I'm in a time crunch and on my phone, so this isn't going to be as extensive or in depth as I'd like.
I took this movie as my first over all pick during the last draft and during the past decade it's actual rather impressive it's still held a strangled hold as my favorite film of all time.
Apocalypse Now - 1979
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078788/
This is the film that changed everything as it relates to cinema for me. Prior to this I only watched summer blockbusters and modern American screwball comedies. A movie had to entertain me in order to be deemed good. That was my only criterion for quality: Did I have fun watching it?
In college I briefly dated a film major who asked me what my favorite movie was and I half-jokingly answered a forgettably dumb screwball comedy. (Better VF?) I'll never forget the expression of complete disgust she shot me in response. Her rudely snide face alone compelled me to explore the art form further, if for no other reason than to prove her to be a stuck-up snob. I started simply enough with either picking up anything on AFI's top 100 list or simply tracking down any movie I'd always heard of as a "classic" but had never actually seen. And true to my suspicions, I found most were just as boring, unimpressive, or "overrated" as I had expected. And the ones I did like were no competition for the blockbusters that already populated my personal top 10.
After a year of stubbornly plodding through these overrated "classics" and having my opinion merely confirmed, while on summer break I picked up from Blockbuster (ha!) #16 on the AFI list: Apocalypse Now.
It was not a "fun" watch. It was dark, and brooding, and weird, and methodical, and insane, and utterly, utterly mesmerizing.
Most people can reference Apocalypse Now as the Vietnam movie with the helicopters blowing stuff up to the sound of Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries and the line "I love the smell of napalm in the morning." It is, after all, a movie commonly cited as a favorite among dude-bros and machismos who know nothing about the movie's link to Heart of Darkness, its darkly ironical use of the above mentioned scene, and that that's only the beginning of the film at the proverbial gates of Hell.
The intensity ratchets up from there in an achingly torturous creak as the crew of PBR Streetgang inches down the river. I remember saying out loud to myself, as the plot points got increasingly bizarre and nightmarish, there's no way the meeting with Kurtz can possibly be a satisfying payoff to top this amazing build-up ... except it's Marlon Brando at his most surreal putting in a performance in 15 minutes that matches his greatest body of work.
When it was over I'd felt completely exhausted, serene, and satisfied - a far cry from the giddiness of excitement I'd get leaving the theater from one of the summer blockbusters or screwball comedies previously mentioned. From that point, I committed myself to the hobby of seeking out a film experience that matched the first time I'd watched Apocalypse Now.
Also need to comment, as praised as the Redux version is, I emphatically prefer the original theatrical version. Redux has some interesting additions, but ultimately I think they make the film bloated and disjointed. The original is close to perfection in my mind without the additions.
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