Daily Reads Jan 15

General

• A new whipping boy for Singaporean bloggers

  from Hear ye! Hear ye!

• On the Possibility of Religious Discourse in the Blogosphere

  from Singapore Angle

• Does SBS Transit need advertising?

  from Wanderings, Musings and Happenings from Ian on S

• Will our ministers ever sit down with adult singaporeans?

  from zyberzitizen

Innovation & Entrepreneurship

• Singapore – Classic Innovator’s Dilemma?

  from SingaporeSurf

• Entrepreneurship And the Future State of Affairs

  from theonlinecitizen

Why We Just Need To Snuff Out Col Kurtz – Apocalypse Now

“Apocalypse Now” (AN) is perhaps the quintessential Vietnam movie to end all Vietnam movies. Although it got mixed reviews, audiences were unanimous: Apocalypse Now was a movie that had all the powers to disturb. With some extraordinary set pieces, Coppola certainly achieved his aim of wanting to give his audience a grand scale of the horror, the madness, the sensuousness and the moral dilemma of the Vietnam War.

The quest for Col Kurtz, (played by an obese Marlon Brando) loosely based on Joseph Conrad’s 1902 short novel, “Heart of Darkness” is like a nightmarish Disneyland ride which ends when we and Capt Willard (played by Martin Sheen) are forced to listen to twenty minutes of the muddled mumblings of the crazed Brando, as he quotes T.S. Eliot. But it has a kind of grandeur of the preceding hundred and twenty minutes or so. Brando’s last words, “The horror! The horror!” summed up not only the theme of the film, but also Coppola’s personal belief that the film had become his own personal Vietnam, and he was turning into Kurtz.

“It’s scary to watch someone you love go into the centre of himself and confront his fears, fear of failure, fear of death, fear of going insane.”

Eleanor Coppola once wrote about the precarious mental disposition of Francis Coppola during the difficult filming of Apocalypse Now in the Philippines which was dogged by unfavorable weather conditions, budget overruns, bureaucratic red tape and a temperamental cast.

After three and a half years after it started shooting, with the initial thirteen-week schedule becoming two hundred and thirty-eight days, and the budget having risen implausibly from $12 to $31 million, much of it coming out from Coppola’s own pocket, Apocalypse Now finally opened in New York in August 1979. Although it got mixed reviews and would take nearly five years to break even – it was a resounding success.

Daily Reads Jan 14

• [ASEAN Summit] 1. This evening, the Leaders of … by George Yeo
  

  from a writer’s blog: my life, my thoughts

• Ripples From NKF Scandal Widely Felt

  from SingaporeSurf

• Real Worlds

  from Mr Wang Says So

• Would the absence of “Green” representation be problematic?

  from Singapore Angle: Perspectives

Gaming & Animation

• Is law enforcement necessarily the best method against unlicensed content?

  from Hear ye! Hear ye!

• Tell Me Something I Don’t Know