Cinema Experts

“Help me Charlie, I wanna sing for no reason.”
Charlie is a successful and affluent bachelor in his mid-thirties who has a career writing advertisement jingles. Charlie resides in a large ocean front home in Malibu, California, and is portrayed as a chauvinist womanizer. The plot begins when his uptight brother Alan becomes divorced from his wife, loses his house to her and has to move in with his brother. His 10-year-old son (now 14) Jake often stays for weekends and at other times.
Rose is Charlie's zany neighbor and female stalker. We learn Rose had a one-night-stand with Charlie shortly before the show started and keeps entering his house through the patio in the most inopportune moments, expressing her ambition of obtaining Charlie, and often serving as a good albeit crazy friend and advisor. Although obviously troubled herself, Rose has stated a few times that she has a Master's degree in psychology. In various episodes it is insinuated that Rose is very slowly orchestrating a psychological plan to win Charlie back. Early in the series she's heard to say (to herself) "Phase one, complete".
In one episode, Rose's father, Harvey, asks Charlie of his intentions with his daughter after an apparent second one-night-stand between the two. Harvey then meets Charlie's and Alan's mother and has an affair with her, stalking her and popping in just like his daughter does. We then learn from Harvey's mother that "that's what happens when you marry a first cousin," explaining Rose's family's dementia soon after Rose revealing the one-night-stand was not real; they only woke up together.
Another important recurring character is Berta, the sarcastic cleaning lady with an acid tongue.
Alan and Charlie's mother, Evelyn (Holland Taylor) is a hip, wealthy, early-sixties, many-times-divorced, slightly slutty, controlling mother of the brothers. Charlie and Alan attribute their life's problems to the dark manipulative force their mother manages to exert upon them even now, adding to the caustic humor of the show in the situations when depicting their vain attempts to escape her.
Another recurring theme is the conflict of personalities between the two diametrically opposed siblings, the relaxed, good-life, woman-catching, commitment-phobic Charlie and the uptight self-conscious nerdy Alan. Alan can sometimes appear to be jealous of Charlie's lifestyle, and can sometimes try to stop Charlie's decisions. This also provides opportunities for comedy in the show, with Alan saying comments such as 'it's like talking to a horny chimp', or 'it's like trying to talk Shakespeare to a Hershey bar'... 10/10

“Napalm, son. Nothing in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know, one time we had a hill bombed, for 12 hours. When it was all over, I walked up. We didn't find one of 'em, not one stinkin' dink body. The smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole hill. Smelled like... victory…”
Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now is a pure example of method filmmaking. It is the true craftmanship of an essential filmmaker. The art direction, editing and sound effects are partially a small fragment which makes this film classical and memorable. What drives the integrity and semblance of the film is the storyline, acting and inner message. The inner message evidently enough is that war is hell, or in other words, hell is war. Not many directors have the ambition or the true courage to establish such a well-defined piece of art. European filmmakers wouldn't have the slightest problem of directing the film or throw in their personal feelings about the war. What is most interesting is that an American filmmaker spoke his style and the style of the film's collaborators through the continuance of the film.
The plot is fairly simple and brief, adapted by Joseph Conrad's Heart Of Darkness. Martin Sheen plays the role of Captain Willard, a war-torn character who does not see any hope in life or humanity anymore. He has a mission and it is to capture a presumed Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) who has fabricated an army of existensial soldiers on the outskirts of the Cambodian jungle. Throughout the film we encounter astonishing sequences. The most unforgettable is the dawn helicopter attacks. Robert Duvall's character Colonel Kilgore is a steady and firm example of the basic American army brain: to search and destroy and then destroy some more if it includes yourself. The children walk about the playground, oblivious to any danger. The helicopters come into view from the dawning sea; millions of sprinkle reflect from the water, we hear the helicopter's engines roar from the horizon and soon enough we are stuck in a messy attack. Throughout the sequence we hear Wagner's 'Ride Of The Valkyries'. It is method filmmaking. The starting sequence is as fascinating as the rest of the movie; a beautiful scene of palm trees blowing in the ragged wind and seconds away from being inflamed with a carpet bombing. Let's not forget the scene where the soldiers of the boat in which Sheen travels in, stop an innocent upcoming boat, suspecting them to be VietCongs and carrying artilleries. Then they spark off a heavy scene of shooting in which all of the passengers of the boat are pulverised to pieces with their crops and food savaged in the atrocity.
This film has its famous moment, some better to be kept quiet about until they come through the screen. It doesn't require any intellectual understanding, although the film is intellectually remarkable. The American soldiers in the Vietnam War jumped into the land of a fresh governmental country, aiming to protect themselves and in the end only received death and chaos for their troops and for the majority of the country they were fighting against. It was a war gone mad, like all other wars, without purpose or dignity. It was a pure act of humanity: to destroy and restore their own greedy needs. This is a film in which there is no saviour, where it is hardly possible to find hope in the gloomiest corners and where all surroundings are plagued with the infatuations of greed, anger, foolishness and egoism. As Coppola once said about the film: 'This film isn't about Vietnam. This film IS Vietnam'. He was right to the date. During the current situations of the world, where they are trying to protect their own skin, the world should try to analyse this film as much as possible and wonder about what it is trying to represent. It is a film which does not ask for applause or damnation. It asks for realism… 10/10