Director’s Cut To Profits

There’s an epidemic of “director’s cut” dvd’s being issued. “It’s hard not to detect a whiff of marketing ploy in all these bulked-up reissues. Far from rectifying the wrongs done to their work the first time round, it tends to look as if the directors just can’t leave well enough alone. Forman’s Amadeus feels 20 minutes longer without feeling noticeably different at all; Cameron’s revamped Abyss adds lots more of what doesn’t work in the film anyway and hardly any of what does; and the new stuff in Apocalypse Now Redux is at best a curiosity box, with the lengthy plantation sequence the obvious low point of the movie as it now stands.”