MovieChat Forums > The Machinist (2004) Discussion > DVD of this movie seems to have little t...

DVD of this movie seems to have little things missing


I first watched this movie maybe 10, 12 years ago, and I loved it so much I bought the DVD on eBay. I just watched it again tonight, and I noticed that a couple of little things that I remember from seeing it in the 2000s were not in this DVD.

The first was near the beginning, when the guys are bantering in the locker room at work. One guy is telling a story about someone he knew, who was seducing a woman who turned out to be a man. And I SWEAR, someone in that conversation made a reference to The Crying Game. That reference was not in the scene on my DVD.

Second one was at the end, when he remembers hitting the child. I remember that the boy and his mother were crossing the street. The boy was eating an ice cream cone, but then the ice cream falls off onto the pavement, and the kid stops to try to pick it up, and that's when the car hits him. On my DVD, you just see the crossing the street, and then the kid is hit. No ice cream.

Neither of these omissions changed the story, but it bugs me, because it makes me wonder if I'm just imagining that I remember those scenes. And if those things were cut out, *why*?? It's not a long movie, why would it need to be cut down? And even if it did, how did cutting those tiny elements reduce the running time in any significant way?

This isn't the first time I've watched a movie on a DVD I that bought (originally I got the DVD from Netflix), where I could swear some little thing I remember is not there.

Were those things (the Crying Game reference and the ice cream falling in the ground) in the version you saw?

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Neither of these scenes were in the R1 DVD that I watched just yesterday - but interestingly, the special features have a making-of featurette that shows how the hit-and-run scene was filmed, and very clearly it happens like you described it. We even see the director telling the kid how he is supposed to bend down to pick up the ice cream. But that is not what ended up on the screen (in the DVD version at least).

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