“I Love the Smell of Coppola In the Morning”

Apocalypse Now voted best film of the last 25 years by Brits:

In a poll organized by the British Film Institute’s Sight & Sound magazine, the 1979 epic beat Martin Scorsese’s “Raging Bull” into second place and Ingmar Bergman’s “Fanny and Alexander” into third.

“Apocalypse Now deserves its position for being a richly complex, madcap experiment in war film-making that comes off because it never falls from the tightrope it walks between extravagance and profundity,” Sight & Sound editor Nick James said in a statement.

A panel of 50 British film experts were asked to consider 259 films made between 1978 and now.

Makes sense to me, the film has a strange, dark, enduring power; and I agree with the Nick James statement about a tightrope, but I see the walk between objective and subjective reality. As the viewer assumes various characters’ subjective experience of of the narrative, jolts of objective reality – usually in the form of violence – snaps the character and the viewer into a broader, “neutral” perspective. Though the story is not, this tone is true to Conrad.