Okay-- and here goes with the spoiler markup (which sort of gives these posts the appearance of wartime-edited letters, don'cha' think?): in the version I saw-- wow, has it been two weeks ago?-- in Uptown, they cut Ivan's sex scene with Ressemore. Which-- and maybe this is shallow thinking on my part-- made it seem like, when Ivan pressed the pebble into her palm at the end, he was almost acting like a guy who could sympathize with the fear and desperation of the very sick woman with whom he'd been traveling, rather than a guy who was simply tending to his side-piece after leaving his wife to look after their toddler and his shack full of raptors. (But not velociraptors, of course. Which would have made for an infinitely goofier time at the movies.)
(Oh, and they ditched the Jennifer Connelly pig-barn sex scene, too. Just wish they would've gone for the trifecta, and zapped Ivan's wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am with Alice while they were at it. That one was completely unnecessary, too, and awkward as hell in the bargain.)
Few more notes, before I forget 'em: The opening sequence was completely out of order. Fun in the pig barn originally came first; thought it was a wise move, literally, to place more motion (Nana and the boys walking across that Winnipeg bridge to their healing-rally ride) at the beginning. And this is the biggest change: Nana's ending voiceover was missing from the Minneapolis version. Both a good choice and a bad one: while it tamped down the mallet-to-the-skull subtlety of the original ending ("Once there was a man who was walking across ice," and he fell through, and the darkness engulfed him, blah, blah, blah-- oh, reeeeaally?), it condensed the film's message-- or pseudo-message, or maybe-message-- to the point of truncation (Ivan releases Mohave into the sun-blasted winter sky, showing us that his-- meaning Ivan's, of course-- spirit-- free of pain!-- the pain he has carried his entire life!-- can now soar--!-- or something like that. THE END.).
One tiny cut, and one I didn't appreciate: Mohave perched like a watchbird on the handlebars of Ivan's bike, while Ivan and Ressemore talk in that crummy motel coffee shop. I liked that shot: it added a welcome moment of humor to Icy Dourland.
Re: Red Lights. At least his chemistry with Sigourney Weaver was pretty cool. One weird-- and very idiosyncratic-- thing that drove me nuts in that movie: the opening Foley work, when, during the pan-up from the asphalt of the road down which Margaret and Tom are driving, the sound editors try to persuade us that Margaret would own a circa-1980 Bonneville with a manual transmission. Especially when we see, later in the film, that the Bonnie is an automatic. Oh, no....
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