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If you don't buy yourself a copy, you are a total chump. This is the masterpiece of masterpieces, the best movie in history. I saw what was billed as the full director's cut, with more than the 229 minutes and less than the 269 minutes—strikes me it was four hours and ten minutes—in a fancy old theater in LA. Huge screen and overstuffed seats... more than what they call loges elsewhere... so I have a better idea than almost anyone you will ever meet, but I've seen it a bunch of times since then at home, and its effect is not much diminished on the small screen.
If you have suffered through any of the shorter versions, you almost certainly have no idea that I could be telling the truth. But anything shorter than the version I saw ruins, or nearly ruins—depending on how many minutes they let you have—everything. I cannot tell you why without risking ruining the experience for first-timers. Just, for real, those minutes are crucial and you come away not begrudging the time spent. In fact, you yearn for more.
Now it seems we're getting 40 more minutes. I think this will be fifteen or twenty more than I've seen, but way more than everyone else has seen. The stupid capitalist space lizards ruined everyone's lives when they didn't just release the thing in its entirety from the git.
Now I'm going to have to start whining to everyone I can think of in order to get a copy of the new release. If I have to contact Rafaella Leone and plead with her that I can't die without seeing this, maybe she'll send it to me.
No. Really. I get that movie. I am NOT big on violence and terribleness in cinema. This is something else. The violence and terribleness has to be in it. The point of it is transcendental and maybe too recondite for blockheads, but nobody can dis the acting and the story, even if they don't get the transcendental part. James Woods blew everyone else, but Sergio Leone, out of the water in this film. Riveting. Riveting. Riveting. And the only other thing I think I can say about it without blowing it for you is that there never has been a movie that could communicate this much, could turn you into the protagonist in this way. It is THE best movie ever made.
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No. Really. I don't think I've been emphatic enough.
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