Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Well, it seems PINK FLOYD: LIVE AT POMPEII director Adrian Maben has got himself a case of George Lucas disease. The new DVD release of the so-called "Director's Cut" of that film is completely re-edited, with a slew of new material, and it completely ruins the mood of the film. Thankfully, they included the original version of this haunting movie on the disc, as well. There's a drastic difference between the two. Here's the deal: The original version of the film, released in 1972, was 61 minutes long, and consisted only of performance footage from the Pompeii amphitheatre and a Paris studio, plus some extra footage of Pompeii. This was shot in full-screen 4:3 and is presented as such on the DVD. Maben went back into the Abbey Road studios while the band was putting together DARK SIDE OF THE MOON in 1973 and shot some documentary footage of the band recording and talking. The new footage was spliced in between some of the original performances for the film and the result was released in 1974 in America; it was maybe 70-something minutes long. Unfortunately, this edit has not made it to the DVD. Now, this new version uses more footage from Abbey Road, some B&W footage of the band in a studio in Paris, new shots the director took of Pompeii, a whole bunch of archival footage of space exploration, and new titles that look made for a straight-to-video release instead of the Godard-esque ones we had with the original (Willy Kurant was one of the cinematographers.) This is about 91 minutes long, and has been inexplicably matted to a 16:9 format. I must say the new footage seems extremely out of place. It doesn't match visually with the old footage, looking very straight-to-video. Much of the editing of the original is broken up with splices to new stuff the director just couldn't keep out ("Hey, Pink Floyd is "spacey"--- I'll put in computer-generated shots of planets!"); the result is more a series of thematically related music videos than a unified movie. What really gets me is that there's an interview on the DVD with the director where on multiple occasions he touches on why the original and almost-original versions of the film were so special, and then he proceeds to destroy that with his new version. In the original, the ruined Pompeiian setting gave the movie a palpable sense of silence and isolation; in the new version they're not much more than a pretty background. The original version held its shots long enough to give the viewer an opportunity to absorb the spacial setting for himself; now we're treated to the short attention span version of things. And why was this this thing masked to 16:9 for the new version? Having a dad who's worked on satellites and space probes my whole life has given me an appreciation for space footage on its own merits; but using simulated flyovers of Mars's surface to accompany Pink Floyd is worthy of a fan's website, not a feature film... please, let the spirit of "Laserium" rest in peace.