Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Entertainment/2011 May 29

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May 29

Blu-ray_player question

Does anyone know where I can find a multi region Blu-ray_player in the Greater Vancouver area? Neptunekh2 (talk) 19:55, 29 May 2011 (UTC)

My Philips BDP3100 can be easily made multi-region. I don't know if it is available in Vancouver. Astronaut (talk) 12:15, 1 June 2011 (UTC)

Apocalypse Now

After tuning into the end of this movie for the Nth time, I'm reminded of some questions I have about it...

• Is there any potential basis in fact for some of the bizarre scenes? The camps without commanding officers, surfing between bombs, the weird way of sacrificing a water buffalo with a machete, the idea of some American military person off in Cambodia leading a killer cult? The chopping off of the arms of kids injected with polio vaccine? Or is it all florid imagination?

• A crucial feature of the end of the movie is that the crew of this little boat can call in an airstrike from "Almighty". My interpretation tends to run that this is not just a handy amenity to be used at Willard's discretion; but rather that the airstrike must have been a back-up contingency plan - something that would be executed in the not unlikely instance that the whole crew should suffer an unfortunate accident during their little diplomatic visit to Cambodia. But this interpretation leads on to several unusual conclusions:

• I otherwise never understood Kurtz's decision to more or less let Willard kill him. There's some monologue that he "wanted the pain to end" and "even the jungle was out to kill him" or even that he wanted to "die like a warrior" but it didn't make sense to me. But if Kurtz's people catch the cook during a radio test for the airstrike, then they know what is coming. Kurtz's choice to let Willard kill him can actually be seen as an altruistic sacrifice for his people, to spare them the collateral damage of a more conventional attack.

• The final scene of the movie then makes much more sense. We see Willard being called on the radio by "Almighty", and he simply reaches out and shuts it off. Then there is a scene of helicopters flying through the air, flames, and repeated, "the horror". What that means, then, is that he is making a conscious decision not to abort the military's airstrike. Given that there's a cult of crazies out there looking to follow anyone who comes out of the temple with a machete, who have given his men much grief, there's a certain appeal to this. He's given them the chance to drop their weapons and leave. The only problem is that per the Apocalypse Now article, this interpretation was supposedly specifically opposed by Coppola. Yet I wonder if he wanted to make available different levels of understanding for such a film.

• Note that these two things together essentially invert the roles of the two main characters: Kurtz selflessly dying to save his civilians, and Willard committing a mass murder beyond everything Kurtz has done. Wnt (talk) 23:45, 29 May 2011 (UTC)

Truly this deserved to be asked at the Humanities refdesk, on account of the quality of the film, but I thought there might be people here with unusual sources of information. Wnt (talk) 23:37, 29 May 2011 (UTC)

I don't have sources for the following offhand and am in a hurry but wanted to give at least one response to aid your googling. The water buffalo kill was supposedly something that the locals were about to do anyway and they asked whether the crew wanted to film it. "Yeah," they said, and it ended up in the movie; so that scene is presumably the most true-to-life scene in the film. Presumably you know about Hearts of Darkness which I certainly recommend since you're a fan. Comet Tuttle (talk) 05:04, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

I'd wondered about that. In a modern film, alas, they'd have spent ten million dollars trying to make a dead or plastic water buffalo look alive, and failed. I take it there's no PC litany about animals not being harmed in the making of this film... B) Wnt (talk) 18:51, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

Some of those things seemed, unfortunately, quite possible in war. For comparison with "leading a killer cult", we have the group of US soldiers in Iraq who raped and murdered a girl and her family. While I'm not aware of their being any religious justification stated for these actions, I have to think that the victims being Muslim figured into the soldiers' total contempt for them.

The "chopping off of the arms of kids injected with polio vaccine" falls within the logic of "total war". That is, if winning is the only goal, and you don't care who suffers or dies in the process (including your own people), then anything can be justified. For comparison, we have the Nazi massacres of civilian bystanders in retaliation for the actions of partisans whom the authorities couldn't capture. StuRat (talk) 06:38, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

I understand that in moral terms, for example the Talmud says something like "whoever destroys a life, destroys the world." But aesthetically, this is not the same thing. A few parts of the movie seem so closely based on reality, it makes me if some others are based on instances I've been unaware of. Wnt (talk) 03:52, 31 May 2011 (UTC)

• Regarding the surfing Liutenant Colonel Kilgore (who loved the smell of napalm in the morning), Apocalypse_Now#Cast mentions some inspirations for the character, if one wanted one could research these real people and see if any of them surfed or otherwise did some of the wild stuff Kilgore was noted for (like the Death Cards). --Jayron32 20:44, 31 May 2011 (UTC)