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Red Dragon - Manhunter Edition

boon23

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Red Dragon - Manhunter Edition
a CBB fanedit

Can a movie with an incredible cast like this be a failure? Indeed it can, if is not about what it is supposed to be about. This fanedit gets rid of a bunch of Hannibal Lecter scenes to turn the focus back on Francis Dolarhyde and Will Graham. Through seamless branching it also comes with 2 very different endings.

3D_boon23_reddragon_MHE.jpg


original film name: Red Dragon
new film name : Red Dragon - Manhunter Edition
film studio name : MGM
edit crew name : CBB
Date Original Film Was Released : 2002
Date Edit Was Released : April, 2009
Original Runtime : 124 min
New Runtime :104 min / 99 min
Amount of time Cut/Added : 20 / 25 minutes cut

Fanedit details:
Bratt Ratner was for sure not the no.1 choice for this project, but he tried his very best and got an awesome cast and great characters to work with: Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter, Edward Norton as Will Graham, Ralph Fiennes as Francis "the Tooth Fairy" Dolarhyde, Emily Watson as Reba McClane and Philip Seymour Hoffman as Freddy Lounds.
The rights for all Hannibal Lecter movies belong since "Hannibal" to Dino De Laurentiis and he decided to milk that cow for whatever it takes (and even gave us the atrocious "Hannibal Rising", for which he forced Thomas Harris to write the novel and screenplay). De Laurentiis thought that what the audience wanted most of all is to see more Hannibal Lecter, so Ted Tally added additional scenes to the script including him.
But Hannibal Lecter as supporting character has the "Doc Holiday" effect ("Doc Holiday" is a supporting character in the Wyatt Earp story and tends to steal the entire show, because he is so charismatic). Remember: 18 minutes screentime in "Silence Of The Lambs" were enough to earn him the well deserved academy award for best actor in a LEADING role.
So what the additional Hannibal scenes really do is to take away from the main story about the investiagtion of the "tooth fairy" murders. This entire part becomes incredibly flat and all the audience does is to wait for more Hannibal scenes, which actually makes the movie lame to watch.
What I did was to get rid of all the unneeded Hannibal scenes to take the focus away from him, starting with the 10 minutes intro, where he was caught and continuing with scenes, where he was teasing Chilton.
The result is a totally different movie, although my changes were actually minor. I think this version of Red Dragon is way more in the spirit of the original book and makes all characters (including Hannibal) appear with a lot more impact. Especially the great performance of Ralph Fiennes profits from the changes.
Another thing that always bothered me in both movies (Red Dragon and Manhunter) is the original book ending, which I never liked. But I was not sure that the fanedit audience would prefer a new ending without a true showdown (and with the investigation actually not leading to the true defeat of the tooth fairy), so I created 2 versions, one with the original ending and one with a very different ending, which I like a lot better.
Version 1 is called FOREHEAD and version 2 is called FACE. Let's see if you can figure out why that is. ;-)

To make it possible to have 2 different endings and still a good image quality on a SL DVD, I used seamless branching to present the movie versions. The breaking point is easily spottable and the break can be a tad long, depending on the DVD player, still it works rather well.

The changes:
recolored the entire movie to a less reddish and more cold tone.
cut Hannibal beginning
moved Dolarhyde residence scene to an earlier point (to introduce the tooth fairy earlier to the audience)
cut starting credits
cut first Hannibal visit finale
cut Hannibal cell removing books
cut Hannibal gets soup scene
cut Hannibal cheering to Chilton

face finale:
cut entire Dolarhyde showdown scene
cut Hannibal mentioning Dolarhyde showdown scene
cut Chilton announcing Clarice to Hannibal

Trailer: [vimeo:hm7yk0gg]

DVD Details:
104/99 minutes Single Layer NTSC 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen with AC3-5.1 audio
LANGUAGES : ENGLISH (5.1), GERMAN (2.0)
SUBTITLES : ENGLISH (selectable)
MENUS : animated with sound
SCENE SELECTION : yes
EXTRAS: 6 Deleted Scenes, Trailer, CBB Overview for all 34 fanedits, Cover & Disc Art : yes, on DVD-Rom part

Fanedit history and making:
When my "First Contact" edit did not work out the way I intended it, I switched to this one. The idea for this fanedit is rather old, but I never got around to actually do it.
This fanedit also marks my complete swtich to Sony Vegas as video editor, because I am sick and tired of the Ulead Media Studio Pro 8.0 bugs. The fanedit was created with Ulead, all deleted scenes, menus and the trailer were created with Vegas. Byebye Ulead. I will never return.
Editing the movie was quite easy, except for the earlier introduction of Francis Dolarhyde and the additional ending. Encoding gave me a hard time because Ulead did not always add interlacing to the progressive source, which I could not get rid off completely (and I tried many times with many different settings, filters and programs) until I switched to the original mpg source (which Ulead can handle very well).

Hardware and software information:
Hardware:
Windows XP computer
with an AMD phenom 940 quadcore cpu
and 4 GB of RAM on an ASUS board

Software:

Ulead Media Studio Pro 8.0 (fanedit editing)
Vegas Video 7.0 (extras editing, 5.1 audio creation)
Cinema Craft Encoder (encoding to mpg)
Virtual Dub (frameserving, resizing, recloring)
Adobe Audition 1.5 (music normalization, additonal music track creation)
Pro Show Producer (start and end credits creation)
Jasc Paint Shop Pro (transparent stills creation for menus, correcting stills for end credits, cover and disc art)
PhotoZoom Pro2 (pro enlarging of images for cover art and menus)
DVD Lab Pro 1.52 (DVD authoring)
Cyberlink Power DVD (previewing)
Irfan View (image resizing)
PGCDemux (to get the audio and video sources from the original DVD structure)
AnyDVD (DVD ripper)
DGPulldown (to change 25fps to 29.97fps)
TMPGxpress (encoding the extras video)
ffmepggui (converting the extras, German and menu audio files to ac-3 2.0)
Auto GK (to get an avi to create the subtitles)
Subrip (to rip the subtitles from the DVD)
Subtitle Workshop (to load and alter the original subtitles)

Time needed for the edition:
editing: 3 days, extras: 1 day, trailer: 1 day, DVD menus: 2 days, quality checking and further corrections: 20 days.

persons involved: boon

Maybe downloadable from Fanedit.info
 

AvP

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thanks boon....wow thats some different software used!
 

jamiemark

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Man, what an awesome idea. Boon, you ROCK!!!!!!!!! :grin:
 

Hargiwald

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I actually have both Manhunter and Red Dragon on DVD and I like both, but always thought both had their completely own sets of problems, but Red Dragon would seem like the easier one to edit, and I think less Hannibal is one excellent way to go about it. I'm looking forward to checking this out.
 

InfoDroid

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This is a really great idea, Boon. And I think your instincts are right on this, because what you described is exactly how I felt when I watched the movie in the theater. I was just waiting for the next Hannibal Lecter scene which really took away from the other storyline and great performances of Ralph Fiennes and the others. They kind of let the "B" story overtake what was supposed to be the "A" story, which was something that happened by accident in Silence (and worked!) but obviously happened by design in Red Dragon (and didn't work).
 

blueyoda

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I'm a huge fan of Silence of the Lambs and like everybody else fell in love with Anthony Hopkin's performance as Hannibal. Then, like everybody else, I enjoyed the Ridley Scott sequel even though it had its faire share of problems, if only because it was the Star Wars equivalent of getting a prequel movie with two hours of Darth Vader killing Jedi.

Then Red Dragon came out and Hopkins was old and visibly tired and in addition to that was shoehorned unnecessarely into the plot throughout the movie to capitalize on Hopkin's box office value. Sad because Brett Ratner, by trying to give the audience what he thinks they wanted, managed to not only cheapen Hannibal Lecter's character but also to wreck a compelling main story with ace performances by the whole cast: Edward Norton, Emily Watson, Harvey Keitel doing what he does best, Philip Seymour Hoffman who's great as always and Ralph Fiennes who brilliantly plays the Tooth Fairy killer.

I had played with the idea of fanediting this movie but deemed it unsalvageable. Hopkin's performance was simply too poor and almost every single one of his appearances felt forced down my throat. But it never occured to me that all that was needed to be done was to follow the book and de-Hannibalize the movie to reveal the real plot. CBB saw the potential of this and executed it with a masterful hand.

By removing many of the Hannibal scenes, this edit concentrates on the compelling main story of which the subtleties now really emerge: Will Graham's battle against his inner demons echoing Dolarhyde's own battle; the blind girl's loneliness echoing the serial killer's own and many, many other themes that were drowned out by Hannibal's distracting appearences, making this edit a completely different movie experience. The alternate ending differs from the book's ending but in a good way; the way which serves the movie best as an adaptation of a work from another medium and even at a larger scale, as a solid prequel to Silence of the Lambs.

This is a "replacement" disc for me - it will be the only version I will ever watch again.

EDITING: 10/10
Everything is seamless. No hard cuts whatsoever either in image or sound. Perfect in every way.

Entertainment: 8/10
Dolarhyde's conversation with his mother in his introduction scene still reminds me too much of Hitchcock's Psycho. And more Hannibal could have been cut in my opinion - not necessarely entire scenes but snippets of dialog perhaps. But dissecting the movie at this level is petty and becomes a matter of opinion.

Audio Editing & Audio Quality: 10/10
Great image quality and perfect 5.1 mix, seamless throughout.

Presentation: 10/10
Menu transitions, seamless branching, deleted scenes with explanations, trailer, faneditor's previous works overview, subtitles and languages options and a beautiful cover. This is basically a textbook example of how a fanedit should be released.

FINAL SCORE: 9/10
Nothing much to say here except that this is not a "better" cut of the movie; it's a completely different movie which finally becomes a worthy prequel to the Hannibal saga, presented in a beautiful and abundant package.
 

boon23

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wow! Thanks for the very kind words, blueyoda. You made my day. :) I am very happy you enjoyed this fanedit.
 

JMB

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Ah, Boon.

Boon, Boon, Boon.

I am very pleased about this review because I will not have to say "It was a technically great edit but in the end a so-so movie" again. This is a definite improvement story-wise over the original and much more entertaining as well.

First off, very nice opening credits. A wee bit hard to read some of the end credits over the paintings but overall really cool and well done. They suited the movie perfectly. That always helps sell a fan-edit for me. Picture and sound were all fine per usual CBB edits.

The edit itself is not intricate, but your cuts were all very well chosen. Simple, but they alter the experience of the movie greatly. This is easily evidenced by the included deleted scenes reel. You saw the better movie within and drew it out with a few deft strokes. How's that for pretentious? ;) But this is what I was hoping I'd see from you again, an edit where the final project was truly a classic piece and a worthy showcase for your skills.

Just one impression I had watching it,[spoiler:2reu35fo]maybe D's scenes could be spaced out a bit more in the second half? I felt like he kind of disappeared for awhile there. I wanted to see him back in the story a little sooner.[/spoiler:2reu35fo] Not a major deal, just kind of a feeling I had.

Very well done. Highly recommended. Great job. 9 of 10 easy.

P.S. The missus loved it too.
 

boon23

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thank you very much for the nice review, jmb. :) I am very happy you liked it (and the missus too ;-)).
 

jamiemark

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I enjoyed this a lot as I expected I would. I'd give it a solid 9/10.
 

Daniel

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Hargiwald said:
I actually have both Manhunter and Red Dragon on DVD and I like both, but always thought both had their completely own sets of problems, but Red Dragon would seem like the easier one to edit, and I think less Hannibal is one excellent way to go about it. I'm looking forward to checking this out.
I have all Hannibal films on DVD (except for that awful movie "Hannibal Rising"); although I've never really liked Red Dragon. It's biggest problem I've always felt is Lecter; and the fact that even the scenes that are adapted from the novel seem awful. I can't believe Hopinks gave such a weak performance to his role, after being so masterful in the previous films. So cutting his role down to the minimum would vastly improve this movie, I can't wait to see it... the torrent is at 18%!

Manhunter is a very good film adaptation, I don't see how it has its own "set of problems"! It's my baby!

Boon: The breaking point is easily spottable and the break can be a tad long, depending on the DVD player, still it works rather well.

Then it's not seamless... it's just branching! (I'm interested in this new ending, does Will get defaced like in the novel??)
 

boon23

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:wat: :-o :oops: :???: :-? :? :shock: :eek: :-( :( :razz:
 

AvP

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You should put the PW on the site :p
 

boon23

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this is now available on multiupload, which is an awesome new service I am trying out.
Multiupload has a great, quick and easy upload tool and it will spread the files to 5 file hosts (leaving out the unreliable uploading.com):
Rapidshare, Megaupload, Hotfile, Depositfiles, Zshare
Premium is not required.
Download with jdownloader works great, you can with just one click split the hosts and have the links for RS, MU, whatever neatly paired up.

I think this is super comfortable.

all links are inter changeable
should be on fanedit.info soon.
 

Zaphero

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Can the Hannibal Lecter franchise tag be added to this? It's the single highest rated edit in that series, but doesn't come up in searches as a result.
 
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