Laugh? I nearly...

The always funny Ryan McGee has posted a list of DVD features he'd like to see but, alas probably never will. Have a read and complement him on his good taste in movies.

Also, I've added some links that I've been meaning to put up for a few weeks now. This is all to make up for the lack of recent content. But there's a couple of things in the works, I promise. Ms. jonboywalton and I have been to see a few movies lately, and the plastic film just came off my new copy of The Shining DVD (replacing my trusty VHS copy), so I'm going to be putting some stuff up soon. You'll just have to be patient.

Knee-Jerk Response or Sinister Marketing Ploy

When did the "Director's Cut" become a part of daily Hollywood movie-making life? What was once a concession made to a filmmaker at the top of his game by the film's owners (kind of like canine visitation rights after the divorce, or getting to tell your side of the story on Oprah), the opportunity to present the director's original vision of how a story should have been appreciated is now an entitlement as much as your own trailer and a nifty fold-up chair with your name stencilled on it (in much the same way that it seems anyone who opens their wallet on set is entitled to a producers's credit).

Once, and not that long ago either, seeing ": the director's cut" after the title on a video cover - or, if the gods were smiling on a certain someone's career that month, a poster for the cinematic re-release - really meant something. It meant another twenty minutes of Betty Blue or The Abyss - the reintroduction of the bit that helped all the rest to make sense (originally pulled because a test audience in Burbank couldn't collectively spell "narrative", let alone follow one), or - more rarely - the removal of some element(s), such as the voice-over and "let's leave the people in no doubt" ending in the original release of Ridley Scott's Kubrick-movie Blade Runner.

These days every third movie at the multiplex will come out with a alternative- or extended version on DVD, usually about six or eight weeks after the cinema release version hit the shelves (though, in these days of high market-compression, more and more often we're seeing parallel releases). Donnie Darko I can understand. I was scratching my head over that one for a week after I saw it - it begs for the director's-cut treatment. But King Arthur? (Or, for that matter, Armaggedon? Resident Evil? The Chronicles of Riddick? American Pie?) It all seems pretty straight forward. The need to use those extra couple of hundred feet of footage you shot does not, in itself, constitute a good reason for releasing a new version of a film. In fact it can actually make an already good film a little clumsey and long-winded (ladies and gentlemen of the jury, may I present Exibit A, Dances With Wolves).

There seems to be only two possible reasons for this sudden mushrooming of special edition popularity; one is organic, the other cynical, but they're both related to money and they aren't mutually exclusive. Firstly, there's the lemming principle. This can be summed up in four words: "Well, George did it..." Here "George" could be replaced with, "Stephen", "Ridley", "James", "Luc", or any number of successful directors' first names. Nobody ever went broke underestimating the humility of people working in the movie industry, and this is a case in point. When it gets out that Frank Coppola is making a vampire movie, every studio has to make their own vampire movie. Similarly, when someone like a Richard Kelly releases their own version of how a movie should have been seen, every director in town tries to remember how they envisaged the look of their last piece (before the producers and the coke showed up). The thing to remember is, Kelly did it because it made for a better movie. So did Scott; so did Cameron; so did Besson. George did it because he's George and because he could.

Secondly, the movies are first and foremost about making money. These days international DVD release rights are discussed in parallel with principal cast negotiations. With shorter cinema runs and the aforementioned compression of the market life-cycle of a movie from about eighteen or twenty months (premiere to VHS sell-through) down to about three, the marketers and promoters are looking for any angle they can find to squeeze a few more nickels out of their boss's $80 million investment. It's not personal, they tell us - it's just business. We're all just trying to make a living.

Intellectually I know this to be true. But for people like me, sitting outside of the industry looking in, it's just one more thing that takes some of the magic out of the movies. DVD technology has offered a unique gift to filmmakers - it, more than anything else, has halped to democratize the Special Edition treatment. The extended fight-scene toward the end of X-Men 2 (between Wolverine and Deathstrike) literally raises the scene to mythological proportions, eliciting comparisons (for me, at least) with Achilles and Penthesilia. But for every movie that benefits from additional footage or editorial tinkering, there seems to be a legion of Highlander II's.

It would be futile to ask for some discretion to be exersiced regarding who gets to do what to a movie; there's too much at stake and too many fingers in the pie. I suppose just because they make them, doesn't mean we have to watch them. And every so often you'll get The Big Blue or Blade Runner: Special Edition, and suddenly there's some of that magic again.

Mea culpa

Yeah, I know. It's been a week, nearly two. I never call, I never write. And I promised to keep in touch. Well, sometimes life gets in the way. Work's been piling up and I'm trying to do some things around the house, and...

OMG, I'm becoming that blogger. When I started this I told myself I wasn't going to bore my three-or-so readers with the sad minutiae of my life (and that I wouldn't use contractions like OMG - well, WTF).

I can teel you I have been considering the breadth of talent exibited by Harvey Keitel over his long and distinguished career, gathering my thoughts for a post in the not too distant future I hope. And I have also been thinking about revisionism in the Western genre. Kind of from Broken Arrrow to Unforgiven. More on that in a couple of weeks too, I think. More on these when I've got more than five minutes spare.

If you're that starved for some distraction, I've been posting pretty regularly to my other blog, though you won't find anything there as considered or erudite as what I try to offer here.