Leon - The Professional - November
09-10-09, 07:10 PM
#30
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09-11-09, 07:36 AM
#31
DVD Talk Legend
Re: Leon - The Professional - November
Finally, one of my top 5 movies! I knew that Portman girl was going to be a star the first time I saw it 
09-11-09, 08:50 AM
#32
DVD Talk Legend
Re: Leon - The Professional - November
).
09-11-09, 09:38 AM
#33
DVD Talk Legend
Re: Leon - The Professional - November
This reminds me. The first time the International Version was released the liner notes stated something along the lines of "Featuring xx minutes of footage cut from the US version deemed too explicit for US audiences." Of course, this wasn't true. The theatrical version was the theatrical version everywhere (and also the version Besson considers his director's cut) and the footage, which has maybe ONE scene that could be slightly "suggestive," was nothing really "explicit." After I (and other) pointed this out here, the silent rerelease which fixed a bad audio track on the DVD a few months later came out, this statement was updated.
I always think it's kind of cute that I might have had a hand in that update somehow.
I always think it's kind of cute that I might have had a hand in that update somehow.
09-11-09, 11:08 AM
#34
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Re: Leon - The Professional - November
Indeed, and yet it's a shame she really hasn't been quite as good since. She hasn't been bad, but nothing memorable IMO. Her smaller role in Beautiful Girls was well done, and I don't blame her for the poor direction on the SW prequels. Still, she hasn't wowed me at all as an adult (well at least not with her acting ).
).She has her head shaved...for real... on screen. I mean, cmon. heh.
09-11-09, 11:29 AM
#35
Re: Leon - The Professional - November
Indeed, and yet it's a shame she really hasn't been quite as good since. She hasn't been bad, but nothing memorable IMO. Her smaller role in Beautiful Girls was well done, and I don't blame her for the poor direction on the SW prequels. Still, she hasn't wowed me at all as an adult (well at least not with her acting ).
).
09-11-09, 11:53 AM
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Re: Leon - The Professional - November
I'm definitely in for Leon on BD. I always felt shafted when I picked up the bare-bones Superbit DVD release when I found out a Superbit Deluxe edition came out shortly after.
09-11-09, 01:26 PM
#38
DVD Talk Godfather
Re: Leon - The Professional - November
Indeed, and yet it's a shame she really hasn't been quite as good since. She hasn't been bad, but nothing memorable IMO. Her smaller role in Beautiful Girls was well done, and I don't blame her for the poor direction on the SW prequels. Still, she hasn't wowed me at all as an adult (well at least not with her acting ).
).
09-11-09, 01:32 PM
#39
DVD Talk Legend
Re: Leon - The Professional - November
She is great in Closer, and I can always watch her in Anywhere But Here.
09-11-09, 02:14 PM
#40
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09-11-09, 09:18 PM
#44
Re: Leon - The Professional - November
This reminds me. The first time the International Version was released the liner notes stated something along the lines of "Featuring xx minutes of footage cut from the US version deemed too explicit for US audiences." Of course, this wasn't true. The theatrical version was the theatrical version everywhere (and also the version Besson considers his director's cut) and the footage, which has maybe ONE scene that could be slightly "suggestive," was nothing really "explicit."
So i leave it to you which is the more true and correct cut. And I will only believe it when I hear it from Besson's own mouth as to which his preferred cut is, as opposed to people trying to justify the validity of the theatrical cut.
Last edited by HumanMedia; 09-11-09 at 09:23 PM.
09-11-09, 10:06 PM
#45
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Thread Starter
Re: Leon - The Professional - November
Closer is the only movie that makes me NOT want to watch her in anything else. Makes me happy to get Leon and watch that one again.
09-12-09, 07:26 AM
#46
DVD Talk Legend
Re: Leon - The Professional - November
Although the longer cut was his original cut. He only cut it because of feedback from US audience tests (Megaplex Joe-6-pack types i bet). - And that always makes for a better film eh?
So i leave it to you which is the more true and correct cut. And I will only believe it when I hear it from Besson's own mouth as to which his preferred cut is, as opposed to people trying to justify the validity of the theatrical cut.
So i leave it to you which is the more true and correct cut. And I will only believe it when I hear it from Besson's own mouth as to which his preferred cut is, as opposed to people trying to justify the validity of the theatrical cut.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2000/...tbfisouthbank1
Q: What do you think of directors repeating themselves, and why did you feel the need to do a director's cut?
LB: Let me remember why...I was happy with the first one, it was mine, my director's cut, no one asked me to cut it. But at the same time you still have 25 minutes that nobody has seen. I think it was the beginning of the summer; in the summer France is like a desert, the people are on the beach, but there are some poor guys who stay in the cities to work, so we decided to make a long version, an extended version, to play in a just a few theatres for the people who stayed. Why are you laughing? It's true!
LB: Let me remember why...I was happy with the first one, it was mine, my director's cut, no one asked me to cut it. But at the same time you still have 25 minutes that nobody has seen. I think it was the beginning of the summer; in the summer France is like a desert, the people are on the beach, but there are some poor guys who stay in the cities to work, so we decided to make a long version, an extended version, to play in a just a few theatres for the people who stayed. Why are you laughing? It's true!
09-14-09, 03:32 PM
#48
DVD Talk Legend
Re: Leon - The Professional - November
Personally I think Natalie's best adult performance was in "Anywhere But Here". Also, I hate hate HATE "Closer". With a passion. The dialogue with three words here, two word responses there was torture for me. It was like a two hour Calvin Klein commercial. And I love this critic's review of it:
Attack of the Moans
by Scott Holleran
Mike Nichols (The Graduate, Working Girl) must have been in a bad mood when he picked Patrick Marber's play, Closer, to direct for the cinema. This star vehicle is one long, moaning diatribe against romantic love with pretty people looking dour, talking in riddles and agonizing in self-pity. It is the screen's most pretentious display of pedantic nonsense this year.
The love quadrangle begins with what seems like a budding romance, which is actually a forewarning to Closer's theme that love is not only blind but also deformed. Jude Law's writer is walking along a crowded London street, in slow motion, toward Natalie Portman's street urchin stripper. It is love at first sight—bathed in lush photography like the whole movie—and then, suddenly, a car hits Portman's ragamuffin.
What seems like an innocuous device to connect the fated pair—Law rushes to her aid and, as she lay wounded but alive, she speaks to him—is the emblem for Closer's contrived misery. They go to the hospital, exchange lines in that West Wing-style of incomplete sentences, ride a bus and, apparently, fall in love. But Closer holds that love is based on whim, not on values, and Law's writer is cheating on Portman by the next scene. Closer begs us to want to know why. For a while, it works.
Enter Julia Roberts, playing a photographer and the movie's most despicable character. She seduces Law, who flirts back, until Portman shows up and does a pouty version of her role in The Professional had her girl-assassin grown up and gone bad. Finishing the foursome is Clive Owen as a doctor who's just about the dumbest dude on the World Wide Web. Owen fares best, having played Law's role on stage, though that's like being dressed for dinner on the Titanic, and his overwrought breakdown during Portman's striptease is awkward.
Closer is a gimmick of time frame—months go by in seconds, books are published, characters get married, partners change—and at one point it goes backwards, just when it desperately needs to wrap things up and let everyone go home. As Closer's moral center, Law's sniveling writer makes no sense. Every event crucial to his character and to the plot is unaccounted for: his book is published, yet Marber reveals nothing about its meaning—he cheats on Portman and becomes obsessed with Roberts, who's as enticing as cardboard here—he throws himself into the role of a man-hunting female whore on the Web to retaliate against Roberts or because he likes it (it's never clear which) and he comes crawling back to Portman, who's as seductive as your girlfriend's gangly kid sister.
Men go bad, women go weak, and it's all talky, showy and stiflingly claustrophobic. That the four leads look pretty and trim is no consolation. Watching people tear each other apart with smug sarcasm is as monotonous as it sounds. Closer is closer to a high-gloss spit at the world, with a steady soundtrack that, like its plot, comes from nowhere.
Attack of the Moans
by Scott Holleran
Mike Nichols (The Graduate, Working Girl) must have been in a bad mood when he picked Patrick Marber's play, Closer, to direct for the cinema. This star vehicle is one long, moaning diatribe against romantic love with pretty people looking dour, talking in riddles and agonizing in self-pity. It is the screen's most pretentious display of pedantic nonsense this year.
The love quadrangle begins with what seems like a budding romance, which is actually a forewarning to Closer's theme that love is not only blind but also deformed. Jude Law's writer is walking along a crowded London street, in slow motion, toward Natalie Portman's street urchin stripper. It is love at first sight—bathed in lush photography like the whole movie—and then, suddenly, a car hits Portman's ragamuffin.
What seems like an innocuous device to connect the fated pair—Law rushes to her aid and, as she lay wounded but alive, she speaks to him—is the emblem for Closer's contrived misery. They go to the hospital, exchange lines in that West Wing-style of incomplete sentences, ride a bus and, apparently, fall in love. But Closer holds that love is based on whim, not on values, and Law's writer is cheating on Portman by the next scene. Closer begs us to want to know why. For a while, it works.
Enter Julia Roberts, playing a photographer and the movie's most despicable character. She seduces Law, who flirts back, until Portman shows up and does a pouty version of her role in The Professional had her girl-assassin grown up and gone bad. Finishing the foursome is Clive Owen as a doctor who's just about the dumbest dude on the World Wide Web. Owen fares best, having played Law's role on stage, though that's like being dressed for dinner on the Titanic, and his overwrought breakdown during Portman's striptease is awkward.
Closer is a gimmick of time frame—months go by in seconds, books are published, characters get married, partners change—and at one point it goes backwards, just when it desperately needs to wrap things up and let everyone go home. As Closer's moral center, Law's sniveling writer makes no sense. Every event crucial to his character and to the plot is unaccounted for: his book is published, yet Marber reveals nothing about its meaning—he cheats on Portman and becomes obsessed with Roberts, who's as enticing as cardboard here—he throws himself into the role of a man-hunting female whore on the Web to retaliate against Roberts or because he likes it (it's never clear which) and he comes crawling back to Portman, who's as seductive as your girlfriend's gangly kid sister.
Men go bad, women go weak, and it's all talky, showy and stiflingly claustrophobic. That the four leads look pretty and trim is no consolation. Watching people tear each other apart with smug sarcasm is as monotonous as it sounds. Closer is closer to a high-gloss spit at the world, with a steady soundtrack that, like its plot, comes from nowhere.
