The art of the recut
Sometimes the version of a movie that you watch isn't quite what other people want to watch. Directors cuts have been around since the 1980's (Blade Runner being a pretty important film where director Ridley Scott had a very different idea of what should be released when compared to the original final cut). Similarly there are a few amazing amateur film editors out there who re-cut or piece together parts of films, tv shows and music videos to create their own preferred version.
Amateur edits of movies have probably always been out there but Baader-Meinhof phenomenon kicked in recently and I started spotting recut versions of films EVERYWHERE so I thought that I'd share some of my favourites.
To fans of the Harry Potter series Severus Snape is a very important character - this recut takes only Severus' story and puts his most important scenes into chronological order. It may seem whimsical but this makes Snape's story seem so much sadder than it seemed when told as only a part of the bigger saga.
There is an amazing cut of Pulp Fiction which has the entire film put back into chronological order - unfortunately it looks like it's been removed from YouTube but it's worth doing a bit of a google to see if it's out there somewhere. Something really interesting here is that you don't need to pay anywhere near as much attention - much of Tarantino's art as a storyteller has been removed as the interesting leaps are all gone. It feels weird to me - dumbed down without making any changes to the content, just how it's ordered - but that makes it all the more worthy of a watch. [There's also a chronological cut of the entirety of the Lost tv series - I've not watched it but I've heard that it totally wipes out the mystery!]
Star Wars VI:Return of the Jedi featured the epic space battle... but it was muddled up with the Ewok battle and also Han and Darth duelling it out - this video is all pew-pew, no Ewokese. If you'd asked me how long the space battle lasted in ROTJ I'd probably have said 2-3 mins, not the eight and a half that it actually has. Putting it all together totally changes my impression of the film and, in fact, puts the star wars back into Star Wars.
To finish off... there's Marvel. The Marvel universe is truly massive and the film series is expanding at an insane rate to try to catch up. This summary is 13 minutes of awesome, really giving you the history of the Avengers and all the other characters. But there's something else out there - all of the movies with all the segments recut into the correct order! I love the idea of this project so much. Needless to say there's nowhere available for you to download this, you're going to have to do the epic work yourself...