Word: viet
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...support of solar energy, attacks on big corporations, a noninterventionist foreign policy and a lingering nostalgia for the impassioned politics and communal undertakings of the 1960s. The Governor has even adopted much of the Haydens' rhetoric, including their favorite image for describing the energy crisis: "The Viet Nam of the 1980s...
Brown revealed his new strategy in a series of controversial appointments. In July he named Edison Miller, a former P.O.W. in Viet Nam, to the Orange County board of supervisors. Miller had been formally censured by the Navy Department after an investigation into charges that he had collaborated with the North Vietnamese. But he was recommended by Fonda, who met him when she was broadcasting anti-American messages from Hanoi during the war. She also served as matron of honor at Miller's recent second marriage; Hayden was best...
...such is the nature of the entire film that even these hallucinatory passages are not so powerful as they might be. At times they are as anesthetizing as the Viet Nam footage that once dominated TV's evening newscasts. What is missing from these panoramas of death is a human context. There are almost no well-defined characters in Apocalypse Now. The biggest nonentity of all, sadly enough, is Willard. We are supposed to see the movie through his eyes-which are frequently superimposed on the film's images-but those eyes tell us nothing...
...about his domain. Nor do we know why Willard, a sudden convert to Kurtz's undefined cause, goes ahead and kills him. By withholding this information, Coppola gives up his final chance to confront the issues his film initially intended to explore. The journey into America's Viet Nam madness-not to mention the journey into Willard's and Kurtz's souls-reaches its dead end in a quagmire of freshman English class recitations...
...real sadness of the movie, however, is not that Kurtz eludes Coppola's grasp, but that Viet Nam does. In its cold, haphazard way, Apocalypse Now does remind us that war is hell, but that is not the same thing as confronting the conflicts, agonies and moral chaos of this particular war. Yet, lest we lose our perspective in contemplating this disappointing effort, it should be remembered that the failure of an ambitious $30 million film is not a tragedy. The Viet Nam War was a tragedy. Apocalypse Now is but this decade's most extraordinary Hollywood folly...