On my return flight from Nephi, United airlines entertained me with "Under a Tuscan Sun". My first thought was that I wanted to see this movie on some level: it had received critical acclaim and looked like it might be something more than the "chick flick" that it was billed as. However, I wanted to see this with my wife, as she expressed interest in it while it was still in the theaters. Sadly, we missed it. I decided to plug my headphones in so that the movie would provide a backdrop while I finished up some writing, so that I could rent it later. Not being one to watch a movie twice, I didn't want to ruin it for my wife.
However, it is hard to write an convincing horror-comedy while there is an extremely romantic movie playing, and I was quickly drawn in. Luckily, I was impressed so much by the story, the acting and even the cinematography that I will happily watch this movie again. However, this is not a movie review. It's an observation about how we cut out the good bits. This observation came while writing a bit from story (below) and noticing at almost the same time that a scene had been edited. I've worked in film and theater enough (albeit long ago) to recognize when something doesn't quite fit, and in this case it was the shortening of a scene. It was obvious that a well-filmed take had been cut back for some reason: most likely due to attention spans of movie goers and the desire to produce a movie that was "the right length". The right length for a movie, to me, is how long it takes to tell the story, and to show in as much magnificence as possible the characters and events of that story. It is for this very same reason that I felt the Lord of The Rings movie trilogy was too short. If you ask me, they should have broken the books down into the original six (each part of the trilogy is actually two books) because there's that much to show us. But I digress.
The bit that I wrote was this:
"The problem with a person breaking tradition is that traditions are built from more than just one person. When one person turns from the defined path, they can loose sight of this fact, and expect that through whatever epiphany they were freed must also have enlightened everyone and everything else involved. But, sadly and more commonly to the immediate detriment of the enlightened individual, the rest of tradition is more likely to rebel and hold even tighter to the framework upon which they are built. Traditions do not like to be broken. They resist it. They fight back."
The point is that a perfectly great movie was fighting against expectations, and the movie lost. Sadly, something important had been removed. Quite possibly for no other reason than tradition.
In history, some of the most important events of mankind--in art, science and philosophy--were the results of directly defying tradition, and I can't help but wonder if "Under the Tuscan Sun" might have been that much more enjoyable had something not been hidden from me. I hope that some of the boundaries of "traditional movie making" might have been broken by the highly successful LOTR movies, and that we might more epic attempts at storytelling in the future, with less formula and sadly predictable tradition.
I'll still watch it again, mind you. It was a really well made movie. There was attention to detail that was respectable and often innovative. But I know there was more. I just know it. They cut a bit, and to me, that bit could have been a good bit.