family and he to desperately reconnect with the love of his life, they have a series of wacky but thankfully realistically muted adventures that net them a truck with a bullet hole in the windshield, a cute dog, and a lot of unpacking of emotional baggage.
Developments with the asteroid mostly go on in the background; in the foreground, people run the gamut of emotions and actions one would expect in such a situation. The power-company people are the real heroes here, as the electricity stays on pretty much right to the end. Kudos!
A nitpicker with even a bit of astronomical knowledge will probably decide by the end of this film that one way or the other, aliens are involved with this asteroid. With personal theories resulting from these asteroidal shenanigans (though the science here is at least as realistic as what happens with the comet and the asteroid in Deep Impact and Armageddon, respectively), one can decide what happens after the final scene in a way that I don't think writer-director Lorene Scarfaria intended.
As it stands, this is a worthy addition to that small but sturdy sub-genre of films with the apocalypse in the background and not the foreground (see also Last Night, Melancholia, and apparently five or six comedies coming out in the next six months). Knightley is really good, as is Carell, and the supporting characters are also all clearly defined and believeable. Recommended.
