The first five minutes and the last five minutes of Saving Private Ryan could be deleted to make it a far better movie.
Same with another Tom Hanks film…delete the first 10 minutes and last 10 minutes of Cast Away.
And in my all-time, favorite film CASABLANCA, the Paris scene always seems to stop the momentum of the story…probably couldn’t be cut “we’ll always have Paris” but certainly could have been done…better?
Lord of the Rings:The Two Towers could do without the silly “Aragorn’s fallen over a cliff” bit.
Whichever ST:TNG movie is was that had the Enterprise crashing onto a planet.
Riker and Picard and wandering around the destroyed bridge…
Picard picks up broken captains chair.
Riker: “I always thought I’d have that chair.”
In the movie Picard just ruefully drops it.
He SHOULD have said ‘Well, here!’ and handed it to Riker.
In Star Trek First Contact they have Data swear with To Hell with our Orders, just because everyone liked him swearing in ST Generations. But he should have saved the swearing for the climax. Just before he breaks the warp cooling tube to kill all the borg he says “Restiance is Futile” but he should have said “Resist is futils, BITCH!”
In A Nightmare Before Christmas there are two scenes that need to be reversed. After Jack comes back from Christmas town he has a town meeting where he gets everyone excited about Christmas, then he sets up a lab and tries to figure out what Christmas is and decided to take it over. It seems to me that he would convince himself first and then convince the town.
Every Bridget Fonda movie would have her naked in it.
AI would have ended as soon as the kid reunited with John Hurt.
Carousel would have ended when the lead character died.
You ended it even earlier than the natural ending (underwater staring at the Blue Fairy).
Delate the tacked-on, stupid happy endings to The Wind, The Bad Seed, Wife vs. Secretary, Ministry of Fear . . . I could go on and on . . .
You’re kidding me, right? The most brutal, realistic depiction of war violence to come along in years, and you want them deleted?
No, DMark means the framing scenes with the older Ryan and his family at the cemetary.
I’d get rid of the ending of My Fair Lady (she shouldn’t have come back to the jerk) and everything in Forrest Gump after Jennie dies.
A League of Their Own could easily do without the framing scenes of the old women players’ reunion at the beginning and end of the film. It was a great movie, I would just delete those scenes.
…Freebie and the Bean
Delete a few of the endings to Return of the King, Spider-Man 2, and Ghost World.
O Brother, Where Art Thou? That movie should have ended when Tommy was floating on the rolltop desk. The last scene with Penny complaining about the ring was just unneeded.
Another Tom Hanks movie, The Terminal would have been much better if it ended after the guard gave Hanks’s character his coat near the end.
The first three minutes of Dark City, in which they ruin the movie’s unfolding plot by describing it to you in advance. And the later Mortal Kombat scenes in the same movie. Get em out!
The first and last scenes in the 1956 Invasion of the Bodysnatchers. No happy endings!
Daniel
Hrm. Not sure I agree with this. Though I agree that Spielberg oversold it.
Far better would be to have the lead up as it stands but at the end just morph young Ryan into Old Ryan staring at the cemetary. Cut to waving flag. Fade to black. That would have had more impact.
In Eternal Sunshine… the movie would of been really good, personally, if they got rid of that odd Jim-as-a-kid scene. That was whimsical and totally at odds with the pace, plot, and general feel of the movie. YMMV.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned the last 10-15 minutes of The Abyss.
Remove one line from the Bill Paxton movie Frailty and it would be amazingly better, far more subtle and thought provoking. The line is:
“How did you know?” spoken by Powers Boothe, and removes all the ambiguity from what had been a fantastic little film.
In Pulp Fiction, I would change one line in this scene:
*The trunk of the Chevy OPENS UP, Jules and Vincent reach inside, taking out two .45 Automatics, loading and cocking them.
JULES
We should have shotguns for this kind of deal.
VINCENT
How many up there?
JULES
Three or four.
VINCENT
Counting our guy?
JULES
I'm not sure.
VINCENT
So there could be five guys up there?
JULES
It's possible.
VINCENT
We should have fuckin' shotguns.
They CLOSE the trunk.*
Vincent’s last line should be:*
VINCENT
We should have fuckin' machine guns.*
This would tie in later, in this scene:*
Butch glances to his right, his eyes fall on something.
What he sees is a small compact Czech M61 submachine gun with a huge silencer on it, lying on his kitchen counter.*
So much better.