EARTHLINGS (SHAUN MONSON, 2005)

“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster. And when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Happy Halloween!

If you’re looking for a good horror movie, I’ve got a doozy. It’s so bloody, so gory, so violent, so relentlessly, unspeakably horrifying, that most people dare not watch it. Are you brave enough to stomach it, boys and girls?

The film’s unusual yet familiar monster is of neither supernatural nor extraterrestrial origin. No, this monster sprang from the earth itself. It slithered out of the oozing primordial sludge many millennia ago and mutated over the blood-soaked eons into its present form. Today, it infests nearly every square inch of the earth’s habitable surface. It tramples the ground, pollutes the sea, and toxifies the air, ravaging everything in its path like a deadly virus devouring its host. The monster lurks in all places, at all times – in your city, your workplace, your school, your neighborhood, in the house next door. It even lurks within the secure confines of your own home. Look in the mirror and you’ll see it there too.

A TV ad currently airing tells us that “we don’t have to worry about predators like our ancestors did. No sabre tooth tigers stalking from the brush. No dire wolves circling the camp. There are no more monsters to fear. And so we have to build [invent] our own.”

But we don’t have to create our own monsters. We *are* the monster. Once you see the world through vegan eyes, through the eyes of the animals upon whom we visit such merciless ultra-violence, it’s easy to spot the real monster. Earthlings forces you to see the world through their frightened and defeated eyes, and in so doing, it also holds a mirror up to us so that we can gaze long into the eyes of the monster reflected back. Wanna take a look?

I can’t believe that any sane person, after having watched Earthlings, would want to continue to participate in this ongoing horror.

LEONARDO DICAPRIO HELPS BRINGS COWSPIRACY TO NETFLIX

Coming to Netflix on September 15th: a new cut of Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret, an eye-opening documentary about the devastating environmental impact of animal agriculture, which deserves attention if for no other reason than that it exposes an inconvenient truth that Al Gore neglected to mention.

Kudos to Leonardo DiCaprio for attaching his name to this important documentary.

UNITY (SHAUN MONSON, 2018)

Anxious to see Shaun Monson’s new documentary, Unity, a follow-up to his staggering 2007 film, “Earthlings.”

2014 NOFF AWARDS

Welcome to the 8th Annual Noff Awards!

Below are the 192 films competing for a coveted Noffscar:

13 Sins
20,000 Days on Earth
Abuse of Weakness
Actress
American Sniper
Babadook, The
Bad Words
Batman: Assault on Arkham
Battered Bastards of Baseball, The
Bears
Begin Again
Best Offer, The
Bethlehem
Big Bad Wolves
Big Eyes
Big Hero 6
Big Men
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
Bird People
Blue Ruin
Book of Life, The
Borgman
Boxtrolls, The
Boyhood
Calvary
Canopy
Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Case Against 8, The
Cheap Thrills
Chef
Child’s Pose
Citizenfour
Coffee in Berlin, A
Coherence
Cold in July
Congress, The
Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
Dear White People
Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Her, The
Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Him, The
Doc of the Dead
Dog, The
Drop, The
Double, The
Edge of Tomorrow
Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me
Enemy
Ernest & Celestine
Extraterrestrial
Fading Gigolo
Fault in Our Stars, The
Fed Up
Field in England, A
Final Member, The
Finding Vivian Maier
Force Majeure
Found
Foxcatcher
Frank
Fury
Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden, The
Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, A
Glen Campbell: I’ll Be Me
Gloria
God Help the Girl
Go Down Death
Godzilla
Gone Girl
Goodbye to Language
Grand Budapest Hotel, The
Grand Piano
Guardians of the Galaxy
Guest, The
Happy Valley
Homesman, The
Honeymoon
Housebound
How to Train Your Dragon 2
Ida
Ilo Ilo
Imitation Game, The
Immigrant, The
In Bloom
In Fear
Inherent Vice
Interstellar
Interview, The
Into the Woods
It Felt Like Love
Jack and the Cuckoo-Clock Heart
Jodorowsky’s Dune
Joe
John Wick
Judge, The
Killer Legends
Last Days in Vietnam
Late Phases
Lego Movie, The
Letter to Momo, A
Leviathan
LFO: The Movie
Life Itself
Like Father, Like Son
Listen Up Philip
Live and Let Live
Living Things
Locke
Love Eternal
Love Is Strange
Low Down
Lucy
Madagascar 3D
Magic in the Moonlight
Malificent
Manakamana
Maze Runner, The
Mistaken for Strangers
Moebius
Mommy
Most Wanted Man, A
Most Violent Year, A
Mr. Peabody and Sherman
Mr. Turner
Neighbors
Nightcrawler
Noah
No No: A Dockumentary
Norte, the End of History
Nothing Bad Can Happen
Nymphomaniac Vol. 1
Nymphomaniac Vol. 2
Obvious Child
Oculus
Omar
One I Love, The
Only Lovers Left Alive
Overnighters, The
Particle Fever
Patema Inverted
Pelican Dreams
Penguins of Madagascar
Pretty One, The
Pride
Proxy
Raid 2, The
Rocks in My Pockets
Rosewater
Sacrament, The
Selma
7 Boxes
Skeleton Twins, The
Sledge
Snowpiercer
Song of the Sea
Stage Fright
Starred Up
Starry Eyes
Still Alice
Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears, The
Strange Little Cat, The
Stranger by the Lake
Stray Dogs
Taking of Deborah Logan, The
Tale of Princess Kaguya, The
Tales of the Grim Sleeper
Teenage
Theory of Everything, The
Top Five
Tracks
Trip to Italy, The
Two Days, One Night
Under the Skin
Unknown Known, The
Venus in Fur
Veronica Mars
Vic + Flo Saw a Bear
Virunga
Visitors
Walk Among Tombstones, A
Way He Looks, The
We Are the Best!
Weekend, Le
Whiplash
Why Don’t You Play in Hell?
Wild
Willow Creek
Winter Sleep
Witching and Bitching
Wrinkles
Zero Motivation
Zero Theorem

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BEST FILM

The Grand Budapest Hotel

Guardians of the Galaxy

Nightcrawler

Under the Skin

Whiplash

And the Noffscar goes to: Nightcrawler

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BEST DIRECTOR

Wes Anderson for The Grand Budapest Hotel

Damien Chazelle for Whiplash

Jonathan Glazer for Under the Skin

Jennifer Kent for The Babadook

Phil Lord & Christopher Miller for The Lego Movie

And the Noffscar goes to: Jonathan Glazer for Under the Skin

BEST ACTOR

Ralph Fiennes in The Grand Budapest Hotel

Brendan Gleeson in Calvary

Jake Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler

Dan Stevens in The Guest

Miles Teller in Whiplash

And the Noffscar goes to: Jake Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler

BEST ACTRESS

Essie Davis in The Babadook

Anne Dorval in Mommy

Alexandra Essoe in Starry Eyes

Pauline Garcia in Gloria

Jenny Slate in Obvious Child

And the Noffscar goes to: Alexandra Essoe in Starry Eyes

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Dave Bautista in Guardians of the Galaxy

Josh Brolin in Inherent Vice

Gene Jones in The Sacrament

J.K. Simmons in Whiplash

Noah Wiseman in The Babadook

And the Noffscar goes to: J.K. Simmons in Whiplash

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Patricia Arquette in Boyhood

Hong Chau in Inherent Vice

Agata Kulesza in Ida

Elizabeth Moss in Listen Up Philip

Amy Seimetz in The Sacrament

And the Noffscar goes to: Patricia Arquette in Boyhood

BEST SCREENPLAY

The Grand Budapest Hotel

Guardians of the Galaxy

The Lego Movie

Nightcrawler

Two Days, One Night

And the Noffscar goes to: Nightcrawler

BEST EDITING

The Grand Budapest Hotel

Guardians of the Galaxy

Oculus

Under the Skin Whiplash
And the Noffscar goes to: Whiplash

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

The Grand Budapest Hotel

Ida

The Immigrant

Under the Skin

And the Noffscar goes to: The Grand Budapest Hotel

BEST SCORE

The Babadook Birdman, or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

The Grand Budapest Hotel

Grand Piano

Under the Skin

And the Noffscar goes to: Under the Skin

BEST ART DIRECTION/SET DESIGN

The Double

The Grand Budapest Hotel

Guardians of the Galaxy

The Immigrant

Inherent Vice

And the Noffscar goes to: The Grand Budapest Hotel

BEST SOUND

The Babadook

The Double

The Grand Budapest Hotel

Under the Skin

Whiplash

And the Noffscar goes to: Under the Skin

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM

Force Majeure

Mommy

Stranger by the Lake

Two Days, One Night

Winter Sleep

And the Noffscar goes to: Force Majeure

BEST DOCUMENTARY

The Battered Bastards of Baseball

The Dog

Life Itself

The Overnighters

Tales of the Grim Sleeper

And the Noffscar goes to: Life Itself

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE

Batman: Assault on Arkham

Jack and the Cuckoo-Clock Heart

The Lego Movie

Penguins of Madagascar

Song of the Sea

And the Noffscar goes to: The Lego Movie

BEST ORIGINAL SONG

“Like a Fool” from Begin Again

“Lost Stars” from Begin Again

“A Step You Can’t Take Back” from Begin Again

“I Love You All” from Frank

“Everything is Awesome” from The Lego Movie

And the Noffscar goes to: “Lost Stars” from Begin Again

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Guardians of the Galaxy

Interstellar

Under the Skin

Witching and Bitching

And the Noffscar goes to: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

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BEST SCENES

Sharing playlists on stroll through NYC:

Begin Again

A girl dispatches douchebag pimp/drug dealer:

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night 

Mommy imagines a rosy future for her son before committing him:

Mommy

Victims come face to face under the black goo:

Under the Skin

Triumphant climactic drum solo:

Whiplash

And the Noffscar goes to: Whiplash

MOVIE PESTS (WILL JASON, 1944)

I recently came across this Oscar-nominated short from 1944, which lampoons that most odious breed of human: the movie pest. It’s a great idea to “take the movie pests out of the audience and put them on the screen.” Alas, the execution of that idea is wanting. The film just isn’t very funny.

So why am I posting about it? As the man says in Rubber: no reason.

I’ll say this, though: We’ve come a long way since the huddled masses began flocking to theaters at the turn of the century to escape their gloomy, overcrowded, inadequately ventilated, foul-smelling and tubercular tenement homes. Watching movies was a communal activity then, as it still was in 1944. It still can be, of course. But, happily, it need not be. Thanks to today’s technology, we no longer have to suffer the aggravation of commingling with movie-theater gadflies.

Why tolerate gluttonous slobs shoveling fistfuls of popcorn into their relentlessly churning jaws, or a freakishly tall pituitary case with a shock of unkempt hair atop his gargantuan head sitting directly in front of you, or a long-limbed, lead-footed seat-pusher using the back of your chair to do leg press exercises, or an insufferable little brat emitting a nonstop stream of shrill nonsensicalities like a machine specially designed to grate on anyone within earshot, or a gaggle of teenyboppers snapping their gum in cacophonic unison or any other godforsaken movie theater nuisance, when you can now watch movies in the comfort and security of your own home without hassle or distraction, on a home theater system comparable in visual/aural quality to any movie theater? My house is a pest-free zone.

UNHAPPY DEATHDAY, SERGIO!

Sergio Leone, my favorite director, died 26 years ago today. As a tribute to Leone’s life and career I’ve assembled a few clips of his films accompanied by some choice quotes from the man himself. Unhappy Deathday, Sergio! Viva Leone!

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1929-1989

A Fistful of Dollars:

“When they tell me that I am the father of the Italian Western, I have to say, ‘How many sons of bitches do you think I spawned?’ There was a terrifying gold rush after the commercial success of A Fistful of Dollars. It wasn’t as if the Italian Western had been taken up by many serious producers or serious directors; it was simply a terrifying gold rush, and most of them built castles in the sand instead of on rock – the foundations just weren’t there.”

“I feel that A Fistful of Dollars made a certain breakthrough in terms of the presentation of violence. Sam Peckinpah told me that The Wild Bunch could not have been made if it hadn’t been for my films. He said that A Fistful of Dollars launched ‘a new kind of cinema.’”

“I wanted Lavagnini, who had composed the music for The Colossus of Rhodes, to write the score. The producers had spoken to me of Ennio Morricone and showed me Showdown in Texas which seemed horrible to me; the music sounded like a poor man’s Tiomkin. The producer insisted on my meeting Morricone. I went to his house and he had me listen to a piece that the producers had rejected and which I was later to use in the finale of the film. Afterwards we listened to a record of something he’d written for an American baritone which immediately impressed me. I asked him to keep the basic elements. We had the principal motif, only the singer was lacking. I proposed having someone whistle it and thus the firm of Alessandroni and Company was born.”

“The duel in Fistful reverses all sorts of conventions. It’s a theatricalized duel in the arena where the moment of truth takes place. Not face to face! There’s the phrase, ‘When a man with a .45 meets a man with a rifle, the man with a pistol will be a dead man.’ And I amused myself by proving the contrary. When Volonte’s rife is empty, Eastwood places his pistol on the ground. The duel begins. We follow his technique of picking up his firearm and loading it. We also follow his opponent’s technique. The rifle takes longer. So: Volonte loses.”

“The day after A Fistful of Dollars opened in Rome, one of the reviews really got to me – because it was written by an enemy of mine. It was a thoughtful review which even suggested connections between Fistful and the films of John Ford. So I picked up the telephone and said to him, ‘I’m touched, truly touched by your support. Thanks you so much. I’m so glad you were able to bury our disagreements.’ And this was his reply: ‘But what on earth have you got to do with A Fistful of Dollars?’ He was the only critic in town not to have found out that behind the name of ‘Bob Robertson’ on the credits was Sergio Leone. Since then, with monotonous regularity, has always panned my films.”

“The story is told that when Michelangelo was asked what he had seen in one particular block of marble, which he chose among hundreds of others, he replied that he saw Moses. I would offer the same answer to the question why did I choose Clint Eastwood, only backwards: What I saw, simply, was a block of marble. And that was what I wanted.”

For a Few Dollars More:

“When Eastwood was offered the second film, For a Few Dollars More, he said to me, ‘I’ll read the script, come over and do the film, but please, I beg of you, one thing only – don’t put that cigar back in my mouth!’ And I said, ‘Clint, we can’t possibly leave the cigar behind. It’s playing the lead!’”

“I flew to L.A. to find Lee Van Cleef. I saw him walking in the distance and he looked just exactly right. He looked like a grizzled old eagle. I turned to my production manager and said, ‘Just sign him up here and now. I don’t even want to speak to him, because if I do it might make me decide not to take him, and if I did that I would be making a big mistake. He is so perfect for the film that I don’t want to hear a word of what he has to say.’”

“The character of the bounty hunter, the bounty killer, is an ambiguous one. They called him “the gravedigger” in the West. He fascinated me because he demonstrate a way of living in this land, and at that time. You must kill to survive.”

“In the final duel, Clint obliges the colonel to prove his professionalism, once and for all, at the moment of truth. He gives him his chance, but the colonel must move fast because Indio is fast on the draw! And Clint will not help him in this closed situation. He’ll remain a spectator. If the colonel is beaten, then he will avenge him. But the essential thing is to preserve his colleague’s moment of truth. This is much less banal than a saloon duel.”

“The lives of two bounty hunters depend on a perfect knowledge of the tools of their trade: guns. I couldn’t invent imaginary objects. I needed to be exact from the technical point of view, so I found exact descriptions of all the types of weapons of that period and ordered them to be remade for the film. But authenticity wasn’t enough. I had to be precise about ballistics and range as well. To nourish my fairy-story with a documentary reality.”

“I did not ask Morricone to read the script. I told him the story as if it was a fairy-tale. Then I explained the themes I wanted. Each character had to have his own theme. But I spoke Roman-fashion, with plenty of adjectives and comparisons, making sure everything was clear. Then he worked at the composition and brought me some very short themes, one for each character. He played them to me on the piano. This would continue until he’d composed a piece which inspired me – because it was me the music had to inspire, not Ennio! When a passage pleased me, I’d say, ‘That’s the one!’”

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly:

“I had always thought that the ‘good’, the ‘bad’ and the ‘ugly’ did not exist in any absolute, essential sense and it seemed to me interesting to demystify these adjectives in the setting of a Western.”

“What interested me was the absurdity of war. I wanted to show human imbecility in a picaresque film. The key line of the film is the comment made by a character about the battle on the bridge: ‘I have never seen so many imbeciles die so pointlessly.’”

“I wanted Eli Wallach because of a gesture he makes in How the West Was Won when he gets off the train and talks to George Peppard. He sees a child, Peppard’s son, and suddenly turns and shoots him with a finger. That made me realize he was a comic actor of the Chaplin school.”

“Charlie Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux, one of the finest films I know, had a strong influence on The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Chaplin’s film looked at the chaotic and absurd aspects of an era in which a hero who has murdered several women could say, at his trial, ‘I am just an amateur at homicide compared with Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Stalin, who do such things on a grand scale.’ Verdoux is the model of all the bandits, all the bounty hunters. Put him in a hat and boots, and you have a Westerner.”

“In The Good, the Bad and the Ugly each character had his musical theme. I was representing the route-map of three beings who were an amalgam of all human faults and I needed crescendos and spectacular attention-grabbers which nevertheless chimed with the general spirit of the story. So the music took on a central importance. It had to be complex, with humor and lyricism, tragedy and baroque.”

“My Westerns have been compared with melodramas. If this comparison arises from the importance of music in my films, then I feel flattered. I have always limited the use of dialogue, so that spectators can use their own imaginations while they observe the slow and ritual gestures of the heroes of the West. If it is true that I have created a new-style Western, with picaresque people placed in epic situations, then it is the music of Ennio which has made them talk.”

“The final duel was a sequence which gave me the greatest satisfaction, especially from the editing point of view. The picaresque journeys all come to a conclusion within it. I always enclose the final sequence, the denouement of my films, within the confines of a circle. It is the arena of life, the moment of truth at the moment of death. This wasn’t a whim on my part. The idea of the arena was crucial. With a morbid wink of the eye, since it was the dead who were witnesses to this spectacle. I even insisted that the music signify the laughter of corpses inside their graves. The first three close-ups of each of the actors took us an entire day. I wanted the spectator to have the impression of watching a ballet. And I had to accumulate shots of their cunning in action: their looks, their gestures, their hesitations. The music gave a certain lyricism to all these ‘realist’ images – so the scene became a question of choreography as much as suspense.”

Once Upon a Time in the West:

“I wanted to do a film which was a dance of death, or a ballet of the dead. I wanted to take all the most stereotypical characters from the America Western – on loan! The finest whore from New Orleans; the romantic bandit; the killer who is half-businessman, half-killer, and who wants to get on in the new world of business; the businessman who fancies himself as a gunfighter; the lone avenger. With these five most stereotypical characters from the American Western I wanted to present an homage to the Western at the same time as showing the mutations which American society was undergoing at the time. So the story was about a birth and a death. Before they even come on to the scene these stereotypical characters know themselves to be dying in every sense, physically and morally – victims of the new era which was advancing.”

“We wanted the feeling throughout of a kaleidoscopic view of all American Westerns put together. But you must be careful of making it sound like citations for citations’ sake. It wasn’t done in that spirit at all. The references aren’t calculated in a programmed kind of way; they are there to give the feeling of all that background of the American Western to help tell this particular fairy tale. They are part of my attempt to take historical reality – the new, unpitying era of the economic boom – and blend it together with the fable.”

“The rhythm of the film was intended to create the sensation of the last gasps that a person takes just before dying. Once Upon a Time in the West was, from start to finish, a dance of death. I wanted to make the audience feel, in three hours, how these people lived and died…”

Once Upon a Time in the West Opening: The Sound as a Storyteller from Pablo Valverde on Vimeo.

Duck You Sucker:

“Mexico became a pretext to evoke wars and revolutions. In certain sequences, I signal events from other places and times: the flight of the king; the Ardeatine Caves massacre; the ditches and death pits of Dachau and Matthausen. I even chose a face resembling the young Mussolini and dressed him up in a uniform. These are signs which are there to connote all wars and revolutions.”

“But at the heart of the film, and my essential motivation, was the theme of friendship which is so dear to me. You have two men: one naive and one intellectual. From there, the film becomes the story of Pygmalion reversed. The simple one teaches the intellectual a lesson. Nature gains the upper hand and finally the intellectual throws away his book of Bakunin’s writings. You suspect damn well that this gesture is a symbolic reference to everything my generation has been told in the way of promises.”

“Me, I live apart and don’t give a damn about anything. At the end of the war, like many Italians, I had illusions and dreams. I believed in revolution – in the mind if not in the streets. I dreamed about a more just and humane society, where wealth was more evenly distributed. After all, my father struggled against Fascism and I came from a socialist family. Let us just say that I am a disillusioned socialist. To the point of becoming an anarchist. But because I have a conscience, I’m a moderate anarchist who doesn’t go around throwing bombs. I mean, I’ve experienced just about all the untruths there are in life. So what remains in the end? The family. Which is my final archetype, handed down to us from prehistory. What else is there? Friendship. And that is all. I’m a pessimist by nature. With John Ford, people look out the window with hope. Me, I show people who are scared even to open the door. And if they do, they tend to get a bullet right between the eyes.”

“I suffered a lot on that film. The shooting, the plots, the problems. And the editing which took such a long, long time. I’m attached to the film as one might be to a disabled child.”

The Toll of Revolution


A Fistful of Dynamite

— MOVIECLIPS.com

Once Upon a Time in America:

Once Upon a Time in America is my best film, bar none. I’m glad I made it, even though during filming I was as tense as Dick Tracy’s jaw. It always goes like that. Shooting a film is awful, but to have made a movie is delicious.”

“I’m trying to do a film that can’t easily be categorized. It’s not a realistic film, not historical. It’s fantastic, it’s a fable. I force myself to make fables for adults.”

“Time and the years are one other essential element in the film. The characters have changed, some of them rejecting their past identities and even their names – and yet in spite of themselves, they have remained bound to the past and to the people they knew and were. They have gone separate ways; some have realized their dreams, for better or worse; others have failed. But growing from the same embryo, as it were, after the careless self-confidence of youth, they are united again by the force that had made them enemies and driven them apart – Time.”

“And it is this unrealistic vein that interests me the most, the vein of the fable, though a fable for our own times and told in our own terms. And, above, all, the aspects of hallucination, or a dream-journey, induced by the opium with which the film begins and ends, like a haven or a refuge.”

“The scene of the charlotte russe in the stairwell is an homage to Charles Chaplin. It is not an imitation of him or plagiarized from a sequence of his. It is simple evidence of my love for him. And I think he would have filmed the situation in this way.”

“I want to say how much the truncated version took the soul out of my work. A version of one hundred and thirty-five minutes was done for television. Everything was flatly chronological: childhood, youth and old age. Time is no longer a theme. There is no more mystery, journey, and opium smoking. It is an aberration. I cannot accept that the originalversion is too long. It has the exact duration it should have. After the screening at the Cannes Film Festival, Dino De Laurentiis told me it was wonderful but it was necessary to cut a good half hour. I told him he was in no position to tell me that. Because he makes films of two hours which seem to last four hours, while I make films of four hours which seem to last two. Dino cannot understand this. I added that this was the reason we never worked together.”

“I am aware that this film is different from my previous works. This time I worked in total clarity as to the correctness of what I was doing. No question. Not the slightest concern. I have no doubt. I was transported on a journey during which I was certain of a good result. I’m speaking of the making of the movie. I’m really happy to have waited fifteen years to do it. All this time was important. I reflected on this when I saw the finished film. And I realized that if I had done the film earlier, it would have just been one more movie. Now, Once Upon A Time In America, it is the film by Sergio Leone. And it’s me, this film. We can only succeed with such a film with maturity, white hair and a lot of wrinkles around the eyes.”

“It seemed to me important, at that precise moment in my life, to film the almost futile existence of a person who left no trace and whose sole strength was the sentiment of friendship. Something which has always touched me, and which I have treated in all my films.”

“Clint is a mask of wax. In reality, if you think about it, they don’t even belong in the same profession. De Niro throws himself into this or that role, putting on a personality the way someone else might put on his coat, naturally and with elegance; while Eastwood throws himself into a suit of armor and lowers the visor with a rusty clang. It is precisely that lowered visor which composes his character. And that creaky clang it makes as it snaps down, dry as a Martini in Harry’s Bar in Venice, is also his character. Look at him carefully. Eastwood moves like a sleepwalker between explosions and hails of bullets, and he is always the same – a block of marble. He had only two expressions: with or without a hat. Bobby, first of all, is an actor. Clint, first of all, is a star. Bobby suffers. Clint yawns.”

NORTHWEST HOUNDED POLICE (TEX AVERY, 1941)

Life got ya down? Are you consumed by existential angst? Has “the horror” of existence become unendurable? Fret not, my friend, for I have the solution to all your worries. Just watch this Droopy cartoon and all will be right with the world. It’s a NOFF guarantee. (But if it doesn’t work, then start drinking heavily.)

Then watch a defenseless dairy calf get his head bashed in. Make no mistake: such horrific savagery is the inevitable by-product of the dairy industry. But don’t worry about it. After all, you need a piece of cheese.

A FEW WORDS ABOUT VEGANISM, ANIMALS, NUTRITION, THE ENVIRONMENT AND Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret

Would anything persuade you to go vegan? What about the unnecessary slaughter of sentient animals? Every hour six million farm animals are stabbed in the neck. Does that bother you? Would you go vegan for them, for all those innocent and defenseless animals? I’d like to think the answer to that is a resounding “Yes!” but, alas, I know all too well from spending entirely too much time online suffering speciesist fools ungladly that all too often the answer is a self-serving “No!” Such people regard farm animals as mere things, consumable commodities, no more worthy of our moral consideration than a head of lettuce, even though chickens, cows, pigs and the rest are as fully sentient as the beloved companion animals we fetishize. These non-vegan bullies victimize the most vulnerable among us and chuckle and brag about it as though it were a point of pride, a praiseworthy accomplishment. For them, it is unthinkable to forgo that bacon ‘n cheese, chicken ‘n steak quadruple-decker, grease-drenched, blood-soaked 5-pound cowburger, because titillating their palates is vastly more important than the meaningless life of some stupid animal. “Stab ‘em in the neck and fire up the grill” just about sums up their inspiring perspective.

I hope you are not one of these lost causes. If, unlike the “mmm bacon” brigade, you have genuine moral concern for animals but, for whatever reason, harbor reservations about veganism, I urge you to read Gary Francione’s Eat Like You Care, an eloquent defense of veganism which debunks nearly every conceivable objection to it in a straightforward, easy-to-read, commonsensical style.

But even if you have little or no regard for the wellbeing of sentient nonhumans, and value your palate pleasure over their very lives, there is still ample reason to go vegan, notably the recognized health benefits of a well-planned vegan diet. Would you go vegan for that, for your health? After all, there is widespread consensus across the full spectrum of health care organizations, including the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, the American Heart Association, the American Cancer Society, the American Diabetes Association, Kaiser Permanente, and nearly everyone else except those with a vested interest in the animal abuse industries, that a properly planned vegan diet is not only nutritionally sound but also provides optimal protection against, among myriad other ailments and diseases, diabetes, cancer, and heart disease.

If you’re interested in good health and longevity, do yourself a favor and read Joel Fuhrman’s Super Immunity, and/or The End of Dieting: How to Live for Life, both of which are lucidly written, painstakingly researched nutrition guides that expose the health risks associated with consuming animal products and tout the health benefits associated with a plant-based, nutrient-dense, whole foods diet rich in fruits, vegetables, beans, legumes, nuts, seeds and mushrooms. (Note: Fuhrman cannot be accused of promoting a vegan agenda because he does not insist upon a strict vegan diet, allowing for an extremely limited intake of animal products once in a while, but it is fair to say that he encourages veganism based upon an objective, comprehensive analysis of the scientific literature.)

I happen to live in Texas where the vast majority of people are noticeably overweight, if not downright obese, which is both alarming and, well, thoroughly repugnant. Don’t mess with Texas…because they’ll sit on and crush you – then swallow you whole. I swear, these bad food junkies, who just can’t lay off the bacon wrapped, cheese-stuffed, fat-saturated, calorie/cholesterol/carcinogen-loaded 2-foot frankensteinfurters, would rather get ass cancer and keel over prematurely from a coronary than live vegan for 100 years. I can hear them now: “Whoopie ti yi yo and a yippee-ka-yay, stab ‘em in the neck, fire up the grill, slather on the butter and let the feeding frenzy begin!”

Apparently these yahoos think, quite mistakenly, that we vegans nourish ourselves on rabbit food and other tasteless shit, as though we nibble on lettuce and tofu all the livelong day. For the record: I don’t eat tofu. Hate it. Nor do I eat much lettuce, although I do eat a lot of phytochemical-laden leafy greens such as kale, spinach and arugula, all of which contain more protein per calorie than steak. Stick that in your pit and grill it.

Vegans also eat “tasteless shit” like this:

That’s a mere sample of vegan chow, but it should be enough to convince even the staunchest animal-gobbler that we vegans can titillate our taste buds with the best of them. But the real pleasure, one that transcends the mere pleasures of the palate, comes from knowing that no animals were enslaved, tortured and stabbed to death in the making of these delicious meals and confections.

Not all animal abusers/eaters display such reckless disregard for their health. Currently the so-called Paleo diet is all the rage among gullible bros back-slapping and high-fiving each other at the local CrossFit gym. A few bench presses and cave-manly grunts later, the pumped-up bros sharpen their spears, form a hunting party, and head to the supermarket to buy lots of meat with their mom’s credit card. Just like a caveman.

For an utter demolition of this inane diet fad – whose entire premise, that we should eat like our Paleolithic ancestors did, rests on a fallacious appeal to nature – check out this outstanding website. It is, in bro parlance, a total smackdown.

But even if you have little or no regard for sentient nonhuman life and/or for your own health and longevity, there still remains compelling reason to go vegan. What about the fact that animal agriculture is an environmental disaster? Did you know that livestock alone emit more greenhouse gases than the entire transportation sector? That’s right, more than all the modes of transportation *combined* – as in every motor vehicle, locomotive, watercraft and aircraft on…the…planet. Although estimates of the percentage of greenhouse gas emissions linked to livestock range from 15% to 51%, even the lower of the two percentages exceeds that of the transportation sector, which is estimated to be around 13%. Moreover, as this article points out the 15% was calculated by livestock specialists, the 51% by environmental specialists. Don’t know about you, but I’d put more (live)stock in the latter.

Would you go vegan for that, for the environment, for the planet? Imagine the good we could do for the planet, literally overnight, if we all just stopped stabbing farm animals and went vegan instead.

I defy anyone to read this fact sheet, and the studies therein, and not come away convinced that the gross wastefulness and inefficiency of animal agriculture is a major contributor to the escalating climate crisis. Here’s a sample of what you’ll learn:

Land required to feed 1 person for 1 year: Vegan: 1/6th acre; Vegetarian: 3x as much as a vegan; Meat Eater: 18x as much as a vegan” “Our food our future.” Earthsave. http://www.earthsave.org/pdf/ofof2006.pdf

Methane has a global warming power 86 times that of CO2.” NASA. “Methane: Its Role as a Greenhouse Gas.” Jet Propulsion Laboratory. http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/education/pdfs/podest_ghg.pdf

Livestock is responsible for 65% of all emissions of nitrous oxide – a greenhouse gas 296x more destructive than carbon dioxide and which stays in the atmosphere for 150 years.”

“Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options.” Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. 2006.

http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/a0701e/a0701e00.htm

One hamburger requires 660 gallons of water to produce – the equivalent of 2 months’ worth of showers.” Catanese, Christina. “Virtual Water, Real Impacts.” Greenversations: Official Blog of the U.S. EPA. 2012. http://blog.epa.gov/healthywaters/2012/03/virtual-water-real-impacts-world-water-day-2012/

2,500 gallons of water are needed to produce 1 pound of beef.” Robbins, John. “2,500 Gallons, All Wet?” EarthSave http://www.earthsave.org/environment/water.htm

1,000 gallons of water are required to produce 1 gallon of milk.” “Water trivia facts.” United States Environmental Protection Agency. http://water.epa.gov/learn/kids/drinkingwater/water_trivia_facts.cfm#_edn11

477 gallons of water are required to produce 1 pound of eggs; 900 gallons of water are needed for cheese.” “Meateater’s Guide to Climate Change & Health.” Environmental Working Group. http://www.ewg.org/meateatersguide/interactive-graphic/water/

But, hell, on second thought, who gives a shit about the planet anyway? Why not let future generations worry about global warming and climate change? Why not ignore the facts, pretend that global warming either doesn’t exist or if it does exist that we had nothing to with it, and have faith that, even if we did instigate and now continue to perpetuate the ever-worsening climate crisis, we could fix it with a little elbow grease and a can-do attitude, plus a helluva lot of technological know-how, before the situation crosses the point of no return. Besides, why should I care about future generations that will exist after my death any more than I care about past generations that existed before my birth? Makes no sense. What I really care about, above all, is pleasuring my palate like there’s no tomorrow. So commence with the neck stabbings!

If, on the other hand, you care about the planet and the fate of our species and countless others, then I urge you to watch Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret, a somewhat amateurish but fact-filled, eye-opening documentary which deserves attention, if for no other reason than that it exposes an inconvenient truth that Al Gore neglected to mention. The film does what Gore and so many gutless others, including most of the environmental agencies, failed to do: take on the powerful meat/dairy/poultry industries and their lobbying bullyboys, and call attention to the hormone-oozing, freakishly humungous cow in the room. See her? She’s the one belching, farting and shitting unholy amounts of methane into the atmosphere.

Breaking news: cows unleash an earth-shattering fart into the face of humanity. You might call this poetic justice, bovine-style. Our species, in all its absurdity, is literally dying for a hamburger. How delicious is that?

By the way, if you think that organic beef from grass-fed cows is the answer, I’m afraid you’re mistaken.

First, the argument is moot, because unless there is a dramatic paradigm shift toward veganism, factory farming ain’t going away. As a practical matter, the quaint family farms of yesteryear, where happy animals once grazed peacefully on picturesque pastures before being lovingly herded into trucks and leisurely driven to the friendly neighborhood slaughterhouse to be oh-so-humanely exsanguinated, cannot possibly meet the rising global demand for meat and other animal products in this increasingly overpopulated world. Only intensive, hyper-efficient factory farming has the wherewithal to churn out the massive amounts of meat, eggs, and dairy needed to satiate the gluttonous appetite of the non-vegan.

Second, grass-fed cows are *worse* for the environment than their feedlot counterparts. As Plant Positive explains in the video below:

“Some people believe they are getting around the environmental costs of meat-eating by selecting grass fed beef. I’m not sure why they believe this. If you are concerned about land use or greenhouse gases, the regular feedlot system is much better. Giving an animal growth promotants like hormones and antibiotics makes it more efficient at converting its food into muscle and fat mass that will eventually be food for the meat-eater. Therefore, it needs less resources and less time to develop all that meat, milk and fat. How is it better for the environment to eat an animal that requires more land and more resources to produce the same number of calories?”

Veganism is better for the animals, for your health, and for the planet. Any one of those benefits is a good reason to go vegan; combined, they make the case for veganism overwhelming. So stop looking for excuses to keep harming animals, yourself and the environment, and just…GO…VEGAN!

I thank you. The planet thanks you. And they thank you:

Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret (Kip Andersen & Keegan Kuhn, 2014)

Come back in a day or two for a new post. In the meantime, take a look at the documentary that Louie Psihoyos, Oscar-winning director of The Cove, says “may be the most important film made to inspire saving the planet” and that Darren Aronofsky says “will rock and inspire the environmental movement.”

ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA – EXTENDED CUT (BLU-RAY)

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After the restored longer version of Once Upon a Time in America was shown at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival (which I wrote about here), the film was promptly removed from circulation “pending further restoration work.” Not much has been written about it since, but now, on September 30, Warner Bros. is finally releasing the extended – and, presumably, “further” restored – version on Blu-ray. Although press reports and reviews will doubtless tell you that this version more closely approximates Leone’s intended director’s cut, the reality is far more complex. First, there’s a small matter that nobody ever mentions: Leone preferred the 229-minute version. How do I know this? Because he said so: “the version that I prefer is this one.”

Here’s the full quote:

“Then there is the very long one that has never been edited and which lasts fifty minutes longer. Four and a half hours. But we rejected the idea of two parts on TV. It is so intricate that it has to be done in one evening. And besides, let’s be honest: this one is my version. The other perhaps explained things more clearly and it could have been done on TV in two or three parts. But the version that I prefer is this one, that bit of reclusiveness is just what I like about it.”

[Source: Sergio Leone: The Great Italian Dream of Legendary America by Oreste De Fornari]

This raises obvious questions: If Leone were alive today would he even want to have these scenes reinstated? Would he want a bunch of technicians, splicers and knob-twiddlers, many of whom had no previous association with the film, tampering with his *preferred* version without his consent? We will never know, of course, the extent to which Leone would have approved of this longer version. And that’s the point. We can’t know. So, please, let’s not refer to it as the “Extended Director’s Cut,” as is stated so misleadingly on the cover of the Blu-ray.

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A different albeit related question is this: did Leone actually assemble a fully edited, ready-for-distribution 270-minute director’s cut in 1984? Most fans assume so, but considering the ample evidence to the contrary, I have my doubts. Let’s review the evidence:

1) In his 1988 interview with De Fornari, Leone is quoted as saying:

“Then there is the very long one that has never been edited…”

The quote contradicts the notion that Leone finished editing the longer version. It is, of course, possible that he was mistranslated. After all, in an earlier interview he’s quoted as saying the exact opposite: that the scenes had been edited. Perhaps in the later interview Leone used the word “edito” which sounds like “edited” but which Google translates as “published” and which could, I suppose, be interpreted as “released.” So he might have said that the missing scenes had never been released.

But…

2) In the Cannes press kit, Davide Pozzi, Director of L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory which performed the restoration, wrote:

“Technically, the homogeneity of the unedited scenes was the biggest problem, as unfortunately the negatives for these scenes no longer exist.”

Was Pozzi mistranslated too? I doubt it since I think he’s fluent in English. So what does he mean by “unedited scenes” if not that the scenes were…unedited?

I don’t know, maybe we can construe “unedited scenes” to mean “scenes that need to be reinserted from where they were removed.” And why not? Doesn’t Gian Luca Farinelli say, in that very same press kit, that “beginning and end frames of the cut scenes allowed us to identify the exact place they were deleted from.”?

So there you have it. All they had to do was take a beginning frame from here, an end frame from there, and reinsert them whence they came. Finito!

But…

3) In an Italian article from 2011, Andrea Leone, Sergio’s son, said “Il montaggio degli inediti e una ricucitura complessa,” which roughly translates as “the editing of the unreleased footage needs complex re-stitching.” (Note: in the context of filmmaking, “montaggio” refers to editing.)

Here we have a sentence containing three words that seem to refer to or could be interpreted as “editing” – montaggio, ricucutura and inediti. (Note: the Italian translation of “unedited” is, according to Google, “inediti.”) Whatever the precise translation, one thing is certain: the process to reinsert the missing scenes would be “complessa” – i.e., complex.

Hmm, if all they had to do to arrive at Leone’s fabled director’s cut was insert the unreleased (and supposedly fully edited) footage back into the existing 229-minute version, why would Andrea say that it would be a complex editing process?

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Come to think of it, editors routinely leave extra footage at the head and tail of frames on rough cuts so that the shots can later be trimmed for content, rhythm, and running time. It is common practice, is it not, for editors to significantly whittle down the running time of rough cuts by the time the film is released? So, yeah, we know where the missing scenes were cut from (the script pretty much tells us that anyway), but so what? That doesn’t mean they were taken from a completely edited workprint – i.e., the fine cut.

In his 1984 interview with Cahiers du Cinema Leone discusses the film’s duration, saying that he was given carte blanche to make a four-and-a-half hour version, but then…

“Four months after the start of editing, they said to me no, it is not possible. They demanded that I cut the film. I did not want to go back to the first concept which was three hours. I cut as much as I could…”

This is, I think, telling: Leone knew that a four-and-a-half hour version was out of the question two months *before* he finished editing the film. It’s not as if they demanded he shorten the film *after* he’d assembled a fully edited 270-minute fine cut. I suspect, then, that Leone excised around 40-50 minutes of footage from an *incomplete* workprint, not from the *fine* cut, with the idea of later assembling a longer version for Italian TV, but never got around to fine-tuning the scenes.

According to Leone’s biographer, Christopher Frayling:

“Leone had ten hours of usable footage in the can. With help from editor Nino Baragli, this was pruned to six hours. Then, finally accepting that there was unlikely to be a two-part version, Leone delivered a *fine cut* of three hours and forty-nine minutes.”

So it sounds like the “fine cut” – the one that results from trimming down the rough cut – was three hours and forty-nine minutes, not four hours and twenty-nine minutes. If so, that means the missing scenes never made it all the way through the most crucial creative phase of the editing. How do we know the extent to which the scenes had been edited? Were they completely edited, up to and through post-production, or were they only partly edited and/or in need of additional post-production work?

Of course, it was Andrea Leone, after all, who said reinserting the missing scenes would be a “complex” task, and we all know from the fiasco of the premature release of the restored version that Andrea has his head lodge in his asshole up to his Adam’s apple, so it stands to reason that he was just talking shit.

But…

4) Reportedly, Morricone and Fausto Ancillai, the film’s original sound editor, helped supervise the restoration, which suggests, at the very least, that the sound and music in the missing scenes hadn’t received proper post-production attention.

Admittedly, I don’t know the exact contributions Ancillai and Morricone made to the restoration. All I know is what little has been reported of their involvement. I think Variety was the first to report Ancillai’s role as supervisor, and Pozzi thanks him in the aforementioned press kit for his support during the restoration process.

Interestingly, Pozzi did not thank Morricone, which might indicate that the composer’s involvement was minimal, I don’t know. Farinelli mentions Morricone in relation to the restoration in this 2011 article but it’s in Italian and the Google translation is ambiguous:

“It will be a challenging process and we are at the beginning. A job that will require at least a year, also because in addition to the frames, there are the sound effects and the soundtrack of Morricone, who is added to the work of replacement.”

I can’t tell if Farinelli is saying that Morricone will work on the new scenes or simply that the sound and music need additional work/enhancement. Maybe someone who understands Italian can interpret this.

This French translation of the Italian article is less ambiguous, and if it’s closer to the mark, then there’s good reason to believe that Ancillai and Morricone contributed additional sound and music to the excised scenes.

“It’s a real challenge ahead of us today. A job that will require almost a year, because in addition to the image, there is the sound and music of Ennio Morricone to be added.”

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Leone makes another telling statement in the Cahiers interview:

Cahiers: How was the sound done in the movie?

Leone: Everything was in direct sound, with Jean-Pierre Ruh, who won an Oscar for Tess. But it was necessary to *post-synchronize* some scenes because sometimes I try shooting with the film music and the actors who have rehearsed with it sometimes prefer to film with it and to *dub afterwards* since it gives them a certain atmosphere.

So just because Leone shot the missing scenes with direct sound does not mean he completed post-production work on the dialogue, let alone the effects and music.

Most directors do not play music on the set, so Leone was unique in this regard, but even under normal circumstances dialogue is often modified and/or replaced during post-production. Moreover, whether scenes are shot silent or with direct sound, the music and sound effects get mixed in afterwards, during the post-synchronization process.

Given Leone’s operatic style and imaginative sound designs, the mixture of sound and music was a particularly important element of his cinema. To put the matter into stark relief, imagine if the opening of Once Upon a Time in the West, with its marvelous symphony of sound effects, or, more to the point of this post, the sequence in Once Upon a Time in America with the ringing phone echoing persistently through Noodles’ guilt-ridden flashback, had been excised before going through Leone’s creative sound mixing process! That phone rings 24 times at gradually increasing intervals over a span of 3 minutes and 43 seconds. How would the scene play if left to the devices of Andrea and his knob-twiddlers? How many times would the phone ring? Would the sequence climax with that piercing electronic shriek? I’d say “fat chance” but that would be an insult to fat chances. No wonder they enlisted the film’s original sound editor to supervise the restoration!

To be fair, the majority of the missing scenes appear to be heavy on expository dialogue, so perhaps the situation isn’t as serious as it might have been.

But Leone’s forte lay in his operatic style, his flair for creating dramatic marriages of image, sound and music, which likely inclined him to excise these talky scenes. And if, as I suspect, Leone cut the scenes before post-production and put them aside for safekeeping with the intention of fine-tuning them later, but ultimately abandoned plans to assemble a longer version, then, well, I’m afraid the Leone clan’s decision to reinsert the scenes was a doomed venture from the beginning.

When Raffaella first announced the discovery of these scenes in 2006, she said:

“We want to restore 40 minutes of deleted scenes we have found. Mind you, though: we will not reassemble the movie, which will stay what my father did.”

Yet she couldn’t leave well enough alone. Instead, she did precisely the opposite of what she said she would do: she *changed* what her father did. One has to wonder why. Did Leone’s secret diary reveal that he preferred the extended cut after all? Did Leone’s ghost encourage her to go forth with the project? Or, perhaps, were there more, shall we say, financial considerations afoot? Did she, her brother, and their moneymen calculate that it would be more profitable to reinsert the scenes? Maybe plastering “Extended Director’s Cut” across the Blu-ray cover would fill their coffers. But would the siblings Leone really sell out papa Leone for a stinking fistful of denaro? Well…maybe.

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In any case…

This comment by Pozzi makes a mockery of the notion that the newly restored longer version is Leone’s director’s cut:

“Technically, the homogeneity of the unedited scenes was the biggest problem, as unfortunately the negatives for these scenes no longer exist. The only materials available were discarded strips of working positives which had been badly preserved. Making this task even more difficult was the fact that the working positives had been printed without particular care, as originally they were part of the working copies which circulated between the assistant editors and sound editors as a work reference.”

Perhaps someone more familiar than I with the ins and outs of the editing process can straighten me out here, but if the missing scenes were unedited, if the negatives no longer exist, if the only materials available were discarded strips of working positives that had been badly preserved and carelessly printed, and if assistant editors and sound editors had used these copies as a work reference, on what possible grounds can a case be made that the reinsertion of these scenes into the existing film somehow constitutes Leone’s director’s cut?

Moreover, that these scenes were used as a work reference suggests, does it not, that they were still in the process of being edited? So even if Leone had assembled a complete 270-minute director’s cut in 1984 (which remains questionable), who’s to say that these “discarded strips of working positives” had been edited in the same way and to the same extent as the corresponding footage that made it into the alleged 270-minute version?

The ultimate question – the long and the short of it, I suppose – is this: given the above facts, how do we know with anything approaching certainty whether the missing scenes had been fully edited, partially edited, or not edited at all? Which ones, if any, made it all the way to the fine cut? Maybe some did. Maybe others never made it past the rough cut. Maybe others needed post-production tweaking.

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At least one scene was likely removed at the rough cut stage. Frayling says that Leone excised the chauffeur scene *during shooting* due to his reservations about producer Arnon Milchan’s acting ability, a well-founded concern given that the confrontational scene involves an amateur with no acting experience going up against the greatest actor of his generation. According to Leone’s trusted long-time assistant, Luca Morsella, whose close day-to-day contact with Leone surely gave him privileged insight into the director’s mentality and decision-making process, “Sergio had promised the part of the chauffeur to Milchan…but lost his nerve about this. He was worried that having taken so much trouble over casting everyone else, this might not work. So he said no. There was a row with Sergio, who finally agreed to shoot it. He shot it then cut it, and then told interviewers Milchan had made him cut it!”

Elizabeth McGovern, meanwhile, expressed grave doubts about her Cleopatra scene, not only because she felt she lacked the acting chops to pull off Shakespeare but also because “it stopped all the action…and was very strange to have a death scene Kabuki-style at that point in the movie.” She, for one, was happy to see it go. Frayling shares McGovern’s assessment of the scene and of herself, calling the scene “awful” and McGovern “no Shakespearean actress.” One has to wonder if Leone too harbored doubts; this might be the scene he least regretted cutting and the one he’d least want reinserted.

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Still, in the end, it might turn out that the scenes did travel all the way through post-production and that Leone did assembled a complete, release-ready 270-minute director’s cut in 1984. Maybe such a cut really existed, despite good reason to think otherwise. I don’t know.

I *do* know that, however many minutes of shitty looking footage Andrea and Raffaella manage to splice into their father’s 229-minute version, the newly restored longer version is not now, nor will it ever be, a true Leone-approved director’s cut. This is so for the following reasons:

1) Leone preferred the 229-minute version:

“Let’s be honest: this one is my version. The other perhaps explained things more clearly and it could have been done on TV in two or three parts. But the version that I prefer is this one, that bit of reclusiveness is just what I like about it.”

To me, that’s the final word on the subject, straight from the lion’s mouth, so to speak.

2) Leone is dead. So unless his ghost directed the restoration from on high, I’m guessing he never gave Andrea, Raffaella, Scorsese, his personal chef, or anyone else approval to reinsert the scenes.

3) Leone ain’t no ghost. Which means he did not participate in the restoration of *his* film. And that means he had no input into how the editing of the missing scenes was handled. So how then can the restoration be the director’s cut if the director wasn’t around to make decisions about how best to cut it?

4) Just because Leone might not have wanted to remove the scenes in 1984 does not mean that he’d want to reinsert them today. Maybe he’d want to put back all the scenes. Or none of them. Maybe he’d want to reinsert the Louise Fletcher scene but leave out the new one with Treat Williams. Or vice versa. Maybe he’d decide to burn the chauffeur scene to spite Milchan. Maybe he’d choose to shorten a scene, or add a sound effect, or employ Morricone’s score in some idiosyncratic way. We’ll never know. Because he’s dead.

As far as I’m concerned, this newly restored version, or any other version Raffaella and Andrea decide to cobble together in the future, is nothing more than an approximation of a director’s cut Leone envisioned once upon a time.

That said, I can’t wait to see it! And I hope the accompanying 32-page booklet addresses some of the above issues.

Postscript (10/3/2014): I am now in possession of the misnamed “Extended Director’s Cut.” I haven’t watched the film yet, but in the process of downloading a digital copy, I happened to watch the pre-credits restoration notes. This caught my eye:

Additional sound restoration and sonorization of cut scenes: Fausto Ancillai and Ennio Morricone

Additional editing supervision: Alessandro Baragli and Patrizia Ceresani

“Sonorization” refers to the practice of adding music and effects to silent films. So there you have it: Fausto and Ennio contributed additional sound and music to the cut scenes. They “sonorized” the film!

That Alessandro Baragli, presumably Nino’s son, and Patrizia Ceresani provided “additional editing supervision” can mean only one thing: the cut scenes underwent editing of some kind. After all, there had to be editing going on in the first place for there to be a need for “additional editing supervision.” I guess Alessandro and Patrizia supervised the supervision of the editing. Perhaps Nino supervised the two career assistant editors from beyond the grave.

What a joke it is to claim that this is the “Extended Director’s Cut.” It should be called the “Deceased Director’s Additionally Edited and Sonorized Extended Cut.” But, of course, that wouldn’t fit on the cover of the Blu-ray.

Post-postscript (10/3/2014): Raffaella Leone makes some interesting remarks in this article:

Raffaella Leone: “This is the movie that our father showed us when he finished editing ‘his’ movie.”

Wait, what? “His” movie? Hmm, so then I guess Leone showed her the additionally edited and sonorized 251-minute version. And here I thought “his” movie was a completely edited, un-sonorized 270 minutes.

I wonder if Raffaella has ever read the 1988 interview her father did with Oresto De Fornari, in which he says:

Sergio Leone: “Let’s be honest: this one is my version. The other perhaps explained things more clearly and it could have been done on TV in two or three parts. But the version that I prefer is this one, that bit of reclusiveness is just what I like about it.”

Make no mistake, Raffaella: your father’s talking about the 229-minute version. Your father preferred the 229-minute version. Your father said it was *his* version, the one *he* prefers.

I have no idea what movie your father showed you, but whatever it was it wasn’t *his* movie, at least not the one he said was *his* in 1988. And it certainly wasn’t this additionally edited and sonorized 251-minute version just released on Blu-ray. Ya know, the “Extended Director’s Cut?”

Raffaella Leone: “To bring back to the screens that movie in its original version has been very difficult and time consuming.”

Wait, what? “bring back…that movie in its original version.”

“That movie.” What movie? The one he showed you once upon a time? *His* movie? So *his* movie was 251 minutes? I thought it was 270 minutes.

Questions for Raffaella (who no doubt reads this blog):

1) How can this movie be the “movie in its original version” if its original version was supposedly 270 minutes?

2) How can this movie be the “movie in its original version” if this movie in its present form was edited and sonorized?

3) Why did you decide to reassemble the movie, and change your father’s preferred 229-minute version, after you said “we will not reassemble the movie, which will stay what my father did”? Why didn’t you leave your father’s film alone, as you originally said you would?

4) What about the additional footage Scorsese supposedly has? Wasn’t that part of the original version? Or are you planning to release an even more original “original version” in the future with even more original footage from your father’s ever-evolving director’s cut?