Maicol Andrés Ordoñez

25Dec08

As was the case with "Rumble Fish" and "Apocalypse Now" to his recent movie "Youth Without Youth", Coppola has been making movies that carry themselves visually more than narratively. I'll admit. Story isn't all that important to me. It's fine when I see the movie but when I remember a movie I never really recall any important plot elements. Only an idea or an image or a moment. Like later year Nabokov novels or the work of Danielewski, I enjoy films that function like poems more than narratives. "Apocalypse Now" succeeds in my opinion as a tone poem of dark, elegant, visceral, magnificent images. The movie is one big war cry. A sequence of madness. Story? I couldn't tell you. Not to say I don't know a good story when I see one. That's just no the reason I go to see movies. Anyway, Coppola doesn't have to prove he can write stories or not. He's proven with his screenplays for "Patton" and "The Godfather" and "The Conversation" and even "Dracula" that he can tell great stories. That isn't a priority all the time. His mission is to create a visual tapestry. That's the restraint placed upon cinema a lot of the time. That's why filmmakers go into Video Art or Music Videos a lot of the time. There's this expectation that a movie has to have a story or a great narrative or academic explanations of its ideas. A great image or visual texture can't be explored a lot of the time because there has to be an explanation for it or narrative weight attached. I think an image can hold its own. My expectations from art are different I think. Anyway, photography. I need to rewatch YWY again too. Let's move this conversation to the forum.