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Films that would've been better had they been shorter

Flying Spaghetti Monster said:
2001, call it a classic with its effects. But it takes hours to tell what is at most a 45 minute story.
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This film is not about "efficiency" in story telling. Not at all
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Yeah, I don't agree that 2001 would be better if it was cut to 45 minutes.

But I still think it could be improved by a few trims here and there.

Part of the problem is that it's no longer 1968, and people are watching it today in a format for which it was not designed.

My Dad saw 2001 the year it was released, in 70mm, on a Cinerama screen at the Indian Hills Theater in Omaha, Nebraska. He assures me that it was mind-blowing.

But after forty-two years of space movies, it has inevitably lost some of its impact, especially when viewed on a TV screen.
 
^I think watching it on a decent sized modern TV in HD might alleviate that problem.

My HD-DVD copy is stunning.
 
I think it's possible to argue that 2001 is a more serious venture than, for instance, The Return of the King, without getting bogged down in arthouse terminology. That way lies pretentiousness, if I'm writing it, at least.
 
Sunshine:
You could delete pretty much the second half of the movie since it only turns into a crappy rip-off of Event Horizon anyway.

Lord of the Rings trilogy:
Lots of times the movies were so boring they made the TMP drydock scene look like time-lapse!

Transformers 2:
I don't even dare to think about how long that movie would'Ve been had they actually known what the hell they're doing.

Titan AE:
One of the first modern animation movies which figured out that with today's audience you don't have to have a clue as long as you have flashy effects. Probably a good thing that whole department tanked instead of becoming repeat offenders.

Star Trek 5 - The Final Boredom:
There's a fan-made re-cut that actually turns it into an almost bearable episode with a bigger budget.

Alien vs. Predator 2:
Just show the hybrid being born and wreaking havoc aboard the Predator ship. The rest of the movie wasn't worth watching anyway.

Matrix trilogy:
Most of the second movie and the complete third movie. Shortly after the first one the Wachowski brothers ran out of stuff to copy (e.g., Ghost in the Shell) and it really shows.

Dune TV adaptions:
Just because Frank Herbert's books are boring as hell thanks to him dedicatiing ten pages to whenever a sandworm farts in the desert doesn't mean the TV adaption has to suffer from the same problem.

2001:
The alien sequence near the end is full of great moments and interesting effects but it's also so slow they could use it as a superior alternative to valium.

Goldeneye:
Why even have the whole train sequence at all except to keep the pytotech experts busy? The few important lines of dialogue could'Ve just as well be integrated into other parts.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom:
What's the point of the dinner scene except to gross out people and waste time?

Lost in Space:
Lose the whole "my stepdaddy was a mutated spider thingy" part.
 
lennier1 said:
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom:
What's the point of the dinner scene except to gross out people and waste time?
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Exposition.

From what I've read, the only alternative Spielberg could think of was a tiger hunt--and he decided that would be more trouble and expense than it was worth.
 
Deckerd said:
Camelopard said:
Deckerd said:
Yes.
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:(
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You could download the Requiem, or even buy it from the Big River. Best listened to with a glass of wine under your belt and nobody else in the house (to come in and say "what the hell is that?")
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Oh, I'm way ahead of you here. I have both of the available recordings of Ligeti's Requiem on CD--the first from Wergo, and the second from Teldec.

I'm not sure which I prefer--the Teldec version has better sound quality, but the older Wergo version has a rawness and intensity to it that I also like.

If you like Ligeti's Requiem, then I would recommend Krzysztof Penderecki's Magnificat and Utrenja. They're both in the same vein. Stanley Kubrick even used some of the latter in The Shining.
 
I'm working on Mahler just now. The Proms start tonight and, as usual the Beeb have pulled all the stops out for the opening night. 6 choirs, a beefed up BBC SO, massed soloists and Jiří Bělohlávek
 
I revisited Shutter Island and it held up to a second viewing remarkably well for a 'twist' film; it's rather cleverly put together.

However, my criticisms held up as well. I noticed on second viewing that the film already exhibits signs of having been cut to the bone, so I can only imagine what it was like before. A few of the scene transitions are positively awkward, the transition from the protagonists exiting Ward C to suddenly climbing through the woods being perhaps the most noticeable. And the Ward C sequence itself was positively interminable.

Some folks claim that the WW2 concentration camp flashbacks in the film are pointless; I disagree entirely. Of all the criticisms that I'd level against the flashbacks, 'pointless' isn't one of them. In the WW2 flashbacks we see the origin of the protagonist's steadfast refusal to accept that he is a 'man of violence' despite the innumerable acts of violence he commits throughout the film.
 
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AI would've been incredibly better if it had ended right when the fade-to-black with the android-kid "praying" to the Blue Fiary occured. The coda with the aliens and the bizzare "bringing the mom back to life... as an adult... with all her memories (thought not the ones of her asshole of an other kid or her husband)... for only one day... for some reason using and all done by using DNA from snipped hair... which doesn't include DNA" thing was dumb and just drug the movie down.
 
Trekker4747 said:
AI would've been incredibly better if it had ended right when the fade-to-black with the android-kid "praying" to the Blue Fiary occured. The coda with the aliens and the bizzare "bringing the mom back to life... as an adult... with all her memories (thought not the ones of her asshole of an other kid or her husband)... for only one day... for some reason using and all done by using DNA from snipped hair... which doesn't include DNA" thing was dumb and just drug the movie down.
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Was that after the credits or did I block it from memory?
 
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