MGM has vastly improved on “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” with a new special edition that gives up 18 minutes of additional footage, an insightful commentary track and a truckload of extras.
Let’s start with the movie itself, Sergio Leone’s crowning spaghetti Western and the final chapter in the Dollars Trilogy. Quentin Tarantino has said it’s the “best directed movie of all time.”
In the stream of the movie’s now three-hour narrative, The Good (Clint Eastwood), The Bad (Lee Van Cleef) and The Ugly (Eli Wallach) track bags of gold to a New Mexico graveyard where they face off.
The Texas theater of the Civil War is the setting for the action.
MGM has improved on its flaccid 1998 release in almost every way.
The latest two-disc collector’s edition, primarily, presents this classic in anamorphic widescreen with a 16-by-9 enhancement. But best off, MGM has taken the step to present the movie in 5.1-channel sound, a radical improvement from the mono-channel earlier release.
MGM has brought back Eastwood, Wallach and another actor for Van Cleef to record dialogue for the missing footage, which has been restored in a version Leone intended.
The second disc also includes a seven-minute extended scene of the torture of Tuco (Wallach).
The feature is included in one disc. The extras are packed onto a second disc.
The second disc includes “Leon’e West,” a 20-minute making-of featurette; “The Leone Style,” a 23-minute documentary on the director; “The Man Who Lost the Civil war,” a sleepy 14-minute feature on Confederate Commander Sibley; “Reconstructing The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” at 11 minutes, “Il Maestro,” a seven-minute profile of composer Ennio Morricone; a poster gallery and trailer.
About Paul Clinton:
After collecting political science and history degrees from USC, Paul took the next natural step. He became a movie reviewer.
For the last half of the 1990s, Paul’s often-edgy, straight-ahead reviews appeared in the Glendale News-Press, Pasadena Weekly and other publications. He cut his critic’s teeth on such films as The People vs. Larry Flynt (“a wry look at the king of raunchy porn”), Higher Learning (“angry, hot-button, humorless filmmaking”), Face/Off (“a stylish action gem”) and Run Lola Run (“a fast-moving cartoon, a lightweight classic”).
In 2000, Paul began contributing reviews to Boxoffice, an industry trade magazine geared toward theater owners. It was also in this year that he discovered the pure joy of the digital format, picking up a Sony DVD player, along with the Aliens Special Edition and, of course, The Matrix.
Paul’s top ten list, for 2002, included About Schmidt, Far from Heaven, Punch-Drunk Love, 25th Hour and Y Tu Mama Tambien.
As his day job – since reviewing movies and DVDs has yet to pay the mortgage – Paul covers local politics and business for the community news division of the Los Angeles Times
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The Toy Story Ultimate Toy Box (2000) – This three-disc bonanza goes a long way toward offering a fuller appreciation for the way the two “Toy Story” movies changed the animation landscape. On these discs, they are joys to watch (“Toy Story” was the trailblazer, “Toy Story 2” more fully humanized the CG creation). Many of the extra treats are available only in this edition, not the two-disc set.
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