This listing is for Apocalypse Now LaserDisc LD (1979) LV 2306.
Country: USA
Released: 1981
Publisher: Paramount Home Video
Price: $39.98 USD
UPC: (none)
I-S-B-N: (none)
Category: War
Color: Color
Length: 153 min.
Sides: 3
Chapters: 19
Size: 12"
Picture: Pan & Scan
Ratio: 1.33:1
Plastic: Transparent
Cover: Standard
Apocalypse Now is a 1979 American epic psychological war film directed and produced by Francis Ford Coppola. It stars Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall, Martin Sheen, Frederic Forrest, Albert Hall, Sam Bottoms, Laurence Fishburne, and Dennis Hopper. The screenplay, co-written by Coppola and John Milius with narration written by Michael Herr, is loosely based on the 1899 novella Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, with the setting changed from late 19th-century Congo to the Vietnam War. The film follows a river journey from South Vietnam into Cambodia undertaken by Captain Benjamin L. Willard (Martin Sheen), who is on a secret mission to assassinate Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a renegade Army Special Forces officer accused of murder and who is presumed insane.
Milius became interested in adapting Heart of Darkness for a Vietnam War setting in the late 1960s, and initially began developing the film with Coppola as producer and George Lucas as director. After Lucas became unavailable, Coppola took over directorial control, and was influenced by Werner Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) in his approach to the material. Initially set to be a five-month shoot, a series of problems lengthened it to over a year, as chronicled in the documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse (1991). These problems included expensive sets destroyed by severe weather, Brando showing up on set overweight and completely unprepared, and Sheen having a breakdown and suffering a near-fatal heart attack on location. When photography was finally finished, the release was postponed several times while Coppola edited over a million feet of film. Apocalypse Now was honored with the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, where it premiered unfinished before it was finally released on August 15, 1979, by United Artists. It performed well at the box office, grossing $40 million domestically and going on to gross over $100 million worldwide. Initial reviews were mixed; while Vittorio Storaro's cinematography was widely acclaimed, several critics found Coppola's handling of the story's major themes anticlimactic and intellectually disappointing.
Apocalypse Now is today widely considered one of the greatest and most influential films ever made. It was nominated for eight Academy Awards at the 52nd Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director (Coppola), and Best Supporting Actor for Duvall, and went on to win for Best Cinematography and Best Sound. It ranked No. 14 in Sight & Sound's greatest films poll in 2012, and No. 6 in the Director's Poll of greatest films of all time. Roger Ebert also included it in his top 10 list of greatest films ever in 2012. In 2000, it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant".
LaserDisc (LD) is a home video format and the first commercial optical disc storage medium, initially licensed, sold, and marketed as MCA DiscoVision (also known as simply "DiscoVision") in North America in 1978. Although the format was capable of offering higher-quality video and audio than its consumer rivals, the VHS and Betamax videocassette systems, LaserDisc never managed to gain widespread use in North America, largely due to high costs for the players and video titles themselves and the inability to record TV programming. It also remained a largely obscure format in Europe and Australia. By contrast, the format was much more popular in Japan and in the more affluent regions of Southeast Asia, such as Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia, being the prevalent rental video medium in Hong Kong during the 1990s. Its superior video and audio quality did make it a somewhat popular choice among videophiles and film enthusiasts during its lifespan.
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