In Defense of Boring Movies - The Thief and the Cobbler (Recobbled Cut)

I'm not gonna sell what I have stolen
It's something that belongs to me
--"Thief About to Break In," Teitur

This post is part of a series about slow, strange, difficult, and otherwise boring movies.


This installation of the Boring Movies series is brought to you by the late, great film criticism site, the Dissolve, which describes our film thus:

The Thief And The Cobbler should have been the capstone achievement of one of Great Britain’s finest animators. It was the last great hand-drawn animated film, and the final film of many of the greatest animators of the golden age: men whose careers stretched back to Fantasia and Betty Boop. As it went through iteration after iteration over its three decades of development (by my count, it had 10 different working titles over the years, some repeated), it served as a palimpsest and training ground for a new generation of animators. By the time a butchered version of the film finally limped into theaters, it was famous mostly as a financial and artistic debacle. In the years since, it’s become legendary. It’s been the subject of a remarkable documentary by Kevin Schreck, Persistence Of Vision—and an even more remarkable fan restoration project by Garret Gilchrist. Behind this legendary lost film was [Robert] Williams, a key figure in British animation best known for his groundbreaking work on Who Framed Roger Rabbit... For nearly 30 years, his obsession with creating the greatest animated film of all time kept him at the center of a maelstrom.

In short, The Thief and the Cobbler was the obsessive project of animator Robert Williams, who spent so much time and energy working on it that he never actually managed to finish the thing. Instead, it was finally taken away from him and finished, quite badly, by someone else, and released just in time to look like a pale imitation of Disney's Aladdin.

Fortunately for us, the aforementioned fan restoration project, The Recobbled Cut, is highly available and highly watchable. It attempts to restore Williams' original vision for the film, by supplying the highest quality visuals available of the shots that make up the movie, from high-definition animation all the way down to still images of storyboards. Here's the opening segment of the film, which splices together line drawings, grainy old film stock, and high-definition visuals to give us an approximation of Williams' intended final product:

This wide variation is part of what makes the film fascinating, especially since the high-quality stuff is among the most elaborate hand-drawn animation ever created:

The film was animated at 24 frames per second (12 is more common), and every image was hand-drawn. The amount of work that went into a single sequence, the grand Vizier fanning a deck of cards, was astronomical—each card was individually painted. As one of the animators Kevin Schreck interviewed for Persistence Of Vision put it, “It looked like people died making this film.”

Like many movies in this series, the plot of The Thief and the Cobbler is simple to the point of almost not being worth talking about: thanks to the actions of a simple thief, a great city is threatened by a terrible evil, and a mysterious, silent cobbler teams up with the city's princess to save the day. It's all very The Hero's Journey. The characters are broad and even quite boring as people, and the dialog is merely a vehicle for the plot (except for the vizier, Zigzag, whose dialog is merely a rhyming vehicle for the plot). Also like other films in this series, the pacing of The Recobbled Cut is very strange, with plot-advancing dialog scenes occurring infrequently, sporadically, and usually quite briefly, while great lengths of time are spent on Looney Tunes-style gags:

...or other elaborate visual setpieces, like this chase scene through MC Escher's dream palace:

I've defined boring movies as movies with a subversive purpose: instead of aiming for pure entertainment, a boring movie presents the viewer with a viewing experience that is in some way a serious challenge, and then asks the viewer to deal with it. A boring movie poses serious questions to the viewer, and creates space for the viewer to come up with answers.

While most movies I've reviewed in this series are intentionally boring in this sense, The Recobbled Cut is not, because its boring qualities are partially a product of the director's frustrated and never-completed vision. (It does share this quality with at least one other movie in the series, The Dark Crystal "Director's Cut".) Richard Williams did not set out to intentionally challenge audiences by inserting storyboards instead of animation, or varying the quality of the visuals over a broad range of color saturations, degrees of sharpness, and levels of completion. And he was probably not aware that he was sacrificing quality dialog and plot for obsessively detailed animation.

But these difficulties do present any viewer with a significant question: how much do plot, or dialog, or characters matter if one's goal is the pinnacle of visual craftsmanship? This is an especially pressing question in hand-drawn animation, where the amount of work required to produce something that looks great is increased tenfold or more over the comparatively simple process of filming live action. In other words, is anything else really important if you're able to produce visual spectacle with this level of vividness and detail:

I've watched this movie twice now, and I'm still not sure I have the answer.

Fair warning to viewers: there are a number of questionable decisions made when it comes to depicting the characters. Women and people of color are poorly represented. If that's the kind of thing you notice or think about when consuming media, this movie will make you shake your head. (Watching it reminded me of The Tragedy of Man, another passion project film, which took decades to animate, has highly inventive and well-executed visuals, and maintains a pretty poor view of women as people.)

If you can look past the movie's many flaws, though, you'll find a diamond in the rough. Robert Williams is an animation master, notably heading up the animation for the astonishing Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and anything he's done is worth looking into if you're at all interested in the history of great animation. You can find the full version of The Recobbled Cut here, and links to more of his work in the full write-up over at The Dissolve. [2024 update: I've updated the links in this post, but I can't find a Wayback Machine archive of the original post on The Dissolve. If you happen to do the digging yourself and figure out where it is, dear reader, please leave it for us in the comments!]

In Defense of Boring Movies - Timbuktu

This post is part of a series of essays In Defense of Boring Movies. 

It’s a time which separates the beloved from those they love,
And when you think of them, painful obsessive thoughts are all that come.
—"Cler Achel (I Spent the Day)," Tinariwen (trs. from Tamasheq)

What is a boring movie? A boring movie is one whose purpose is not to entertain, but to provoke thought. Watching a boring movie is about self-improvement: it's like sitting down to read a book of ancient philosophy or densely written fiction—in the end, it can be rewarding and even fun, but you have to put in the work yourself.

There are no rules for how to make a movie like this, but a couple of common characteristics have emerged as I have studied this kind of film. One is sparing use of music: many of these movies refuse to use music as a crutch to tell the audience how to feel. (The previous entry in this series, Steven Soderbergh's black and white Raiders of the Lost Ark cut, might seem to be an exception, since the whole movie is set to music and has no dialogue or other sound, but the music in the film is never the first choice for pairing with the images on screen, and sometimes even actively works against the natural emotion that the scene might be invoking.)

The other characteristic is frequent use of long shots. (Long in time, not distance.) Lengthy shots force viewers to slow down and reckon with what we're actually seeing, to focus on images and allow thoughts to bloom in response, rather than trying to keep track and make sense of a rapid sequence of cuts designed to carry forward a plot and maintain interest. Click the clip below and watch for 60 seconds or so for a good example, comparing last year's frenetic Interstellar with the grave, somber 2001: A Space Odyssey. (The whole video is worth watching, by the way, but some other time when you're not reading this post!)

The movie I'm reviewing here, 2014's excellent Timbuktu, has both of these qualities in spades. The director, Abderrahmane Sissako, uses long shots to establish a quiet, even meditative mood, which is tough (and, in a way, bold) considering the movie's premise: in 2012, Timbuktu, an important city in Mali, west Africa, was occupied by Islamic militants, and Timbuktu depicts life during their regime. 

The sparing use of music is a tool that requires viewers to focus on their emotional reaction to and interpretation of a scene. Music can be used to enhance a scene, sure, but it can also simply tell the viewer what to think or feel; refusing to use music in almost any scene in Timbuktu, Sissako lets the audience think for themselves about the nature of life in occupied Timbuktu; for the most part, the slow pace and refusal to heighten tensions with music lends the whole thing a humdrum feel, especially in the first half of the movie. Life goes on in the city, less conveniently, with more difficulty and strangeness, but still feeling very ordinary.

In Timbuktu, though, unlike other films in this series, music has a specific meaning throughout the film: all forms of music are forbidden by the occupying regime, so when music does show up in the film, it is usually associated with illicit activities. Mostly, the association is subtle; music plays in the soundtrack almost exclusively during events that are, in one way or another, illicit or forbidden, as in this questionably legal soccer game, played without a ball because soccer is forbidden (note: the scene involves one person speaking through a translator, and subtitles appear for the translator but not the original speaker):

 

The association is direct, though, in at least one case, where some young adults are arrested for gathering and making music:

Sissako employs long (sometimes very long) shots to great effect. Not only does he get viewers to slow down and really contemplate what is happening on screen, as with any longer shot, but he also uses long takes to make us absorb and process singularly uncomfortable, disquieting moments. By refusing to cut away to a new angle, the audience is provided with no relief, and we are forced to reckon with the discomfort radiating from the screen. Take, for example, this accidental death (murder?) scene, in which confrontation, awkward struggle, accidental gunshot, flight, and death take place in just four shots over three and a half minutes: 

Note music doesn't interfere with the awkwardness and discomfort of the struggle, but arrives after the crime has occurred, continuing the connection between music and illicit actions. 

~   ~   ~

Timbuktu asks us that most unsettling of questions: What if the monsters we fear most are just like us? In other words: If the occupiers in Timbuktu are simply ordinary men, who argue over soccer, make bumbling mistakes, and put forth bad arguments to cover poor or self-serving decisions, what separates us from them? Could we become like them given similar circumstances?

And in the tradition of boring movies, it gives plenty of space—plenty of slow-paced, quiet screen time, unencumbered by music or frenetic action—to contemplate the answer. 

~   ~   ~

To wrap things up, here are some more reasons to watch this movie, if you're still on the fence:

• If you're a language nerd like me, you'll love it—the characters speak not only widely spoken languages like English, French, and Arabic, but also the local languages Bambara and Tamasheq (one of my favorite bands, Tinariwen, perform primarily in Tamasheq).
• Like just about any film on my Boring Movies list, it's visually striking, and all the more so because you get plenty of time to look. Western Africa is rarely depicted in media that Americans watch, and it's a beautiful place to shoot a movie.  
• Unusually for the Boring Movies list, the movie has more of an ensemble cast--there is a central plot line of sorts, but lots and lots of characters get generous screen time and character arcs. I think this gives the movie a unique and intriguing feel. 
• Also, unlike most of the films in this series, Timbuktu clocks in under two hours—at a quick 96 minutes!
• If you're still unsure, the late, great Dissolve website has an excellent review that might help you decide.  

If you're like me and still have a Netflix DVD account, you can get Timbuktu that way, but it's also available as a video on demand from Google Play, Amazon, and iTunes. 

In Defense of Boring Movies - Raiders of the Lost Ark, B&W Silent Cut

Part of a series of essays In Defense of Boring Movies.

There's no color and no sound
I've been ten feet underground
—"Black and White Town," by Doves

Welcome back to In Defense of Boring Movies, an occasional series in which I talk about a movie that sets out to confound viewers' expectations and entice them to ponder big questions. Today's entry is on Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Steven Soderbergh cut.

Steven Soderbergh is a filmmaker with a diverse body of work; it includes mainstream successes like Erin Brockovich and Ocean's Eleven, as well as more eccentric fare, like his biopics on Che Guevara and Liberace, or other oddities like his Solaris remake and the male stripper movie Magic Mike. What makes him particularly interesting as a filmmaker, though, is his recent retirement from movie-making at age 50, citing the troubling state of the film industry and the fact that making movies just wasn't fun anymore.

It's been a prolific retirement: he's directed a Broadway production (The Library), created a short TV series (The Knick) and even started a liquor brand. He's active, is what I'm saying, and his activity has continued this week with the release of a black-and-white, silent cut of Raiders of the Lost Ark (the first Indiana Jones movie). Why? I'll let him tell it:

I value the ability to stage something well because when it’s done well its pleasures are huge, and most people don’t do it well, which indicates it must not be easy to master (it’s frightening how many opportunities there are to do something wrong in a sequence or a group of scenes. Minefields EVERYWHERE. Fincher said it: there’s potentially a hundred different ways to shoot something but at the end of the day there’s really only two, and one of them is wrong). Of course understanding story, character, and performance are crucial to directing well, but I operate under the theory a movie should work with the sound off, and under that theory, staging becomes paramount (the adjective, not the studio. although their logo DOES appear on the front of this…). 

So I want you to watch this movie and think only about staging, how the shots are built and laid out, what the rules of movement are, what the cutting patterns are. See if you can reproduce the thought process that resulted in these choices by asking yourself: why was each shot—whether short or long—held for that exact length of time and placed in that order? Sounds like fun, right? It actually is. To me. Oh, and I’ve removed all sound and color from the film, apart from a score designed to aid you in your quest to just study the visual staging aspect.

So, like all the movies in this series, this Raiders cut is about getting the viewer to set aside plot and escapism and fun, and ponder another subject deeply instead. Unlike most of the series, it's a deliberate manipulation of someone else's movie. (The lone exception so far is the "director's cut" of The Dark Crystal that was released by an avid fan last year.)

Soderbergh wants viewers to focus on staging--the deliberate placement of actors and scenery that, when done well, tells viewers where everything important in the imaginary on-screen world is, and how it's related in space to everything else. Staging also helps define visually what might be expressed in as narration or thought in another medium: the relationships between characters, and their personal psychology.

So, in the scene below, notice that the camera stays to the left of the characters as they proceed through the first section of the temple, only straying to the head-on or back-on position occasionally, and never moving to their right. The director is adhering to the 180-degree rule, which is a filmmaking guideline that, when followed, keeps the audience aware of where two characters in a scene are located in relation to each other. By staying on one side of the actors, the camera keeps Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) on the left and Satipo (Alfred Molina) on the right throughout the sequence. (If the camera went back and forth between the actors' right and left, the actors would appear to switch back and forth one the screen in relation to one another, confusing the audience.) This pattern is only broken when a shot of the branch above the pit, followed by a long shot from inside the pit of Indy swinging over it, alerts the audience to new spacial orientations.

Additionally, note how the actors' spacial relation to each other gives us a sense of their personal relationship to one another, and their own personalities. Ford strides ahead, confident but duly cautious; Molina cringes and minces along behind, often covered visually by Ford's body. As a bonus, pay attention to the way the lighting allows us to see each of Molina's horrified expressions, but tends to keep Ford's countenance in shadow.

The reality is, though, that I'm not a filmmaker. I'm not even a film student; I've never taken  a film class, so my love of film is 100% amateur-level, derived from reading Roger Ebert, the AV Club, and (more recently) The Dissolve. So I don't feel hugely qualified to talk at length about staging, though I found the task of focusing on it to be fascinating.

I am a musician though, and what's most striking to me (and what I feel somewhat qualified to speak on) is the use of music in this cut. Soderbergh says the musical score is meant to "aid you in your quest to just study the visual staging aspect," but to me it seems primarily designed to play with and break the viewer's expectations around the interaction of moving picture and musical accompaniment.

You may have noticed the jarring disconnect between the feel of the action on screen and the mood of the music in the first clip; this is a theme that's carried on throughout Soderbergh's cut, with some exceptions. Perhaps the most fitting, if still tongue-in-cheek, selections is the use of In the Hall of the Mountain King, with its gradual but inexorable ramping up of volume and tempo, for a chase sequence:

Soderbergh is using primarily (or possibly exclusively; I can't say for sure, more on this below) music from two David Fincher movies, The Social Network and Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, to score this cut, perhaps simply as a reminder to the viewer of Fincher's motto about staging, which he quotes in his explanation of what this is all about. Whatever his reasoning, the music, by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross of Nine Inch Nails, often has a haunting effect, imbuing scenes that play as funny or frenetic in the original with a sense of eerie calm in this version. At other times, the music matches the mood of the scene, while still bringing an eccentric vibe to the proceedings, as in this tense fight sequence, which pulses with industrial energy in the score:

What this sequence, and indeed much of the rest of this cut, brings to the fore, is just how little of acting is line reading. Without a single word to help them, the actors convey menace, fear, rage, pain, and relief, to our complete comprehension. That said, I can't tell you for certain if the movie makes complete sense without words: I know it too well to get confused anyway, and I decided against trying to badger my wife (the only person I know hasn't seen Raiders) into watching with me.

~   ~   ~

Wrapping up: I did as thorough a check as I could on the music used in the film. Below are all the songs I was able to identify (I used a music identification app called Shazam). The rest is enough like it that it's probably other stuff from the same artists, whether more obscure than the stuff identified, or (just maybe) original compositions for this project.

Here's a list of songs used: 

1. 0:00-5:06 - "In Motion" - Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (The Social Network soundtrack)
2. 5:07-9:35 - "Soft Trees Break the Fall" - TSN soundtrack
3. 9:36-10:50 - "Penetration" - TSN soundtrack
4. 10:51-13:03 - "In the Hall of the Mountain King" - Pier Gynt, arr. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (TSN soundtrack)
5. 13:04-15:44 - "Revealed in the Thaw" - Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (Girl With the Dragon Tatoo soundtrack)
6. 15:45-19:55 - "A Pause for Reflection" - GWTDT soundtrack
7. 19:56-22:09 - "While Waiting" - GWTDT soundtrack
8. 22:10-25:38 - "Almost Home" - TSN soundtrack
9. 25:39:-29:03 - "Painted Sun in Abstract" - TSN soundtrack
10. 29:04-33:24 - "Intriguing Possibilities" - TSN soundtrack
11. 33:25-36:34 - "Complications with Optimistic Outcome" - TSN soundtrack
12. 36:35-42:26 - ?
13. 42:27-46:16 - "Almost Home" (again)
14. 46:17-58:58 - "The Heretics" - GWTDT soundtrack
15. 58:59-1:03:02 - "On We March" - TSN soundtrack
16. 1:03:03-1:05:25 - ?
17. 1:05:26-1:08:35 - ?
18. 1:08:39-1:12:44 - "People Lie All the Time" - GWTDT soundtrack
19. 1:12:45-1:16:15 - "Painted Sun in Abstract" (again)
20. 1:16:16-1:20:05 - ?
21. 1:20:06-1:22:25 - ?
22. 1:22:26-1:29:38 - ?
23. 1:29:39-1:32:15 - ?
24. 1:32:16-1:34:08 - "While Waiting" (again)
25. 1:34:09-1:38:40 - ?
26. 1:38:41-1:42:07 - "A Familiar Taste" - TSN soundtrack
27. 1:42:08-1:45:45 - ?
28. 1:45:47-1:49:42 - ?
29. 1:49:43-1:50:40 - "Penetration" (again)
30. 1:50:41-1:55:38 - "In Motion" (again)

Finally, I feel I would be remiss if I didn't provide my favorite scene, the truck chase sequence. Enjoy it, in all its silent, frenetic glory:

You can watch the whole thing over at Soderbergh's site, here. 

In Defense of Boring Movies - Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner

Part of a series of essays In Defense of Boring Movies.

Source

I got my life, 
And it's my only one,
I got the night, 
I'm running from the sun,
So good night! 
I made it out the door—
After tonight,
There will be no return,
After tonight,
I'm taking off on the road.
—"See You In My Nightmares," Kanye West (feat. Lil Wayne)

The story behind Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner is unlike that of any movie I've ever seen, so that's where I'll start: it's the first feature-length movie ever written and performed in the Inuktitut language.* Its entire cast and most of its crew were of Inuit descent, and that level of representation of native North American peoples is an extreme rarity in the history of cinema (though not completely without precedent). The film is an interpretation of an ancient Inuit legend; to flesh out and ensure the accuracy of their story, the creators (all but one of whom were Inuit themselves) interviewed eight tribal elders over the course of several years to get different versions of the tale, and edited them together. It depicts with exacting detail a society and way of life practiced centuries ago by the ancestors of its creators. It is, in a word, extraordinary.

For all that, it is also a boring film, though as always in this series, I use that term in a positive sense. A "boring" movie, in my personal parlance, is one that challenges the audience, forcing the viewer to do expend substantial quantities of mental energy in order to get meaning or enrichment from the film.

Wikimedia

Unlike the some earlier entries in the IDoBM series, Atanarjuat is not boring because it leaves aside plot for extended periods of meditation on nature, poetry, or philosophy, but simply because its world is so alienating and confusing for most western audiences. The film does very little in the way of hand-holding for newcomers to its cultural norms, social bonds, and personal and place names. It opens with a mysterious social (and apparently magical) ritual, the consequences of which reverberate throughout the film, but what exactly is happening is never spelled out directly for the viewer, and we are left to puzzle it out over the course of the film's three-hour run time.

As always with movies in this series, though, putting in the energy yields rich rewards. In this case, the reward is the opportunity to immerse oneself in and examine a fascinating culture. The basic elements of this scene, for example, are timeless (woman displays interest in man, woman's brother shoves man because he doesn't like him), but they are played out against a unique background, the construction of an igloo using ancient tools and methods, by people dressed in the manner of their ancestors:

The plot is both simple in its basic outlines and fiendishly complex in the network of kinship ties, motivations, and protocols that it traces. It involves family conflicts stretching over several generations, as well as ghosts, reincarnation, and evil shamans, but the center of it all is a timeless story of a clash between two men—the naive but good-hearted Atanarjuat, and the jaded and calculating Oki—over the affections of a woman, Atuat. Oki has been betrothed to Atuat from childhood, but she and Atanarjuat love each other. Naturally, a ritual fighting game ensues, complete with meddling ancestor spirits:

Unfortunately, this is not enough to resolve things between Oki and Atanarjuat for long. The plot eventually achieves a Shakespearean level of social drama, replete with nefarious plotting, illicit affairs, rape, murder, revenge, and an extended chase scene featuring a naked man fleeing over a vast field of ice (that happens in The Winter's Tale too, right?) It is, to put it mildly, probably not a movie to watch with your parents.

Viewers willing to put in the mental energy required to sort through the complex network of characters, motivations, and alien cultural elements are likely to find themselves deeply engrossed in the world of the film.

The filming style, done with handheld digital cameras, lends a sort of real, on-the-ground feel to the movie, with the result that the viewer may forget that what they're seeing is a re-imagining and a re-enactment of a events a thousand years in the past. As Roger Ebert put it in his review, "There is a way in which the intimacy of the production and the 172-minute running time lull us into accepting the film as a documentary of real life. The actors, many of them professional Inuit performers, are without affect or guile: They seem sincere, honest, revealing, as real people might, and although the story involves elements of melodrama and even soap opera, the production seems as real as a frozen fish." This makes watching the credits at the end, in which we see the modern, up-to-date reality of the people on and off camera, both jarring and fascinating in itself.

Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner and its sequels can be downloaded for free (or a donation, which I encourage!) here. A streamable version is embedded below:

---

*This makes it the third movie in this series that employs the indigenous languages of the Americas, the others being The New World and Dead Man. This was not intentional, but I'm still very pleased by it. Also, all of the movies in the series so far include non-English languages...so long as you're willing to count the screeching of the Skeksis in The Dark Crystal "Directior's Cut" as language, which it's intended to be, whether or not it really is. Stalker is, of course, entirely in Russian.

In Defense of Boring Movies: The Dark Crystal "Director's Cut"

Part of a series of essays In Defense of Boring Movies.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes
(Turn and face the strange)
Ch-ch-changes
Don't want to be a richer man
Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes
(Turn and face the strange)
Ch-ch-changes
Just gonna have to be a different man
Time may change me
But I can't trace time
—"Changes," David Bowie

(Note: I've embedded the film being discussed here at the bottom of the post, so skip down if you want to get straight to the action!)

Something exciting happened to fans of Jim Henson's 1982 cult classic The Dark Crystal over the weekend: they got to see what it could have been.

The Dark Crystal is a weird film, but it was especially weird for moviegoers of 1982, who were mostly familiar with Henson's work on lighter, all-ages entertainment like The Muppet Show and Sesame Street, and were not necessarily prepared for an unsettling journey through an alien fantasy land full of monsters, danger, and death. Which is what they got when they sat down to see The Dark Crystal.

Test audiences for the film found it confusing and alienating. For these reasons, they did not like it very much. As a result, the final version of the film was changed significantly; to decrease audience confusion, voiceover narration and internal monologues were added—explaning background information and character motivations, respectively—and to decrease audience alienation, scenes where characters spoke in invented languages were dubbed over with English. The result is something even a child can understand, though whether they can enjoy it depends on their level of tolerance for the weird:

Original costume from The Dark Crystal

Much like another 1982 film, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, such changes significantly altered the film's overall feel and enjoyability, and a passionate fan base developed around both films because of their dark, weird, creative vision. Unlike Blade Runner, no version of The Dark Crystal as it was originally conceived has been made widely available to fans. Until now. 

You can read about it in more detail in the notes below, but this version consists mostly of restored audio from a VHS workprint of the film, synced with video from the DVD version, with scenes rearranged to match the order they appear in in the workprint, and with occasional VHS video from the workprint where no DVD version of the scenes exist. In short, it's the closest thing we currently have to a watchable "director's cut" cut of The Dark Crystal. And it's great.

This post is part of series of posts on "boring" movies, which I've defined up till now as movies that pose deep questions about life and then step back and give the viewer a headspace to examine these questions. This definition is a little too narrow to include The Dark Crystal, however; as far as I can tell, there are no deep questions on display in the film, and there's a little too much action for much of the movie to be considered "headspace." This cut of The Dark Crystal is a boring movie in a broader sense: it's boring because it requires significant energy to watch. This is actually a trait of many bad movies: if a movie is badly paced or confusingly cut, it can require extra energy that the audience should not have to spend in order to understand what is going on.

But if a movie deliberately sets out to challenge an audience, forcing viewers to make key connections and guess at backstory and character motivations, the result can be a much more entertaining and rewarding experience than that offered by a movie that spells everything out. In other words, movies that are willing to risk boring their viewers are often better for it. The Dark Crystal, like other movies in this series, is proof of this principle.

This cut of The Dark Crystal opens with a pair of unexplained deaths and the main character beginning a quest; he understands niether the goal of the quest nor how to accomplish it. Viewers are given no information that the characters do not have, and indeed less, as we have no idea who any of the characters we're meeting are, and information about them will only be delivered, piecemeal, later in the film. Engaged viewers will put in the energy needed to wonder about the missing information and look for it to appear later in the film, and they'll feel rewarded for their investment when they start to learn about what's kept mysterious earlier in the movie. The Dark Crystal's key enticement to convince the viewer to invest their energy this way is in its intensely imaginative and beautiful visual world, which is on display from the start and never really lets up. Check out, for exampe, this gorgeously imagined otherworldly swamp:

This cut of the movie is not without problems. The audio has been cleaned up from what was apparently a nearly unlistenable state, but it is still a VHS-quality sound, which can sometimes be jarring when paired with the crisp DVD-quality visuals, and which occasionally produces unintelligible dialog. The editor also had a few issues syncing audio and video, which results in a couple moments where the two do not quite match up. Also, some of the video is from the VHS workprint, and is of a much lower quality than the rest of the film. In this clip, you can hear some of the warbly VHS audio that the film occasionally features, and you can see some of the VHS-quality video that was salvaged from the workprint (in this case, in black and white, though some other VHS scenes are in color), providing a more complete transition between two scenes than is present in the final cut:

Lastly, one way in which this cut resembles neither the original vision of the film nor the final one is that it has long segments of untranslated dialog. The original idea was that one group of characters, the Skeksis, would speak in an invented language that would then be subtitled; this invented language appears in the director's cut, but there are no subtitles for it and the audience must guess from context what is being said. In this way, this cut feels more like another film in the In Defense of Boring Movies series, Dead Man, in which there are extended segments of untranslated Native American language dialog. (This comparison is moot if you happen to speak Cree or Blackfoot. Or Skeksis, for that matter.) While we were watching the part of the film in the clip below, I told my roommate that there was intentionally no translation or English dialog, and he said "Good, because I felt like I was going insane."

It would be nice to see an edition that both reflects the original vision of Jim Henson and that doesn't feel like a bootleg. But what we have here is still in many ways superior to the offical cut of the movie; it is a version that challenges viewers in a number of ways and more fully rewards the decision to sit down and watch The Dark Crystal. I think it's definitely worth a look, and not just for people who are already fans.

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Link to an interview with the editor of this cut

Other notes from the editor:

Early versions of The Dark Crystal were a bit different than the version we see today. Jim Henson and Frank Oz originally sought to create a much darker story that relied more on the audience and less on voice-overs and inner monologues explaining the plot. In this version there's no narrator, Jen's inner monologues are gone, and the Skeksis hardly ever say anything in English (Aughra speaks some Skeksis too!). This version is much more modern and a little darker with this original audio and the slightly different score. Some of the scenes are moved around too, which adds to the surreal feel of the original film. Some test audiences were more casual moviegoers and responded negatively to this version so the Henson team redubbed the ENTIRE film to help explain the plot to the audience up front and make things more obvious.

Sadly this beautiful version was mostly lost with a few rough-looking (yet still redubbed at times) scenes making it to the DVD and Blu-Ray versions. Demonoid user Aikousha saw this early test version when he was a kid and took it upon himself to track down this little bit of film history. What he found was a very nasty black and white "workprint" copy (used by the Dark Crystal production team) on a VHS tape that was very grainy and was almost unlistenable due to tape compression and SEVERE hiss and noise. But the important thing was that it was a mostly intact version of the beautiful vision of Jim Henson, Brian Froud, and Frank Oz. The Dark Crystal, as originally intended!

Workprints are used by the production crew and this one has all the trappings of one. Grease marks on the film, rough cuts, tape slowdown, and unfinished special effects among other things. Now, this workprint is still out floating around on the internet but it's really painful to watch and the sound is atrocious so I took it upon myself to clean up the audio, sync it to a clean treatment of the video, include some scenes that were unavailable anywhere else, and recut a watchable version that played out like the workprint.

Disclaimer: It's still a little rough. My computer had lots of slowdown since I was syncing to a HQ vid and some of the missteps in editing weren't noticeable until the 5 hour render was complete! They're minor and not frequent so it might only take you out of the moment briefly.

Black and white scenes were included from the workprint occasionally since they're not available elsewhere. They include: A matte painting of landscape in front of Skeksis castle that pans down to the 'lost' Jen swimming scene, an extended clip of 'Trial By Stone', an extended scene in Aughra's home, with a little extra at the end.

Deleted funeral scenes from the DVD are restored to their proper place.

There is also some beautiful alternate music composed by Vangelis here and there

Credit goes to Demonoid user Aikousha for finding the workprint and making it available. All reassembly was done by me scoodidabop (aka Christopher Orgeron/Creedo). If anyone wishes to attempt restoring the black and white scenes I'll gladly include them in a new edit of the film. For the record I attempted to contact the Henson company earlier this year when I had about half of the edit complete to ask about sharing this on youtube but they never responded to my inquiry. Also, I just found out today (Dec 2nd) that someone else attempted this same idea and called it "The Darker Crystal" and released it in September. This is NOT his version. I haven't seen his version but I'm sure mine is similar to his.

I began working on this over 2 years ago and finally finished it last week. Lots of work but it was worth it.

Photos:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Skeksis_on_Display.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Dark_Crystal_Film_Poster.jpg

In Defense of Boring Movies: The New World

Part of a series of essays In Defense of Boring Movies.

A whole new world,
A new fantastic point of view,
No one to tell us no, 
or where to go,
Or say we're only dreaming.
—"A Whole New World," from Disney's Aladdin

Savages, savages!
Barely even human...
They're not like you and me
Which means they must be evil!
—"Savages," from Disney's Pocahontas

I think of myself as a Terrence Malick fan, even though I've only seen two of his movies. He hasn't even made that many movies—so far, he's been the writer/director on just seven in a four-decade career—so it's not like I couldn't get through his body of work in a week or two if I wanted to.

The thing about Terrence Malick is that his movies are the absolute height of what I've come to call the "boring" movie: movies that ask big questions and give the viewer space to think about them. They tend to have lots of long, dialogue-free shots that just let you think and see and feel, rather than propelling you quickly through a plot.

It takes some actual work to enjoy this style of movie, of which Terrence Malick is currently the king. His movies tend to stretch to 3+ hours, and from the first moments watching The New World, I was totally absorbed, and I stayed that way through the whole length. So even seeing just one of his films made me feel like I already knew him and his body of work well enough to know I was a fan. The second one was just gravy, really.

The plot of The New World is this: it's the story of John Smith and Pocahontas. You know that story? Good. Then you know the plot. Like with any boring movie, the plot in The New World is not really that important.

Terrence Malick is interested in the universe and nature and how people relate to 'em, these forces that are bigger and wilder than us. In The New World, he's specifically concerned with the way white people came to America and interacted with the vast array of nature on display here, as well as how they interacted with the Native Americans, who seemed to have a much different relationship with nature.

Boring movies ask big questions and give you space to think about them, but just what that space looks like is of course variable. Where Stalker and Dead Man are content to have the viewer watch the characters silently make their way through the wilderness, The New World lingers heavily over nature, to the extent that the filmmakers had an entire second film crew dedicated to filming wildlife scenes.

The big questions in The New World are these: America was a beautiful country once; how did we manage to muck it up so much, and why? What happened between the new settlers and the original inhabitants, and could it ever have been different?

The New World is a huge movie full of big ideas and questions and events, but it gives you so much room to breathe that watching it feels like a slow, gentle walk instead of a headlong dash through plot and pondering. The New World is a great example of a movie that's "boring" in all the right ways.

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Photo Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_New_World_poster.jpg (fair use)
Clips are from the Extended Cut of this film. 

In Defense of Boring Movies: Dead Man

Part of a series of essays In Defense of Boring Movies.

Dead man, dead man, be brave,
Dead man, dead man, be brave,
Be brave:
You shall be saved, by and by;
By and by, you shall be saved.
—"Dead Man," M. Ward

Last time I wrote on this subject, I explained in detail what I mean when I call a movie "boring" in a positive sense. To summarize: it's when a movie confronts you with questions and gives you space to think about them. Movies in this category aim to enrich or enlighten before they entertain, or even to replace entertainment altogether with these higher aims.

Jim Jarmusch's 1995 film Dead Man is, to quote Roger Ebert's 1½ star review, "a strange, slow...movie that provides us with more time to think about its meaning than with meaning." Like the best boring movies, it's more interested in getting the viewers to ask questions and wonder about big ideas than providing them with a clear, coherent message. While most of the viewing public and mainstream newspaper reviewers at the time agreed with Ebert's pretty abysmal assessment, it did have some noteworthy defenders in the independent press, most importantly Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader, my favorite Chicago periodical and local news source*.

 

The plot in a nutshell: a man named William Blake (Johnny Depp) goes west seeking a job, but is turned away and ends up a criminal on the run. In the process, he receives a mortal wound that will slowly kill him over the course of the film, and he meets a Native American named Nobody (Gary Farmer) who ends up guiding him through the rest of the movie, helping him accept and expect his death. All along, the two are pursued by and confront various people who wish to stop or kill them, and violent clashes ensue. 

The big questions and themes this movie wants you to ponder are several. The movie turns on its head the typical Western idea of pioneers courageously exploring and opening the frontier, with Native Americans as either an active opponent or scenic backdrop, or simply a non-presence; in Dead Man, white people are portrayed as primitive, violent, and intrusive, while the Native Americans are shown as fully human, interesting, and wonderful without quite being romanticized. The attendant questions include: what does it mean that our culture has told this story to itself this way, over and over, in Westerns and in other places? are we doing anything similar to other cultures or people, within or outside our country, today? And so forth.

The next big idea is the pointlessness and ugliness of violence. Violence is fun and sexy and great in pop culture, or sometimes just shocking and horrifying, but in Dead Man it is merely stupid, awkward, and weird. Why do we so rarely see violence depicted in these terms in our culture? How is it so rare that it is seen as utterly pointless and misguided, rather than a necessary evil or a plain good time? 

The biggest and most overarching idea is that the whole movie, like life, is one long journey toward death. The reality of death is something Blake has to confront, and it takes him a long trip and a lot of thought and talk to finally confront it, relatively peaceably. The viewers are invited to question their own attitudes toward death along with Blake.

If you're enticed, check out the opening ten minutes, in which all three big themes appear in nascent form. (Further enticements from this segment include a wonderfully bizarre turn from Crispin Glover, whom you may recognize as Marty McFly's dad in Back to the Future, as well as the beautiful and unsettling electric guitar score provided by Neil Young.)

Did you catch the big ideas already coming to the fore right here at the beginning? We get a glimpse of some abandoned, half-destroyed teepees, to which Blake reacts with fear, clutching his suitcase. And a couple minutes later, the men on the train start shooting at buffalo out of the windows of the train, which is not only a premonition of the awkward/pointless violence theme (how utterly pointless is shooting animals from a moving train?) but also an element of the theme of destruction of Native American livelihood by the intrusive, brutish white pioneers. Finally, note that the film-as-journey-toward-death theme is ever present: Blake is on a train and headed to the "end of the line" and, in fact, is already in "hell," according to Crispin Glover's character.

I really recommend this movie. Its pace is slow, even intentionally frustrating, but if you let it, the slow pace can give you the time you need to search for answers to the key questions, and to ruminate on the relevance of the big themes to your own life. It is, in other words, the best kind of boring.

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* When inducting the movie into his New Cult Canon, which is the source of much of my knowledge of independent and little-known cinema (including Dead Man), Scott Tobias attributes Dead Man's current status as an acknowledged  masterpiece to Rosenbaum's review, and to a long run as a midnight movie at Chicago's Music Box Theatre. In other words, we in Chicago saved this movie; eat your heart out, New York.

Sidenote: without Tobias's New Cult Canon, I would probably never have heard of numerous movies that are now favorites of mine, like Primer, Near Dark, Brick, and The Iron Giant. This feature, and the AV Club in general, is very dear to me and has long shaped my knowledge and love of pop culture. It is also, alas, finished, as he and others have moved on from the AV Club to create an excellent film criticism website, The Dissolve.

Images:
Photo 1: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryan_baxter_photography/2426190661 
Photo 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:DeadManPoster.jpg

In Defense of Boring Movies

Part of a series of essays In Defense of Boring Movies.

It’s just a life story, so there’s no climax,
No more new territory, so pull away the IMAX.
—"Our Life Is Not a Movie, or Maybe," Okkervil River

One of my favorite films of all time is Stalker, directed in 1979 by Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. It is, in a word, boring.

Oh, there are more eloquent, poetic words an expert reviewer could use to describe this film—and I use those words, often with great relish. But "boring" is my personal description of choice for Stalker and its ilk; in fact, there are a whole class of movies that I love dearly that I group together as "boring movies."

Before I get into what makes a "boring movie" in the sense that I mean, let's back up and talk about Stalker. It's a science fiction film: it takes place in a world where, somewhere in rural Russia, an unknown, but clearly very strange, event occurred, creating a "Zone," said to drive people mad or kill them and cause mutations in their children. At the center of the Zone, supposedly, there is a room that, if you enter it, will make your dearest wish come true. It's illegal to go to the Zone, but in the film two men do, guided by a "Stalker," who knows the Zone's many (invisible) traps and pitfalls.

If that premise sounds intriguing, good, because it is. It is not, however, exciting, and, in its execution at least, is never entertaining. Instead, the movie ... takes ... its ... time. Through long stretches of dialogue-free scene- and mood-setting, it bores you into either turning it off and doing something else more fun, or to settling down, relaxing, and beginning to think. Take this scene as an example: the long, wordless ride to the Zone (filmed in beautiful color) from the world outside it (in sepia tone):

Sequences like that let you know that the director's goal is not to entertain, but to induce a meditative state and provoke thought. To quote Tarkovsky, "If the regular length of a shot is increased, one becomes bored, but if you keep on making it longer, it piques your interest, and if you make it even longer a new quality emerges, a special intensity of attention." In this film, you can focus this attention on a variety of subjects; I tend to pay attention to certain details and use them to debate with myself whether the Zone is real or made up (there is almost never any direct, visible evidence that anything is amiss: for most of the film, we have only the Stalker's word that the Zone is not wholly illusory), but a viewer can spend her time pondering many other questions, including another personal favorite: what does it mean to truly desire something—are our "dearest wishes" made consciously or unconsciously?

A boring movie, in this sense, is a movie with a subversive purpose. Many of my favorite movies in this category advertise themselves as genre fare—the science fiction film, the western, the frontier epic—almost as if they are hoping to draw in the unexpecting viewer, not prepared or wanting thought but an escape. Instead of offering the usual transport to another world, though, where you can forget your own life and its attendant troubles in a sea of fun, tensions quickly followed by resolutions, and the promise of a happy ending, they confront you with questions to ponder and problems to ruminate on. Such confrontations are necessary, and it is good to have pieces of art that will approach us, offer us the opportunity to think deeply, and provide some directions in which answers may lie. I am happy that films like this are out there. And I think you should be, too.

If what I've said on this subject interests you, here is a short list of my favorites, with articles linked to explain what each is about more thoroughly and with more expertise than I can here.

Stalker: I've explained this one to you, but see also Solaris by the same director.
Dead Man: an "acid western" wherein Johnny Depp confronts his own mortality.
The New World: the story of Pocahontas and John Smith as meditation on humanity's relationship to nature.

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Photo source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/danielsphotography/3513199260/