'Once Upon A Time In America': A Butchered Film Rising Up As A Phoenix
cinephiliabeyond.org
cinephiliabeyond.org
edit: link
Attending that screening caused me to discover one of my favorite American films.
[At long last, materials for some of these missing sections have been found and re-inserted into the picture under the supervision of Leone’s family and surviving collaborators. The work has been completed by the magnificent team at Cineteca di Bologna and L’Immagine Ritrovata, and it has been wonderful to witness this enlargement of Leone’s vision, step by precious step.” —Martin Scorsese, Founder and Chair, The Film Foundation]
As I said, I saw it a long time ago (and I'm no movie expert), but me and the friend who watched it with me agreed the 229 minute version was pretty good but could have been better with some editing to cut the run time... though we didn't have the Cannes version to compare it to (or the knowledge that that version existed)
edit: oops, I guess the theatrical version, not the Cannes version.
This article is from 2015. It's annoying when articles don't display their original publish date and you need to view source to see it.
I remember reading a theory that the main storyline in doesnt actually happen, and it is just an opium induced haze of de niro's character
I also consider this to be Sergio Leone's best movie and one of the must-watch movies by any movie fan.
Don't get me wrong, on its own terms The Killer is an amazing film, basically defining the heroic bloodshed action genre, and together with Hard Boiled and A Better Tomorrow among the three must-see John Woo movies.
251 min running time
This is the proper theatrical release with an optional commentary track.
For the 4h11m version, the commentary was dropped due to a lack of space and also because the commentary doesn't cover the additional scenes.
[1] http://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Once-Upon-a-Time-in-America-Bl...
It's very tricky to fit a 4 hour movie into my life nowadays.
It's my favourite movie, for the visual storytelling in particular.
Sometimes I wonder what film history would look like, if only movie directors, producers and distributors had accepted the serial format earlier. It took the success of Return of the Jedi to make it acceptable to spread a story over multiple features, and even then it was considered just a geek thing until Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings saga. Now Marvel keeps scoring hit after hit with the biggest shared-continuity universe in the business, auteurs have embraced serialization with high-quality TV series, and it's only a matter of time before someone starts purposefully making non-genre continuity-linked trilogies.
In the UK we had a series called GBH that blew me away as a young person. I keep meaning to rewatch it to see if it's as good as I remember.
I've watched it recently, and it's super-fun, but not thoughtful or deep. It's just a LibDem/Tory slander against Militant starring a cartoon character sexually impotent lefty pol who pours campaign fund champagne over hookers while plotting petty revenge against his childhood enemies, slapping children and wetting the bed.
Nelson is Bleasdale's hero: long standing Labour member. Wants to teach kids, but would never cross a picket line. Doesn't use the personal stuff the establishment have dug up to discredit Murray. &c
Incidentally, I lived near Hatton back in the day. He had done extremely well financially out of his time at the council.
You can't reasonably accuse Alan Bleasdale of being anything close to a LibDem/Tory propagandist. Not without shifting the Overton window to a preposterous degree. There's a lot of space to place one's self in between Blair and Militant without because accused of betraying Labour's principles.
I've watched GBH a few times since it aired and I think it still holds up. Certainly give it a go if you get the chance. The original UK TV version of 'Edge of Darkness' is also still very, very watchable. Some remarkable scenes and performances.
As a huge fan of Blade Runner, I strongly disagree. A masterpiece I've watched plenty of times already and love dearly, but there simply isn't enough plot to stretch into a series. I'm a bit upset at the general tendency to turn everything (books, movies) into trilogies, and then have prequels, sequels and whatnot. I'd rather have a single beautiful piece of art, and then have the director and scriptwriter move on to different works. I prefer focus to a never-ending milking of the proverbial cash cow. I don't enjoy "shared universes" or "world building" -- I'd rather have a single, focused good movie.
Or, to paraphrase Eldon Tyrell:
"The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long, and you have burned so very, very brightly, Blade Runner."
No more sequels. No more trilogies. I beg you, Hollywood!
(I've watched the European cut several times. I also hate the modern trend for over-long films or episodic TV with a thin plot stretched out.)
I assume I shall have to watch the whole thing before it meshes into coherence, so at this point no ruminations on the actual quality of the thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodorowsky's_Dune
It may also be confusing Lynch's film with the 2000 Sci-Fi miniseries Frank Herbert's Dune, which totalled roughly 5 hours across three episodes.
The most recent version of the film is 250 minutes long and was released in 2014 containing the extra 20 minutes of restored footage.