Last movie watched...

[von Boom]

The Donner Cut hands down, in my opinion, it's a massive shame that Donner and the Salkinds couldn't have reconciled their differences to finish off Superman II in 1979, Donner clearly nailed the whole mythology in a definitive manner yet to be equalled, and his Superman II would have been more serious in tone and had a more mythic, epic quality than Lester's admittedly decent version, alas...

I think what hinders the Donner Cut is the fact that it had to use Lester's footage to fill in the gaps Donner didn't get to film. The difference in tone between the two is pretty clear.

JvB

[MR. ELIMINATOR]

Just watched Escape from New York for the first time. Fantastic!

[Dandontdare]

Superman II and Superman II The Richard Donner cut.

It was interesting to the see the difference between the two versions. Donner's version was good, but the theatrical version was a little lighter and according to my wife had more charm. I wonder if Henry Cavill will be able to match Christopher Reeve as Superman. I can't wait to find out.

JvB

What is the principle difference between the two? is it huge plot-wise, or minor tinkering?

[TordelBack]

At SBT's urging, I re-watched They Live, which was as stonkingly good as ever, and as Steev suggests, not far off a documentary.

Then, for some inexplicable reason, I rewatched the whole of '80s pants-shitters Threads and The Day After on You-Tube in alternating episodes.  I've always remembered how much the better of the two Threads is, but sweet cheeses, in a side-by-side comparison it wipes the floor with its big-budget rival.  It's like watching Hamlet and The Lion King, same subject matter, different league. 

There's some genuinely incredible images in Threads, things I've never seen before or since on film - fingers burning like candles, cats writhing in the ruins, seriously disturbing stuff worthy of John Smith.  The Day After OTOH looks like pretty much every disaster movie since (although it's better than many), and is full of pointless errors like the sound of detonations arriving ahead of light and heat blast.  I'll take Leslie Judd calmly reporting two nuclear detonations in the middle east  as the harbinger of war over AWACS officers shouting jargon at each other, and chippies fighting over wood supplies over John Lithgow watching missile launches from a baseball game, any day.  Threads' focus on milk floats and wives folding shirts, couples stripping wallpaper, then transitioning into vignettes of puke and shit and pus... the simple despair when the taps stop working - harrowing.   Amazingly affecting stuff on both the personal and global levels.

Right, off to find When the Wind Blows and my cheery week will be complete.
 

[von Boom]

What is the principle difference between the two? is it huge plot-wise, or minor tinkering?

The basic plot is the same Zod et. al. are released from phantom zone, come to Earth, stir things up. The difference is in how the plot unfolds.

Donner had a darker vision for S2, using more realism to move forward, whereas Lester used comedy, especially with Clark, to move the story. Donner's version could be considered more canonical than Lester's. That's probably due to the fact that Donner was filming both S1 & 2 at the same time and considered them both as essentially part of the same story arc.

JvB

[Eric Plumrose]

TAKE SHELTER. It's very good but the ending . . . I'm undecided about.

[Professor Bear]

All good points, TB, but The Day After had a greater legacy than Threads, as Ronnie Reagan found the former such a bummer that he pressed forward on nuclear disarmament talks.  Me, I love that the toss-up between TDA and Threads can be summed up by TDA's glossy ending of sobbing old men in a giant grave of a city or Threads' educationally subnormal population of the future experiencing a still birth.

The Saint - the Val Kilmer flick.  I recall not quite understanding the critical mauling this got at the time, so I'll go ahead and assume I was drunk, sleeping, or the former and working on the latter when I saw this first.  The "I was named for a saint" thing and all his aliases being catholic saints was a decent schtick, but the rest... dear god, the rest... it's like a catalog of things that are clumsy and shit.
All the same, even with a dull setting, a lack of any real action - from otherwise reliable explosion documentarian Philip Noyce - and some funny-terrible chat up patter between the leads, I think this might have been okay if it was twenty minutes shorter and didn't have that ending where the bad guy sets up a cold fusion reactor in front of everyone just to prove it doesn't work, and then explains the science as to how it might have worked and how if only this one light bulb would light up he should totally be taken to jail.  I just went "what the fuck?" at the screen at that stage.  Kilmer's mugging at the end is awful, and the bit where he mouths "I love you" made me instantly think of Top Secret, but not in a good way.  Terrible.

The Sea Chase - John Wayne flick where he plays a German merchant ship captain forced to do a runner from a former BFF in the Royal Navy when war breaks out.  Not much action and the Duke as always plays the Duke, but I didn't give a monkeys when he did that in The Conqueror and I don't much find it a barrier  to enjoyment here, either.  A fun romp about men obliged to their duty and the women that love them - or sit around smoldering and crying at the occasional amputation - but not enough face punching or Wayne telling Nazis they're a cunt to their face for my liking.

[TordelBack]

All good points, TB, but The Day After had a greater legacy than Threads, as Ronnie Reagan found the former such a bummer that he pressed forward on nuclear disarmament talks.

Cool, didn't know that!  Not surprised though, because it is powerful stuff, and quite honest - it's just all a bit... exciting?  Threads on the other hand made me feel sick, every single hideous minute of it, but in the good way of the worst nightmares.  Its escalating horrors are just so plausible - for example, where the narrator intones that even had the entire National Health Service survived intact, it wouldn't have had the resources to deal with the one bomb that falls on Sheffield.  Or the banal disintegration of the trapped emergency committee.  From an older perspective than that of the terrified teen I was when I saw it first, I could see myself in almost every situation, as almost every character. A Cradlegrave of the apocalypse.

As to Threads' ending, it certainly is a bit of a weak spot, but in its defence, it actually does virtually the same 'old men crying a city of the dead' as TDA about half way in, so it gets points for at least trying to push beyond into something even more horrible.  It's a clever way to say:  you think this is a bad situation, maybe like a really big awful version of the Blitz, but it isn't, and you won't pull through eventually - it's the bloody end. 

Incidentally, I was surprised to see that the Threads SFX still look absolutely magnificent, at least on the low-res YouTube copy - TDA was a way more impressive spectacle (flocks of silo launches, terrific stock footage of detonations), but the low-angle views of mushroom cloud and the sheer violence of the exploding buildings in Threads were much more visceral and affecting.  And the burn make-up... fuuuuuuuck, you'd think I'd have seen it all after a decade of CSI shlock shows, but not a bit of it.   

Sorry to go on about this, but I indulged a maudlin humour by watching these shows, and didn't expect to be quite so bowled over and downright moved by the achievement.

[Radbacker]

we watched Threads in Year 8 Social Studies (in 1988, i know the cold war was basicly over but not to my 13 year old mind) way to terrify a generation teachers, I was terrified of Nuclear War up to that point and after seeing it became absolutly certain that it was all going to end in a bright flash and crippling sickness, misery of the highest order.  Ahh the 80's such fun, kids these days dont understand, sure you could get caught up in some Terrorist incident these days but at least the whole world isn't going to get flashfried by a couple of nuts in the Whitehouse and Kremlin.

CU Radbacker

[Spikes]

Ahh Threads, what a brilliant programme, in a totally depressing kinda way.
Remember watching this when first shown on telly back in the day - along with The Day After. (The Day After was first if i recall). Being a typical teenager i watched both purely to see things blowing up. When i caught threads again, when it was released on dvd a few years ago, ..well talk about a cold shiver going up your spine. The background story of things starting to kick off in the middle east was, in the early 2000's, unsettling to say the least.
Always thought that scene of the fire engines quietly slipping away in the dead of night to be unbelievably poignant, and a good image, before a single bomb had fallen, of the "threads" of society unravelling.
Uncomfortable but unmissable stuff.

[Roger Godpleton]

Well I've reached the halfway point of Twin Peaks, and I'm reliably informed that this is where it starts to get shit, up until the epic finale. It stills holds up really well, even after watching The Wire, Sopranos, Breaking Bad etc first. There are certain scenes such as [spoiler]Maddy Ferguson's death[/spoiler] that you can't believe they got away with on US network television.

[Ancient Otter]

I've seen Threads but not The Day After. Have any of the people who've seen both seen The War Game, Threads predecessor?

[Spikes]

Yeah, The War Game. Again pretty grim watching, seem to remember it wasnt until the late 80's that it got shown - even though it was made in the '60's. Wasnt the original programme banned, or held back, or something? Dont think ive seen it since then.
Might be worth tracking down the dvd and checking it out again.
Blimey,who'd ever have thought there'd come a time when we'd feel nostalgic about possible nuclear devastation, 

[Rog69]

Threads scared the crap out of me as a child but I remember being pretty much traumatised by a documentary shown a few year earlier (I think it might have been an episode of panorama) that showed the Protect and Survive public information films.

I had never even heard of nuclear weapons before seeing that and it was a hell of a lot to take in, I must have only been around 10 at the time, it gave me nightmares for weeks afterwards.

[Ancient Otter]

You know a lot of these civil defence public information films have been collected on dvd?

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Collection--Nuclear-Britain--Front-Defence/dp/B003AJPXIM/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1322952036&sr=1-1

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Protect-and-Survive-DVD/dp/B0009YVBHS/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1322951989&sr=1-1