report date: May 11, 2001

By JOHN HARKNESS

CANNES - The three-and-a-half-hour new version of Apocalypse Now, referred to as Apocalypse Now Redux, premiered this morning, and it's definitely longer than the old version.

The good news is that the good stuff is all still there, more or less intact - Robert Duvall's performance and the Air Cavalry attack to Wagner, Frederic Forrest's great turn as Chef, the nightmare sequence at Do Lung Bridge.

The bad news is that the expanded version doesn't improve on the original. It doesn't solve the film's huge third-act problems, and the long added scenes with the Playboy centrefolds and the French family's plantation were originally cut out of the picture for a reason. They stop the film dead in its tracks. For all Coppola's talk about their philosophical importance to the film, he now thinks that he was bowing to what he thought contemporary audiences would stand for back in 1979, which means that he didn't think audiences would sit still for long meandering scenes loaded with "philosophical" importance. Well, hell, Coppola ain't Kierkegaard.

IT'S NOT HOW LONG YOU MAKE IT - After last year's extravaganza of three-hour movies, this year's Competition actually has a clear majority of films running less than two hours. And the longest film in the Official Selection doesn't come from a Japanese obscurantist or someone doing a recreation of two or three volumes of Proust. No siree, Bob. It's not even Coppola. It's Martin Scorsese, who has a four-hour documentary on the Italian cinema - something he apparently knocked off during the filming of The Gangs Of New York.

AGE AND ACTRESSES - I wandered over to the Market and saw some of Dancing At The Blue Iguana, Michael Radford's study of the angst-ridden lives of exotic dancers in a southern California strip club. (We should note that this is a film by the director of Il Postino so it's serious filmmaking, not exploitation, which means that nobody has any fun, including the audience.)

One of the odder elements was that Daryl Hannah and Jennifer Tilly were in it, playing dancers. It's odd simply because both women are pushing 40 - and hard - kind of old for strippers, particularly in L.A., where attractive young women are stuck in a buyer's market.

Tilly's had an interesting marginal career, with her fluke Oscar nomination for Bullets Over Broadway and the occasional great role in films like Bound. It's never surprising to see Tilly in a film - her filmography suggests that she'll turn up in pretty much anything, and she even wrote an article for Premiere on the art of doing nude scenes. But I'd be very interested in hearing what Hannah was thinking during the making of this film - she's been in the business more than 20 years (a small role in Brian De Palma's The Fury was her debut) and for most of the 80s - Splash, Roxanne, Steel Magnolias - she looked like she was either a star or about to be a star. And now she's 40 and playing a stripper. I think her main thought would be, "What the hell happened to my career?"

XMAS GIFT - Finally saw some great new film footage. I can't say I saw a great film, because the film isn't finished, but the 25 minutes or so that New Line screened from Peter Jackson's Lord Of The Rings, including a more-or-less complete 14-minute sequence from the battle with the orcs in the mines of Moria up to the beginning of Gandalf's confrontation with the Balrog was as stunning a piece of celluloid as I've seen this year. Jackson, whose films include Heavenly Creatures and the much underrated The Frighteners, is a director with a genuine feel for fantasy. What bothers me about what I saw is that I have to wait until Christmas to see the rest.

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