Great But Flawed Movies (and how you'd fix 'em)

Cafe Society
1

Inspired by the thread about flawless movies: Ever see a movie that you loved, that you thought was superb, except for that one glaring flaw that bugged you and prevented it from being perfect?

For me, that movie is Pulp Fiction. I loved nearly every aspect of PF, except… that horrible performance by Tarantino himself as Jimmy. His delivery was stilted and irritating, he looked tense and unnatural, and I hated every second he was on the screen, which is too bad, because I loved Harvey Keitel as The Wolf, so I had very mixed feelings about the Jimmy part of the movie.

IMO, Tarantino should have set his ego aside and cast Steve Buscemi (who has a cameo as a snotty waiter at Jack Rabbit Slim’s) as Jimmy. Think about it–how great would Buscemi have been as the choleric, righteously exasperated Jimmy, asking sarcastically about “dead nigger storage” and mocking Jules and Vincent, calling them dorks? THAT would have made Pulp Fiction the perfect movie.

Your pick, and how you’d fix it if you had your druthers?

2

Wings of Desire:

  1. Cut by about 3/4 the rambling, boring musings of Marion, the trapeze artist. Replace with more Peter Falk.

  2. Tighten Homer’s (the elderly muse) thoughts, make them less esoteric; have him reflect more on history and the war.

  3. More Peter Falk.

  4. More angel observations with ordinary folk.

  5. For the love of all things decent, eliminate that interminable, never-ending circus scene. Welcome kids to the Worst Circus in the World!! Replete with depressing, out-of-tune brass band!

3

Fellowship of the Ring

Cut the battle with the Watcher in the Water and the cave troll by about ten minutes each. Omit Gilraen’s grave (from the extended edition).

Perfection.

4

Tarantino may be able to direct, but he should never ever try to act. If he wants to do a cameo, like the great Hitchcock, OK, but don’t try to act.

5

Psycho

Remove the scene where the detective goes on and on about tranvestism, and cut directly from Norman being captured to him in the cell, talking to himself in his mother’s voice.

6

OK…it’s not a great movie. But it had the potential to be a good movie: Mel Brook’s Robin Hood: Men In Tights.

The first thing I would do to fix it is fire Mel. The man has turned into a hack. Any talent he had is long gone (with the exception of adapting his own work into a helluva funny musical.) Then I would totally recast the movie. Fire all the Jews. :smiley: Well, at least one…I want Richard Lewis dead, preferably after torture. Then I would direct the movie from the script, but without telegraphing all of the sight gags. Mel ruined the movie by insulting the intelligence of his audience. C’mon, Mel. We’ve seen enough movies that we are going to get the jokes. And if we don’t…so what?

This one has always bugged me, because it had the potential to be good, and the direction and casting just killed it.

7

Minority Report. I would have borrowed the ending from Brazil and applied it to this film…

8

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country:

In the scene where Spock asks Dr. McCoy if he’d like to modify a photon torpedo (to destroy the cloaked Klingon ship), Dr. McCoy should have said anything except “fascinating”. That is not a proper answer to a “yes or no” question. It justs annoys the hell out of me and I usually end up muting the sound whenever I watch it.

9

Well, you know that McCoy was essentially parodying/poking fun at Spock, right? It works for me on that basis.

WRT Pulp Fiction, I would’ve cut the entire scene of Butch in the cab after the fight. Gawd, I hate that whole “sultry latina” stereotype. “So … what was eet like to keel a man?” Do you get the feeling neither Quentin Tarantino nor Roger Avary got a lot of dates in high school?

10

Yeah, I got that, but it doesn’t make it any less irritating.

11

Some spoilers, of course…

Matrix 2 and 3 were NOT great, but it would have helped to remove all the new characters they added, and the really not very well-CG’ed fight scenes, as none of the characters or scenes really advanced the story, or impressed me at all. I suppose this might bring the running time of the two movies (combined) down to about an hour, but that wouldn’t be so bad. Oh, and anyone who discussed the Matrix with a devoted fan for more than about ten minutes probably knows that Neo symbolizes Christ, or so many fans think. The plot would have explained this for us quite well, even without the death on a mechanized cross and church music. I should probably stop before I just start ranting and ranting about bad CGI, but I must leave you with these links:

[major spoilers]
Maddox on Matrix 2
Maddox on Matrix 3

That is all.

Also, the movie version of Little Shop of Horrors. The original ending, please!

12

Something has always bugged my about Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Chritsmas.
It makes no sense that Jack comes back from Christmas town and does the presentation to the town first and then sits up in his tower figuring out what Christmas is. I have always felt that he should lock himself up and study Chrstmas and after the ‘This year, Christmas will be OURS!’ line then has the meeting to explain Christmas to the town and hand out the jobs.
But that’s just me.

13

I didn’t see the movie, but I did read the short story that the movie was based on. And although I’m not the kind of person who automatically insists that the book was better than the movie, the short story was quite a bit more interesting. Then again, telling that story would be impossible for Spielberg, who has turned into a gutless wonder. He doesn’t appear to have the nerve to bring interesting edgy stories to their logical conclusion when an ill-fitting happy ending would do. The only reason “Schindler’s List” was a gutsy movie is that it was based on fact and he couldn’t rewrite history to have Schindler save 100,000 Jews instead of a thousand or so.

14

You know, I totally agree with you on this and usually fast forward through the Villalobos scene. If I were going to recast Buscemi as Jimmy, I think I’d cut the hell outta the taxicab scene too. Good call, Nonsuch.

15

American Beauty

I loved this movie. LOVED it. Except for one line, which doesn’t ruin the movie for me, but irritates me to no end. In the scene where Ricky is filming Jane on his bed, and they’re talking about if he were to kill her dad, she says “what a lame-o.” Besides that line sounding dumb to me, it just doesn’t feel like something Jane would say. It’s such a clichéd movie teen thing to say, but her character isn’t like that. At least that’s how I see it. Just take that line out, gaaahh.

16

I can’t believe I’m blaspheming like this, but I’d edit The Philadelphia Story to cut some of the preachy men telling Tracy all about herself.

I’d do the same to Network. What the hell does William Holden know about Faye Dunaway?

17

Identity. I would keep the “surprise revelation” from the audience until AFTER the climactic shootout, thereby giving the shootout some emotional weight.

18

I will consider the Lord of the Rings one movie…because it essentially was.

-Keep the part in the intro where Isildur is seen entering the River and being shot by the orcs…this shows up in the extended edition (EE), and should have been in the theatrical release.
-Take the scene where sam and Frodo see Elves going to the Havens from the (EE) and put it back into the TR.
-Somebody other than Agent Smith as Elrond. I like Hugo Weaving. I do. But as Elrond? Sorry, no. My vote: Rupert Everett.
-Cut down the cave troll sequence. Instead, have Frodo stab it in the foot, as in the book, and then have the scene where Gandalf puts the holding spell on the door, and gets blown down the stairs by the Balrog’s counter-spell. And none of that absurd swaying drawbridge and “never toss a dwarf” nonsense.
-In fact, I was really bothered by “Gimli the wee little idiot” routine. Gimli was small, but had dignity, and was a fierce and deadly warrior, not some bumbling buffoon straight out of Snow White.
-Galadriel…where to begin? Cate Blanchet was a wonderful casting choice, but she was given shit to work with. The mirror scene was one of my biggest disappointments in the whole film trilogy. It should have been left as Tolkien wrote it. Her characterization as a vaguely sinister, vampy temptress was just absurd.
-“Let’s go hunt some orc!” GAAAAAH!
-Gimli the bigger idiot in Rohan: Come ON already! Enough dwarf humor.
-The Ents: So, Treebeard goes from the oldest, and among the wisest living things in Middle Earth to…well, a Wizard of Oz apple tree on quaaludes. The rise of the Ents against Saruman was THE best part of TTT, perhaps the final triumph of Nature over Technology before the long attrition of the Age of Men. The significance of this can’t be overstated, yet Jackson glosses over it completely, relegating the Ents go a comical bit role, that seems almost schizoid, given Treebeard’s sudden turnaround leading up to the attack on Isengard.
-Merry and Pippen throwing stones from Treebeard’s shoulders and crying “YES!” Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, STUPID! I would have ripped this scene out the spool with my bare hands had I known it was coming.
-Way too much time spent on the battle of Helm’s Deep, at the expense of other, more important threads (see Ents above)
-Elves at Helm’s Deep: WRONG! This is just dead fucking wrong. The Elves were no longer actively involved with human affairs, except for some nudging from Elrond, and the presence of Legolas in the Fellowship. This was important. This meant something. Obviously Jackson was oblivious.
-Gandalf’s reunion with Aragorn & Co. - Whoah, Gandalf, you’re back. Yep. Hey, how was death? Grooovy. Great, now what? We go fight, I guess. Cool. Another major letdown, drama-wise.
-Faramir: This character was completely destroyed. It’s hard to begin on what I would change, because I’d essentially change everything. Faramir in the books was perfect. Faramir in the films is a catastrophe. Horrid. This is the only change that actually disgusted me. It did, big time.
Frodo showing the Ring to the Nazgul: Fucking goddamn retarded. Pretty much the stupidest thing Jackson & Co. could have possibly done. It added NOTHING to the story, and introduced about half-a-dozen major conceptual and logistical flaws into the plot that were never even addressed, much less resolved. It simply should never have happened. Idiotic. Illogical. Bizarre.
Denethor: Give the guy a little dignity, will you? I mean, the film Denethor is just an oafish, cowardly asshole.
Frodo’s “illness” and the Havens: Well, Sam, my shoulder kinda aches, so, well, I guess I have to leave Middle Earth and the Shire forever. Yeah, I know it’s kinda drastic, but, man, it really smarts, I’m not kidding, and I hear they do some great Shiatsu in Tol Eressea. Now let me take ship with this big dopey grin on my face while you blubber away in tearful confusion, along with the audience.
Use the fucking books, you morons, and maybe half the world wouldn’t be asking people who actually read them carefully why Frodo sailed off in the end for no apparent reason.

19

I’m surprised no one has mentioned “A.I.,” which immediately jumped to mind.

Of course, the modification would be to excise the tacked-on ending where the film suddenly skips to “the future” with the aliens and the whole virtual reunion with the mother and all. The film comes to a perfect stopping point (underwater by the fairy statue), then goes on with that horribly trite tacked-on ending.

20

Godfather II- whenever I watch it I can’t help but think how perfect it would have been if only Richard Castellano (Clemenza from Godfather) had reprised the role as he was intended to instead of having Pentangeli as the traitor. (Castellano was evidently a monumental prima donna who wanted to hire his friends and family and write his own dialogue and was finally scrapped at the last minute and replaced with Michael V. Gazzo as Pentangeli; Gazzo was a great character actor and did as well as he could with the role of Pentangeli, but Michael’s depression and isolation would have been so much more powerful if it had been his lifelong friend/second-father figure who testified before Congress against him. Also, explain why Pentangeli/Clemenza’s brother in the courtroom makes him change his testimony. (One book I read said a scene had been written in which it was explained Pentangeli/Clemenza had an illegitimate family in Sicily who lived under his brother’s protection and, had he testified, his brother would have killed them, but this was either never filmed or at least cut.)

Gone With the Wind- The role of Ashley should have been played by a gorgeous but weak looking fellow whom you could believe a 16 year old brat swooning over. Leslie Howard was way too old and way too blah for the part and this almost wrecks some scenes he and Scarlett are in together. (I don’t fault the film for historical errors or variations from the book since it’s essentially mythology rather than historical fiction by this time and the other roles are so perfectly cast.)

About a Boy- This is one of the movies that I mentioned in a previous thread liking more than the book (and I liked the book a lot), but the deleted scenes on the DVD never should have been deleted as they added way too much.