HOW TO PISS OFF NERDS, BY F.F. COPPOLA

I bought the fancy new double-disc version of Apocalypse Now, which is one of my top five movies ever by anybody (the others, today anyhow: Repo Man, Blade Runner director's cut, The Big Red One posthumous long version, and Road House tied with Day Of The Dead) yesterday. I am disappointed and angered by it, for one very big reason.

The set features both versions of the movie - the 1979 original, a/k/a/ "the good version," and Apocalypse Now Redux, a/k/a "what the fuck were you smoking? Seriously...the French plantation scene? Dude..." - along with an assload of bonus features, including full-length director's commentary tracks for both versions, a lost scene that's extremely damn creepy and dream-haunting, a bunch of other extended scenes in very rough form that wouldn't have added much of anything to either version of the flick and in some cases are pretty inexplicably weird, and a fistful of behind-the-scenes stuff about the sound mixing and the editing and all the stuff only hardcore geeks like me care about, but hardcore geeks like me care about those things a great deal indeed. (Side note: wasn't it great how I used "fistful" and "assload" in the same sentence right there? I know that's the kind of thing that keeps you folks coming back.)

Here's the problem, though: rather than do the sensible thing and put Apocalypse Now on Disc 1 and Apocalypse Now Reallysux on Disc 2, along with however many bonus features could fit, or putting both movies on Disc 1 and all the bonus features on Disc 2, they (and by "they," I mean Francis Ford Coppola, since he had to have signed off on this thing) put "Act 1" of each movie on Disc 1, and "Act 2" on Disc 2.

According to Coppola's logic, Act 1 runs from the beginning through the massacre of the family on the sampan, and Act 2 picks up right after that - basically, Do Lung Bridge to the end.

So now I have to keep my bare-bones AN DVD for when I feel like watching the movie for itself (have I made my disdain for the re-edit clear enough yet?), and I can pull out the extra nerdy party pack when I feel like listening to Marlon Brando read "The Hollow Men" for 15 minutes. Damn you, Coppola!