What’s Aged the Worst?
The 135-minute runtime; the twelve-minute theater sequence; the picnic scene; Bill Paxton's slow-motion death scene; the unstructured violence of the final act; the fiercely independent portrayal of Dana Delaney's character
In the discussion (8)
Approx. transcript time · 00:26:32Read transcript
- The 135-minute runtime: about twenty minutes would have been chopped, starting with the theater scene, which could have been 45 seconds; they do two plays that night, a reading from Henry V and Faustus.
- A defense of the theater scene: it shows why Jason Priestley's character is loyal to men he probably should not befriend, the constitution of the town and who is in charge, and that Wyatt Earp is officially out of the game when the mayor introduces himself; twelve minutes is still probably unnecessary, but the Priestley point wins the objector over.
- Priestley sitting beside Powers Booth is read as a stan, just a big fan; the movie opening with the cowboys executing a wedding party is liked as a way to set the tone for how bad somebody is, with the joke that it copies Three Amigos and that is why Kevin Jarrett (as transcribed) was fired.
- Three stretches of intense, unstructured violence, especially the end where it is unclear what they are trying to accomplish and the heroes are just murdering people, are called the George Cosmatos effect, the film turning into Cobra or Rambo for five minutes; the opening sequence itself is fine and sets up a gnarly, bare-knuckled, masculine movie.
- The theater was too long; the film is called weirdly woke about a woman's place in the old West, Dana Delaney playing a fiercely independent woman; another notes that Wyatt leaving Maddie for the actress is the real story and is also in Wyatt Earp, though doubt is cast on how independent she really was.
- Their picnic scene sucked: nobody comes to Tombstone for picnics, and the late-80s, early-90s habit of establishing a romantic connection is unnecessary when we already get that they like each other.
- Bill Paxton's slow-motion death scene is really bad and dated, one of several very long deaths that would be done differently in 2018.
- Asked again later, the 135 minutes is still the answer: it is way too long.