Sergio Leone

I just bought Once Upon a Time in America on DVD last month, and I'm still trying to define the...feel?...of the thing. It's the kind of movie you can watch and watch and watch and still be coming to terms with.

i've only seen A Fistful of Dollars. it was compelling, but a bit hollow.

One of my favorite directors of all-time, hands down. I just love how he created his own, completely unique cinematic language. I've always thought of his movies as visual songs, with the characters being more like instruments in an orchestra, and the shoot-outs being more like dance. It's a shame, too, how his religious symbolism is so often overlooked. My favorite scene: at the end of TG,TB,aTU- the "bad" is dead, while the "ugly" is balancing on a cross (in limbo, if you will), begging for help from the "good." Of course, the genius of the whole thing is that there's a very thin line between the "good," the "bad," and the "ugly."

BTW, I heard the new special edition is only gonna be available in full-screen. If this is true, I'm gonna be PISSED.

worry not, I have heard that it will have a very nice widescreen tranfser.

God, Leone in fullscreen would be almost pointless. His use of a widescreen frame is as good as any directors, ever. Of course it helped that he mainly worked in Westerns where he could fill up huges swathes of screen with sky and horizon and ugly extra.

"Once Upon a Time In America" is the only one of his films I have a real problem with. Its his most self-consciously "important" film, yet it feels somewhat trite, perhaps even empty. I can never really understand what he wants to say. Also, it is paced just like his other films - it ambles, as Westerns tend to. But the Crime/Gangster film is generally urban and demands a tauter pace, I think. So all of Leone's long silences, the quiet stares, the (beautiful) Morricone music seems out of place in this context. And the ending is baffling, in a way...