the corner office

Continuing with the theme of movies I haven't seen since I was a kid, today I watched The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. The movie has been etched in my brain as 'cool' since the days of Betamax, but I couldn't really remember anything about it. The only scenes I could remember were Eli Wallach insulting Clint Eastwood in the desert and the dead soldiers in the trenches. So I wasn't quite sure whether my enthusiasm would survive re-watching the movie.

No chance. Awesome movie. Enthusiasm restored, with a new-found appreciation I couldn't quite have mustered in primary school. I won't try to get all high school English on it, but the movie is just a stylistic, gritty, panoramic, and hugely entertaining masterpiece.

I'd actually been building up to buying this on DVD for a while now. It seems that Sergio Leone's 3 'Dollars' spaghetti westerns have all been restored, spruced up and re-released - TGTBATU now includes additional footage which had been cut from the original US version, and the running time is almost 3 hours. The local Look & Listen has had the one-disk featureless version of this re-release for a few months, and every time I see the DVD I gave it a gawk. I've never gotten it though, because I'm always partial to the the 'special edition' versions with all the goodies on 'em. Today I was in another DVD shop, and they had the 2-disc special edition, which has commentaries, and heaps of documentaries, interviews and the like. So I bought it in a snap. Given how chuffed I am after getting this, methinks the other Man With No Name movies will be following soon.