Comment on Crocodile Dundee | New 'Encore Cut' removes footage from original film

• southsamurai@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  I mean, that did that before the movie was released the first time.

  When the movie is written, there’s someone deciding what they think you should see based on their morals and values. When it’s being filmed, that’s a part of it. When it’s being edited, those decisions are being made, and the entire movie ratings system is based around who can see what based on an arbitrarily picked set of morals.

  I get that changing a movie after initial release is rarely going to be met with enthusiasm, but pretending that movies aren’t already very influenced by an arbitrary set of morals is just silly.

  In this case, at least it’s the people that made and distributed the movie making the decision rather than some essentially anonymous board pushing shitty judeo-christian morals onto the rest of the world. This decision is a good one, to reduce bigotry in a character that is supposed to be a common man’s hero.

  That’s an artistic choice, a narrative choice. And it’s being made with decades of improved thinking about how we should treat people.

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  • Squizzy@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Societal pressure if changing a movie after the fact. The creative process is different to post release. It cant be compared.

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    • southsamurai@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      It absolutely can be compared that’s what this entire thread is doing.

      Movies aren’t statues. You don’t have to destroy it to change it. Whether or not a given change is good is subjective just like whether or not a movie is “good” in the first place is.

      Changes to ET? Pointless, but didn’t affect the vibe of the movie. The changes to star wars that were attempted failed. This one? It absolutely does not hurt the film at all. The scenes were never realistic in the first place, they didn’t advance the plot, they didn’t do anything useful for character development.

      Any of us may or may not like a movie being changed, but there’s no point to absolutism. You can do it, but it’s essentially arguing with the wind.

      I would also argue that art is a living thing. It doesn’t really matter why something gets changed, or when, so long as that change is in line with the intent of the art.

      Crocodile Dundee is and was a movie about a fish out of water, finding love and acceptance in a strange place. While the original scenes can be taken as Mick having never encountered such things before, the actions taken by him in those scenes are incongruous with the rest of what he’s portrayed as.

      Think about it. He’s threatened by some kid with a knife, and his action is to simply let the kid know that he’s not worried. He doesn’t go all aggro and punch the kid, or stab him. He very carefully slices up his jacket. That’s a man in control of his actions, capable of measured responses to the indecisive unexpected. But he runs across a cross dresser and he grabs their genitals? Doesn’t fit the character.

      When he grabs the woman at the party with the idea of “just making sure”, it’s also incongruous with the rest of his behavior, since he’s already shown himself quite able to adapt to New York, big city people without grabbing their genitals. He’s standing next to his guide, and didn’t ask if that was a woman? Nah, Mick isn’t stupid. No way does he grab those genitals unless it’s an attempt to “flex”, for lack of a better word, but he’s not prone to overt machismo like that in the rest of the movie.

      The scenes were never in line with the rest of the movie. All they did was lean on societal bigotry against women, gay men, transvestites, and (though it wasn’t presented as such in the scenes) what was a fairly new concept of “transexual” which we now call transgender. It was getting a cheap laugh at best. At worst, it was an example of how bigoted not only the film makers were/are, but how bigoted we were that nobody raised hell at the time.

      This is absolutely a good use of post release editing.

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