New Apocalypse Now DVD set this year? (1 Viewer)

[Brett_M]

I had no playback issues on my Oppo, nor did I notice any audio synching problems.

Dumb question time: Did you upgrade with the new firmware, Dave?

 

[Dave Mack]

Yeah I did do the March version, not the latest. Guess I should try? Have had more sync problems since upgrading to the March.



But there's still a ton of EE!

 

[Brett_M]

How big is your display?

 

[Dave Mack]

92" FP

 

[Brett_M]

Wow. Well, I'd say upgrade your firmware (the latest greatly improves the audio synching) and as for the EE -- DEAL WITH IT BUDDY.

 

[Michael Rogers]

Wow. I got mine at my Circuit City and it rung up $14.99 and as soon as I showed the ad, the cashier adjusted it. No problem, Thank Goodness!

 

[Sam Favate]

Not sure if this was mentioned but there is an easter egg on disc 2 of The Complete Dossier. On the last page of the DVD credits, highlight 'previous' and hit the left arrow button, a mushroom cloud will pop up on the left side of the screen. Hit enter, and hear (and see) John Milius talk about the genesis of the film's title.

I watched every bit of this set this weekend, and I think it is terrific. A great DVD of a great, great film. Now we need Hearts of Darkness on DVD! (Can it be that there has never been a DVD release of this film?)

 

[Dharmesh C]

I finished the visual extras, loved every minute of it. Well done, Kim Aubrey. It would have been nice to have had a 3 - 4hr documentary but I guess the audio commentary will make up for it.

 

[Dave Mack]

Any word on Bram Stoker's Dracula?

 

[David (C)]

It’s coming
The anticipation for this release is unbearable. My interest is most peaked by the inclusion of an all-new alternate cut.

 

[David (C)]

Did I post this Dracula news in the wrong thread?^^

 

[TravisR]

Yes.

 

[Tom_Ca]

"In a note released with the film, Coppola emphasizes that this new material was not simply shoehorned into the original version of the film, but that "Redux" is "a new rendition of the movie from scratch." He and his longtime editor Walter Murch "re-edited the film from the original unedited raw footage -- the dailies," he says, and so possibly even some of the shots that look familiar to us are different takes than the ones we saw before."


Given that, how could seamless branching work?
If in theory Redux is a completely new cut?

 

[mike kaminski]

They didn't re-edit the entire film. The original cut took four or five people over a year to do. Certain scenes were just re-tooled. For instance, the surf board scene has new sections added to it, but some of the pre-existing shots have been shortened, lengthened, whathaveyou, so that scene is not just the original scene with new shots mechanically slapped in but an actual re-edit of it to accomodate how the new additions change the balance. Or at least that is basically the gist of how they approached it. So even though theres more changes than may first be apparent, theres still not as much as you would think.

 

[Elijah Sullivan]

No offense, but that still doesn't make sense.

Either Coppola exaggerates how radical the new cut is, or the DVD does not truly contain both cuts. It is simply impossible, as Tom said above, to include both; the number of branching points would be astronomical, as would the necessary amount of storage.

As Murch says himself in his book, In the Blink of an Eye: "...a scene made up of only twenty-five shots can be edited in approximately 39,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999 different ways... ...If you had fifty-nine shots for a scene, which is not at all unusual, you would potentially have as many possible versions of that scene as there are subatomic particles in the entire universe!" (Exclamation point his. See pages 79-80 in his book for an explanation of his logic.)

I tend to lean towards thinking that the new DVD only includes Redux (because the entire transfer was supposedly made from the new dye-transfer print) with a shortened version standing in for the theatrical version. A pity, because I personally was not impressed by the Redux version at all.

This question actually bugs be enough that I've been uninterested in my Complete Dossier disc since it was released.

 

[mike kaminski]

Its actually not that hard to follow. The re-worked scenes number probably...what, a dozen? Across two disks. So you have the roughly 100 minutes of the theatrical cut on disk 1, with maybe a half dozen branch points, accounting for about an additional 20 minutes of reworked scenes on that first disk.

I think the main ones reworked are: the "charlie don't surf" sequence, the ski sequence which now comes later in the film and a few little bits surrounding it, the refuelling sequence, the lead in and out of the plantation sequence, two of the scenes with Kurtz, and maybe a bit here and there that I am missing. I think Redux is 35 minutes longer but the amount of footage touched is probably closer to about 40 minutes.

So, you might say Coppola is exaggerating but he's really not: most scenes that had additional footage put in them were reworked to balance out some of the new footage, and the lead in and out of entire new scenes was re-edited so the new scenes are not just "dropped" in the pre-existing footage. So if the "Charlie don't surf" sequence is normally ten minutes long, and now its extended to thirteen minutes, maybe only the last minute of those pre-existing ten minutes have been touched in some manner, so the branching adds four minutes instead of three, which is not that much. I'm just making this up as an example, but its not that much.

Actually, now that I think about it, wasn't this done without branching? I seem to have this vague memory that it was in fact two different transfers. Am I imagining things?

 

[cafink]

I'm pretty sure the "complete dossier" DVD set uses seamless branching to present the two versions of the film. If they were going to use two completely separate transfers, why wouldn't they have just put each on its own disc instead of spreading both across the two discs?

 

[mdnitoil]

The Beaver review claims that Dossier is branched, for what that's worth.

 

[Elijah Sullivan]

My assertion was that Coppola's claim that Redux was reworked from scratch negates the possibility that the original schematics of both films is presented on the Complete Dossier DVD.

If Murch created Redux from scratch then it's impossible to use seamless branching. Obviously Redux is not "reduxed" but "extended"; that or the theatrical cut is absent from the new disc.

So Coppola incorrectly promoted one of the two - Redux or Complete Dossier.

 

[cafink]

As popular as this film is, and as extensively as its been pored over in its various incarnations, I'm sure we'd have heard by now if the "Complete Dossier" did not actually contain the original theatrical cut as advertised. I'm not especially familiar with the film (I've only seen it once and, honestly, didn't care for it all that much), but my guess is that Coppola exaggerated the extent to which Redux differs from the original.