So, 'Youth Without Youth' is Coppola, Sr's return to film-making after a glaring ten-year absence, following a series of unremarkable movies in the late '90s. 'Youth Without Youth' is certainly remarkable, but the appropriate remark is closer to "Yikes!" than "Wow!" 'Youth Without Youth' reveals an artist who has lost touch with a lot of things, including narrative grasp, sense, reason, and reality. I guess that's what happens when you're hermetically sealed inside your own vineyard with way too much money, and a daughter whose creative vision has eclipsed your own, erasing the exclusivity of the family name.
'Youth Without Youth' begins with great promise, quickly becomes very curious, slowly emerges as silly, and finally winds up a titanic, lumbering, tedious, incomprehensible bore. The first half hour introduces sounds and images that are striking, haunting, and fresh, suggesting a new career phase for the elder Cope. They verge on outright experimentalism. The last hour is just images and stuff sort of happening on a screen. Comparable to nothing else in Coppola's career except, by some stretch, 'Bram Stoker's Dracula' (or, Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula), this movie becomes a wannabe philosophical discourse with a hefty cloak of gravity, with Tim Roth engaging in a some very long-winded dialogues with his alter ago amidst themes incorporating the Third Reich, immortality, and Sanskrit. The elder Cope wants Big Big Big Themes addressed, and the wants to effect sweeping erosion of the Sands of Time, and perhaps wants to exorcise some of his Late Life Crises... and of course, being the Titan he once was, having retained the visionary/delusional drive that made Apocalypse Now possible, he doesn't seem to feel it necessary to invite anyone else inside what he's constructed. This is a house built entirely for himself. Admirable, perhaps, but it shouldn't surprise Cope or anyone else that this movie has been projected onto screens facing empty chairs.
The movie's about 15% pure poetry, and 85% pure B.S. The writing is laughable, if you're in the right mood, and stylistically, it's as though the elder Cope himself has regressed in age to become a film student again, inventing cinematic tricks that service nothing, really. I think the man's gone batty.
'Youth Without Youth' begins with great promise, quickly becomes very curious, slowly emerges as silly, and finally winds up a titanic, lumbering, tedious, incomprehensible bore. The first half hour introduces sounds and images that are striking, haunting, and fresh, suggesting a new career phase for the elder Cope. They verge on outright experimentalism. The last hour is just images and stuff sort of happening on a screen. Comparable to nothing else in Coppola's career except, by some stretch, 'Bram Stoker's Dracula' (or, Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula), this movie becomes a wannabe philosophical discourse with a hefty cloak of gravity, with Tim Roth engaging in a some very long-winded dialogues with his alter ago amidst themes incorporating the Third Reich, immortality, and Sanskrit. The elder Cope wants Big Big Big Themes addressed, and the wants to effect sweeping erosion of the Sands of Time, and perhaps wants to exorcise some of his Late Life Crises... and of course, being the Titan he once was, having retained the visionary/delusional drive that made Apocalypse Now possible, he doesn't seem to feel it necessary to invite anyone else inside what he's constructed. This is a house built entirely for himself. Admirable, perhaps, but it shouldn't surprise Cope or anyone else that this movie has been projected onto screens facing empty chairs.
The movie's about 15% pure poetry, and 85% pure B.S. The writing is laughable, if you're in the right mood, and stylistically, it's as though the elder Cope himself has regressed in age to become a film student again, inventing cinematic tricks that service nothing, really. I think the man's gone batty.