Posted by myrrh on November 24, 1999 at 17:44:11:
Pardon me while I wax reflective, here.
Ahhhhh�...
It's the end of the workweek. We're sliding into the first of two significant holidays right on top of each other that have always been opportunities to connect with loved ones, to do things in service of other people, to focus on the good in the human spirit, to feel in some sense "at one" with everybody else on the planet.
What a wonderful time. You can feel the excitement building. Whether you do Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, Solstice or Christmas or...? The celebration is approaching that marks the mid-point of our darkness!! � also marking
the return of the light!
(Marcia, you can take a snooze here�this doesn't apply to people who live in the Tropics!)
I guess it doesn't hurt that as soon as I got home from work today I partook of a celebratory attitude adjustment, huh?
Like I said: Aaaaaaahhh�. :)
Now. On to the business at hand:
It's killing me that I don't have access to this freakin' DVD!! (what do we call them in the familiar? "Discs?").
For a while I was seriously considering NOT buying it now, based on what I've heard so far. It's my perturbed jab back at Mann for not doing anything that made any sense on the Director's Cut! More than a jab. More like a stab. More than perturbed. More like deeply pissed.
But oh, well. What can we do? Everybody sees things through their own prism, and I guess Michael Mann envisioned this movie way differently than all of us thought he did. Put another way - The man must have gone temporarily insane. That's what I think. I think some insane Hollywood THING happened, whereby maybe he might have been suddenly pressured to wrap it up and get it done, and he wasn't quite prepared, but had to do it. (All conjecture on my part.) Maybe he was angry about something when he did it... Maybe he was having a personal crisis of some kind. It's hard for me to imagine what might have happened to make him, a man who has been so consistently high-high-quality over the years, produce the kind of product that would be so universally (so far) UNfavored by LOTM connoisseurs!
In any event, it seems his director's cut (see, I'm not even going to dignify it with Capital letters!) falls far short of what the consensus of what a Director's Cut should be is! Wait a minute, what did I just say?? YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN!
Maybe I'm nuts, but I'm picking up on a feeling that something intervened (how, what, I don't know) and he allowed himself to get somehow emotionally cut off from his brainchild, his sacred creation. Why else would he have done the DC the way he did...I'm still puzzling.
I wonder if he knows how it's being received? Was it previewed by any audience, or did Mann just sit in his basement editing for months on end without seeing anyone? (Not a good idea!)
To wrap this up�.Though I haven't seen it yet, I THINK I agree with Donna: I would be happy to see the small extra scenes here
and there...any more is better. But I'm still PLENTY pissed about the removal of I Will Find You!
I loved those two or three flippant lines we've mentioned...I always felt that Natty Bumppo was a pretty consistently irreverant guy, and I felt those lines were the 20th-century-geared equivalents of 18th century irreverance, or something. More than irreverance, he was very disdainful! I think one thing the lines demonstrated was that he didn't take himself too seriously, in contrast to Duncan, who took himself EXTREMELY seriously! Anyone else want to comment on this? I know you all know what I mean out there!
Donna mentioned something else I'm intrigued by: "The extra walking scenes of the captured girls and our heroes after them were nice."
!!Maybe there's hope after all, in some eensy, teensy-weensy ways!
*Pathetic, dry sniff!*
I could go on (amazing, since I'm working purely on imagination, here!) but...
I'm waiting to hear more�
Myrrh