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Grand Canyon Wide Awake Edition

boon23

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I am not sure if anyone is interested, but I am about finished with my little side project, Grand Canyon.
This was a great movie from Lawrence Kasdan from 1991, unfortunately a bit spoiled by some lenghtes and a pretty boring and very long dream sequence. besides that this is a real good movie about the rough reality and real people dealing with real feelings. A great drama.
I cut several scenes from the movie to just improve the flow and I am very much satisfied with the result so far.
I will upload it to Rapidshare once it is done, and if there is much interest I will also uplaod to bittorrent.

Maybe downloadable from info
 

InfoDroid

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I've heard this is a great film! Even though it didn't reach the success of The Big Chill.

Danny Glover's line about "It's not supposed to be like this" is said to be classic.

I'd like to give it a watch....
 

Finn

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God I love Grand Canyon, not sure I'd want to see it recut tbh. I love it as it is.
 

boon23

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My suggestion, finn: don't. Why have somehting you love as it is ripped apart? If you are already satisfied, this fanedit makes no sense for you.
 

Finn

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Good point, just because it exists isn't necessarily a reason to see it.

Its a good point we should all consider, as its often overlooked.
 

boon23

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I just found this review and it kind of hits the nail on the head for me...
One night after a Lakers basketball game, Mack (Kevin Kline) aims to take a short-cut to avoid traffic on the way home. His car however, ends up breaking down in a dangerous black ghetto area of Los Angeles. Soon, he is angrily confronted by a gang of black youths, until a black tow truck driver named Simon (Danny Glover) arrives and manages to talk the gang out of causing trouble. This incident leads Mack and Simon to become friends, due mainly to Mack's insistence of their friendship based on the life-changing moment Simon has given to him. Soon, other characters in Grand Canyon have life-changing moments. Mack's wife Claire (Mary McDonnell) who finds an abandoned baby that triggers a longing for motherhood, or their friend Davis (Steve Martin) who has a Hollywood career making silly action films until he is shot in the leg by a mugger. Grand Canyon aims to convey the message that sometimes life requires straying from the norm; for these lapses in conventionality are what fuel the miracles of society. This is a rather promising message, but unfortunately the film falls flat on its delivery, and becomes an embarrassing attempt at showing how whites and blacks can be united with mere random acts of goodwill.




Grand Canyon has the best of intentions but unfortunately isn't quite as successful a film that it thinks it is. If anything, the film is nothing but a signification of how director Lawrence Kasdan left the success of the eighties (in which he gave us Body Heat and The Big Chill amongst others) behind for nineties efforts that lacked credibility or edge. It's possible that the film's shortcomings are due to the script being full to the brim with clich?s, or maybe it's because the good cast ensemble lack proper direction, but Grand Canyon smells of a film that tries to hard to be an Oscar-Winning-Classic, and ends up lacking any fluid continuity and a proper narrative focus. It doesn't help that Kasdan is trying his best to construct multi-narratives, because his directing style seems intent on showing off the more 'quotable' lines of dialogue from his script, thereby weakening the dramatic thrust of the film. Essentially, the film feels like a battle between Kasdan's screenplay and his directing style, as if Kasdan schizophrenically is unable to give equal balance to the two departments. Also, you cannot help but sense that the film's dealings with racial problems, particularly the issues of the black ghettos, are melodramatic and stereotypical in their depiction.

This is a pity, as the all-star cast performs admirably. Kevin Kline steps into his usual middle-class white-collar role comfortably, and Mary McDonnell suits him as the determined wife. The two strongest roles in the film belong to Danny Glover, as the integrity-filled Simon, and Steve Martin, as the wisecracking philosophical filmmaker Davis. They elevate the film to a respectable level, even if the film fails to hit many of its targets.




The musical score by James Newton Howard is decidedly early nineties in style, and despite sounding slightly dated in aesthetic quality still manages to corroborate the film's notion of urban unease. The cinematography by Owen Roizman bristles with the social tensions of the cityscape of the film, and it?s a credit to Lawrence Kasdan that he at least knows how to fully exploit such fantastic imagery.

In Kasdan's earlier Big Chill, there was something earnestly appealing about a group of Woodstock-generation friends struggling to grow old and exist in Republican-Eighties-America. The dialogue never felt like dialogue, and the anxieties of the various characters exhibited in the film were easily identifiable for any audience. In Grand Canyon, Kasdan throws out the identifying traces and replaces them with spiritual mumbo-jumbo that could rival Steve Martin's own LA Story for absurdity. Many critics at the time of the film championed its optimistic approach to the inner-city problems that were making people holler, and yet more than ten years later the film feels as if every layer of relevance has been stripped.

Yes, this review has been overly harsh on Grand Canyon, but how is it possible to not be harsh to a film that appears more dated than two of the director's earlier efforts? Kasdan wastes a good cast, and suggests in a textbook fashion how a director gradually loses his edge. The Oscars academy honoured the screenplay with a nomination, but this was politically motivated as Grand Canyon's racial-groups-in-unison subtext pressed all of the right PC buttons.




Grand Canyon still manages to entertain, but carries with it pretentious amount of worthiness that detracts from the overall level of quality. The ending alone tries so desperately to win your heart that you feel like you have to like it just for trying that hard, and yet fortunately you still manage to resist. Despite its sickly-sweet spiritual message, the film will leave most wanting in the twenty-first century, and does nothing for Lawrence Kasdan's career. Maybe he should have stuck to writing for the Star Wars and Indiana Jones series of films.
...and that is why it is a fanedit, and what was planned as a ONE CUT to just get rid of the dream sequence (6 min) turned out to be a bit more daring, by taking away almost 20 minutes of scenes that felt to me rather distracting from the main plot. Some of these scenes are great, but most of them are just long. I still would have liked to even cut some more, BUT that would have left me with just one string of the story for the entire second half, which just wouldn't have been enough to finish an episodic film.
 

boon23

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this is my cover art:
3dgrandcanyonrm8.jpg
 

boon23

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project finished.

*************************************************************************
****************FANEDIT.ORG proudly presents*****************************
*************************************************************************
*********************A fanedit by BOON23*********************************
*************************************************************************
*************************************************************************
**************GRAND CANYON - WIDE AWAKE EDITION**************************
*************************************************************************
**************************INTRODUCTION***********************************
Grand Canyon is a good movie, but what started so interesting looses its drive starting with a very long dream sequence and kind of less interesting events in teh second half of the movie. What is for many the "L.A.CRASH" of the 90s lacks a bit drama and suspense. Still there are wonderful scenes in this movie, no audience should miss, so my intention was to create a version that better keeps the pace and does not get so superficial.
***************************THE EDIT**************************************
The first idea was to only get rid of the dream sequence, because initially that was what bothered me most, but when I started editing, I got deeper into the movie than ever before and I found more of what is IMHO more destructive than doing any good to the movie:
- Claire jogging through the poor people's quarters is a very superficial scene, because it is so full of stereotypes.
- Mack's affair with Dee is better to be left untold, because almost all her scenes are way over the top or feel empty. Worst part of it is when she trades her being in love with Mack to flirting with the policeman, who is single. Also her quitting and her monologue for that is a rather cold scene, intellectually well done, but heartless.
- Roberto helping the boy in the camp is too heroic, he is by far too much of a good boy. Sorry, but I prefer guys that are a little bit less of a Johnboy Walton. But his driving sequence stayed (because I needed it as a filler).
All in all I cut more than 20 minutes fromt eh movie, I also replaced the final score, because to me it didn't cause what it was supposed to cause: a feeling of something bigger than we are, a feeling of being totally impressed. I hope now it does.
***************************DVD DETAILS************************************
111 minutes NTSC 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen with AC3-5.1 audio and a vbr of 4.500KB/s using a 3 pass encoding with CCE.
Languages : ENGLISH GERMAN SPANISH
Subtitles : ENGLISH
MENUS : animated scene selection, audio
SCENE SELECTION : yes
DELETED SCENES : no
COVER ART : yes, on DVD-Rom part
 

Remixed by Jorge

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I'm really glad for another Boon23 edit. There are some cuts that I've might have made myself.

Grand Canyon aims to convey the message that sometimes life requires straying from the norm; for these lapses in conventionality are what fuel the miracles of society.

What I loved about the film was its ambiguity. GRAND CANYON could be a film about the fear of urban living, race relations, searching for love, good luck or bad luck, gifts from strangers, life changing revelations or about small miracles. There are many characters and many subplots. Some brilliant, some painful.

And because it gives no answers (even though you might want to find answers in the movies) the film becomes mystical. Much like the Grand Canyon at the end. With the Grand Canyon and with GRAND CANYON, you just watch it.

Having said all this, the music cue at the very end I always found it came a bit late. Today, I might not even put any music behind it, just the wind. Maybe way more shots from Imax / Grand Canyon: Hidden Secrets at the end.
 

boon23

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if you would have suggested that earlier I could have given that a try... but you might find the music I chose for the end ok. I won't tell which it is because it works best with the picture.
 

Remixed by Jorge

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Sorry B. Didnt really wrap my head around GC until I started reading your posts. I'm sure the music will be nice. I'll guess it's probably the opening music from STAR WARS. LOL just kidding. :p :D
 

boon23

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damn. You spoiled it. How could you know? ;-)
 
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