I haven't talked about recent movies for a while, or movie box office, or upcoming films, or any of that stuff. And I'm not going to do so today either, simply because there's nothing coming up that I'm interested in seeing. I did watch a couple of films over the past few days, and wrote reviews of both, so expect to see what I thought about
Elektra and
The Transporter (1, not 2) early this week.
I also watched
Constantine again, for the first time on DVD, and was happy to see that it held up nicely. It wasn't a masterpiece, and I think I liked it more in theaters, (I gave it
a shockingly high 8 then, and while I'd probably lower that a bit on this 2nd viewing, it was still at least a solid 7.) but it was entertaining, not stupid, and while too much of the mythology was hinted at or referenced, rather than shown, I liked the world it was set in, with the absent God, scheming Satan, and mercenary half breeds (angel and demon) all over the earth. The ending was still brilliantly clever, in plotting and execution, and very satisfying. I was also glad I had seen it in theaters, since the visuals, especially of hell, were so awesome on the big screen, and not half so impressive on our TV.
The least impressive thing about the DVD? The extra deleted scenes. Occasionally a film works in extra scenes and improves, but that's very, very rare. And for every
LotR and
Hellboy extended edition, there are a dozen other films with deleted scenes that very, verly clearly show you why they were deleted. Constantine's bonus scenes weren't edited in; they were just tacked on if you wanted to watch them, and to that choice I say, "Bravo!" Because frankly, they all sucked.
Most were slightly different versions of existing scenes, always less interesting than the versions in the final film, but there was one whole subplot they wisely cut out. It starred John Constantine with his fuck-buddy, a half-breed demon named Ellie. IMDB tells me that she was played by
Michelle Monaghan and
DevilFinder tells me she's not very famous. She wasn't very good in
Constantine, but while I didn't think much of her acting, that's not why they cut her out. It was her character, and what it did to the film.
Watch them yourself if/when you get the
Constantine DVD, but basically she's a half breed demon who is Constantine's lover, and a sassy lass. The entirely deleted scene shows her lounging in bed with Constantine, and giving him lip about his smoking and the state of the world. He gets up and gets dressed, and it seems like she's just a girl until the camera pulls back and we see something moving under the covers behind her. A tail, apparently. A nice touch that, but the scene was totally wrong for the film. We don't want to know about Constantine's personal life, or his sex drive; he's much more effective as a loner with no personal attachments.
A later scene has him meeting her again in the neutral ground bar, where she attaches herself like an annoying leech and gives the line about how "her boss" would come up from hell personally to take Constantine's soul. The bar in that segment is far larger than in the final film, and it sucks; it's like a huge Hooters, rather than an intimate, red-lit freak palace. Constantine walks through the bar in the final film, but there's no sign of Ellie then, and the bar is 10x cooler as well.
Her third appearance was in the final battle scene in the hospital, where she talks to John when he first walks in, before he turns on the sprinklers, in the deleted scene. She's actually shown in the final film, just briefly, as the holy water starts to melt her skin away, and there was one last scene of her cut out, when she's the last one living after the shotgun battle, and John lets her go and she scurries away.
I'm telling you far more than you need or want to know, but on the whole the extra scenes in
Constantine were just like Austin Powers' farts; better out than in. Let's give some props to the director, or the editor, or the meddling movie executives, or whoever decreed that they be cut, since the film was much stronger without no Ellie and without the other extraneous tidbits they snipped off here and there.
On a similar bonus scene note,
The Transporter DVD had no deleted scenes. It did however offer three extended length fight sequences. That's what the box said anyway. We watched them Sunday evening though, and as far as Malaya or I could tell they were 99% identical to the scenes in the film. Minus most of the sound effects, some of the snappy editing, and with lots of black frames with text like, "insert reaction of man in basement hearing gunshot" on them. Worthless to watch, in other words, though to be fair we did not do them with the commentary on, and perhaps that would have greatly elevated them. Or perhaps not. Honestly, you can skip all three of those entirely. Just FF to the fight scenes as they are in the actual film, if you want to see more simulated ass kicking.
In one bit of final movie news, I found myself on
the legendary CAP Alerts guy's site yesterday, and while skimming over the recent movie reviews to look for anything potentially anti-religious, I remembered the low budget horror/occult film,
Skeleton Key. It came out a month ago and promptly vanished, but it featured voodoo and stuff, and I had high hopes that Mr. CAP would go predictably insane about that.
He did, and while it's not one of his best rants (Like the one in which he talked about the Harry Potter and LotR movies being part of Satan's grand plan to weaken Christianity and all of Western Civilization by making evil magic and witchcraft attractive to children. Yes, I'm serious. He was too.) I enjoyed it.
To quote:
Yes, mom/dad, this is a movie of witchcraft, demonism and Satanic rituals. Complete with sprinkling of brick dust, candles, circles on the floor, incantations and infant/child victims. And body parts in formaldehyde. Before all the "Hoodooians" start barking, I don't care what it is called by man. If a supernatural power is not of God it is unholy. So the rituals were Satanic. No, that is not ignorance. That is knowledge of the Truth; that is Armor in His Word. [Rev. 21:8, Rev. 22:15]
And, of course, the film deeply minimizes the Christian faith by making it nothing more than just another religion, treating it as unmentionable.
This guy really makes Christians (and all people of faith) look bad, with his simple-minded absolutisms, but I can see the attraction to viewing the world the way he does. Lots of people can't handle reality, with its infinite shades of gray, and the ability to put yourself in someone else's PoV is beyond the ability of a depressingly-large number of humans. (President Bush, for instance.)
Thinking that "We're right and good and they're evil and wrong." is much easier than being objective and open-minded, and when you throw in the fact that everyone wants to feel special, the current state of the world is no surprise. So in CAP Alert Guy's world the religion he happened to grow up with is of course the one true faith, and anything different, even in a fictional film, is evil and the work of Satan. It seems a pathetically childish way to think, but in his world he's probably quite happy, since everything has its place and nothing requires any hard thought. If it reinforces what he believes already, it's good. If not, it's evil trickery sent by some hell-dwelling Bogeyman. And that's that, and even if evil triumphs in the short term, good will always win in the end, and if you die in the struggle, you'll be rewarded forever and ever, in heaven.
It's delusional and pathetic from the outside, but damn, if you can suspend your disbelief it's got to be fun to live like that. Like being a golden retriever, with no greater goals or joys in life than a full belly and a tennis ball to chase, and no threats more dangerous than the pizza delivery guy ringing the doorbell. And we atheists wonder why 90% of the people on earth throw themselves into one logic-defying religion or another?
