A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

(C) 2015 Paramount Home Entertainment When Australian director Peter Weir (“Gallipoli”) began filming “Witness” in 1984, Harrison Ford was a major action-adventure star known for his roles as Han Solo in the “Star Wars” trilogy and Indiana Jones in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.” At the time, though, few moviegoers considered Ford as an actor capable of playing a romantic lead on the silver screen. (Ford starred in Peter Hyams’ 1979 World War II melodrama “Hanover Street,” but it failed to earn popular and critical acclaim.) Happily for Ford and movie audiences everywhere, Weir’s film about John Book, a Philadelphia police captain who falls in love with a beautiful Amish widow (Kelly McGillis) while hiding out in the Pennsylvania countryside from a posse of corrupt cops changed that perception forever. “Witness” proved that Ford could play complex and down to Earth characters beyond the iconic heroes he is still best known for. Writt

(C) 2010 Paramount Pictures Apocalypse Now: Full Disclosure Box Set (2010) Kilgore: I love the smell of napalm in the morning. Many film critics and movie lovers consider director Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 Vietnam War movie Apocalypse Now to be one of the best war movies ever made. The late Roger Ebert hailed Coppola’s original version as “one of the key films of the century,” while Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers calls the longer 2001 Apocalypse Now Redux “one for the ages when it comes to the moral battles of war.” In Apocalypse Now, Coppola and screenwriter John Milius ( Red Dawn ) take Joseph Conrad’s 1902 Africa-set novella Heart of Darkness and carried it forward in time to the hellish jungles of Southeast Asia.  The filmmakers depict 1960s era helicopter gunships flying into battle accompanied by Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” and change the narrator’s name from Marlow to Capt. Willard.  However, they keep Conrad’s haunting vision of a nightmarish