A couple of years ago, as you may recall, some Star Wars fans got together and re-edited The Phantom Menace in order to get rid of Jar Jar Binks (well, as much as possible) and some unnecessary bits of action and dialogue. Hell, even ol’ George was impressed.
If you could, what other movies would you edit down?
For me:
Return of the Jedi:
Ditch the Ewoks as much as possible.
Lose ALL “cute” Muppet moments - the frog-like creature eating a bug-like thing outside Jabba’s castle and that annoying little pet of Jabba’s.
The “from a certain point of view” crap Kenobi was vomiting on Luke on Dagobah.
Pirates of the Carribean: The Curse of the Black Pearl:
Jonathan Pryce’s character was unnecessary to the “story”
I would take out about 10 minutes of sword play here and there to move things along
The subplot of Elizabeth and the Commodore could also go and wouldn’t be missed - While we’re at it, change the competition for Eliz to be between Captain Jack Sparrow and the other dude, that would have been much more entertaining
I thought the scenes with CJS and Eliz on the island didn’t add much to the story, either and wouldn’t have been missed. (Unless of course the aforementioned “triangle” would have been part of the story)
I’d edit out the Jesus scenes from the Heston version of Ben Hur. His presence adds nothing to the story of the conflict between Ben Hur and Massala, and the scenes are just clumsily done. He’s like the mynah bird in the old Bugs Bunny cartoons: Bugs and the villain will be creating high-speed havoc when suddenly the mynah bird enters and everyone freezes in place watching him slowly lope across the screen.
Either that, or leave the scenes in but add the “mynah bird” music whenever JC is doing his thing: Doop, doop, dooo-do, Doop-doop, Do-dee-doooo-do…
Every scene in Gangs of New York should be shaved a minute or two. Long silences, slow pans and overly long panoramic exterior shots and atomspheric interior shots made that movie draaaaaggggg.
They’re nice the first-- oh-- 5 times, but get on with the storytelling, whydoncha?
I can’t think of any specific movie that this should be done to, but I know there must be hundreds of them.
Right after the opening credits, as soon as the director’s been identified, there should be a disclaimer box/page that reads something like this:
After further scrutiny and after recovering the production costs of this film, it has been decided by consensus of those involved to return the time it would take for you to see this film to the cosmos. The flim itself has been donated to the recycling facility.
Then go straight to the end credits.
That way you get to see everybody who was involved and to know that their tastes have won out over the need to release the movie into the public’s consciousness.
When I saw the title of this thread that was going to by nomination. Only difference is I would trim most of the “action” sequences by about 65%, not to 65% of their current length.
I’d also edit out the mumbo-jumbo garbage with the architect. It was virtually impossible to follow (and I was a systems architect for about 6 years!) and just really, really dragged on. Might edit in a couple of powerpoint slides instead
“The Two Jakes”, delete everything between the opening credits and the credit roll at the end. Awful movie. Jack needs to stick to acting and leave directing to those who can…
In Disney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame, get rid of the gargoyles song. It’s a bad song, but worse is where they put it. They take the darkest point in the movie and decide to just put a jolly song in there to interrupt the whole flow of the story. I fast-forward through it every time I watch the movie.
Specifically, I found the sequences of the Enterprise moving towards the core of V’ger incredibly tedious and thought they really could have been tightened up in editing.
EYES WIDE SHUT. Remember the scene about 3/4 of the way through where Tom comes home and finds Nicole in bed with the mask he wore at the orgy beside her? If they had ended the film RIGHT AT THAT MOMENT, it might have been . . . well . . . passable.
And speaking of Nicole, there’s MOULIN ROUGE! Damn, I thought she’d NEVER finish dying! They could lose about half of that death scene and have a better film.
THE IRON GIANT: The epilogue where it turns out that the Giant isn’t really dead after all feels tacked-on and just sort of cheapens the whole story for me.
I know I am not the first to mention it, but if you cut down Titanic to only the scenes that involve the ship setting sail and sinking, its a great movie.
Vanilla Sky. Cut out about a half hour in the middle and it would be fine. Man that whole movie got old. You can easily figure out that somewhere along the line the whole thing is some sort of dream or alternate reality, but then they drag it out so it takes forever to figure out the details.
Blade Runner was a little too in love with its own atmosphere – picking up the pace and making the fight scenes more Schwarzenegger like would have made the film more of a hit and less of a cult film.
Man on the Moon beat you to this. “Latka” talks about “thank you for coming to my movie, but it is so stupid. In fact, this IS the movie…What are you waiting for? It is over…Go.”
I’ll nominate Any Given Sunday. Would have been a good cheesy football movie with more editing.
