Heaven's Gate (the movie)

The film itself. Heh. Still not actually seen it, I really much prefer the stories around it.

Sorry. Yes, though 'thinking' may be an exageration here. Maybe I should stop freebasing my cough medicine.

Highly recommend Steven Bach's book Final Cut -- he was one of the two chief execs in charge of the film. It's an unintentional but all the more worth it period piece now (capturing a sense of how the Hollywood studios were acting and starting to change in the late seventies and early eighties), and while as he himself says it can't be a definitive story, it's pretty exhaustive. Apparently William Goldman urged him to keep a diary at some point, well before Cimino and Heaven's Gate came along, and that helped him write one hell of a detailed account. Don't know if it's print.

am halfway through a second-hand copy of this book at the moment, and it is wonderful, and very gripping. michael's right above; much of the movie *was filmed at the 'golden hour'. i haven't seen the movie itself in years, and remember little of it now.

critic robin wood thinks this is one of the greatest movies ever.

Yeah, and Wood is wasting energy on an entire book appraising Michael Haneke.

HG is not really much worse than The Deer Hunter, tho.

I saw the 3.5 hour version once. It'd be ok-ish if they lost a)the 30 minute roller skating sequence, and b)the 30 minute dinner party sequence. Actually it'd still be pompous and futile, but it looks lovely.

Apologies if it's been posted elsewhere but Steven Bach has died http://www.benningtonbanner.com/local/ci_12028045 I was looking at his bio of Leni Riefenstahl just the other week and if it's anywhere near as good as 'Final Cut' then it'll be a fitting swansong.

I was just watching some of Heaven's Gate last night. It's shot really well with lots of dust and blue skies, but yeah. Who could've ever known that there wasn't much chemistry between Kris Kristofferson and Christopher Walken?

Let The Revisionism Begin!

http://www.criterion.com/films/28036-heaven-s-gate

geez, Cimino looks like a li'l old lady these days.

http://www.filmlinc.com/blog/entry/heavens-gate-and-the-film-maudit

indeed! wtf?

http://filmlinc.com/page/-/Cimino1.jpg

Borrowed from his poll thread:

http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/classic/features/ciminos-final-cut-200203

Long Story Short: Too Much Time, Money & Vanity or: "I stopped making movies, so I re-made myself!"

I've got this on my to-watch shelf. I've probably looked at it a dozen times the past couple of months and thought, "Do I feel like investing another four hours in this?" (I think I've seen it three times.) One day--not yet--the answer will come back "Yes." (I've got a regular MGM issue, widescreen and the full three hours and 49 minutes. How much of an improvement the Criterion is, I don't know.)

The Criterion is supposed to have a new edit overseen by Cimino. Early reports say he nixed the intermission. I don't think he could do that much other than that because it's widely believed all of the outtakes and most of the original elements were destroyed. The old MGM disc is sourced from a archival print of the initial premeire version found in London in the early '80s, which was shown on Z Channel and such. That DVD is also non-anamorphic.

If it's any incentive for someone who hasn't yet seen it, there's some Grade-A Isabelle Huppert nudity awaiting you amongst all the symbolism, dust and kills.

geez, Cimino looks like a li'l old lady these days.

And what's that old lady doing up there with Jeff Daniels.

cmon, Kris has a great ol' monumental lion look.

http://menwholooklikeoldlesbians.blogspot.ca/

i watched this movie. it had its moments, but was overall pretty awful.

I bought the book Final Cut about the making of this movie years ago and still haven't read it, nor have I ever seen the film.

the book is better than the movie.

the movie's amazing...

saw it this year, the 218 min version, in 35mm, on sao paulo. drove 700 km. cant really complain

Howard Hampton:

If director Michael Cimino could have shot it in 3D, I’m positive he would have: It’s not so much that he wanted to put the viewers in the action as transport them to a moment in lost time when an American Eden was on the cusp of being forever wiped out by rapacious business interests. If Sam Waterston’s satanic head of the Stock Grower’s Association were any more villainous he’d have to go looking for orphans to tie to the railroad tracks—he’s a double-whammy figurehead who talks like an aristocratic Eastern fop and looks rather like a young, sniveling Joe Stalin. The tension in the film is between the intensely detailed, expressive, but defiantly static mise-en-scene and a familiar Old Hollywood–informed script that Raoul Walsh or Howard Hawks would have shaped up into a taut, one-hundred-minute hell-for-leather ride with Gary Cooper, Ingrid Bergman, and Jimmy Cagney. Cimino’s only true concession to the New Hollywood zeitgeist is duration and the overarching sense of doomed endeavor—here the Calvary charges in to save the hired killers from the proletarian resistance—along with vaguely more explicit politics that aren’t so different from your typical sentimental Capra little-people-vs.-the-big-bullies broadside.

http://www.artforum.com/film/id=37487

http://www.villagevoice.com/2013-03-20/film/michael-cimino-revisits-his-notorious-flop-heaven-s-gate-which-maybe-was-a-masterpiece-all-along/

Anytime I ever read anything on Heaven's Gate, I always think, "That sounds amazing; I need to give this another look." Then I do--it's like Lisa Simpson's experiment with Bart vs. the hamster.

In addition to trimming several minutes from the running time and removing the intermission, he radically revisited the film's color palate, bringing back the vibrant greens, blues and browns that had been muted by a sepia haze in the original release prints.

so, apparently NOT a masterpiece all along...

This is being utterly submerged by the current reissue. It's not the same film.

Watching now. 45 mins in (Christopher Walken's first appearance), not really sure what I'm supposed to care about. However, it does look really nice.

I rescreened recently after rereading Final Cut, and yes, the script is pretty inept at establishing the characters. Judging by the prologue, you'd think you were in for a buddy epic about Kristofferson and John Hurt! But then Hurt only pops up to provide some exposition and then to wander around babbling intermittently between large breaks in the main body of the film.

I don't often praise how DVD cases look, but this Criterion is lovely.

Now I guess I gotta watch this thing

youve seen worse

It's funny how the epilogue is only like 5 minutes in duration, but it feels like the longest sequence in the film.

Okay so I've screened the first disc (second was broken so I guess it'll be a week before I get to watch the second half). This movie is nowhere near as bad as I had been to led to believe it was (and this Criterion version looks brilliant) but at the same time its totally meandering. What is the point of the opening sequence? Are you meant to understand who any of these people are? Why is there a stupid love triangle?

Wow what a weird pointless film. I guess if they'd excised both the prologue and the epilogue and bothered to build any interest in any of these folks there might something there, but otherwise just a slog. Even the "battle" sequences are without drama since you don't really care who any of these people are so there is basically zero investment...

I think you've summed up the usual response to this: not the debacle of legend, especially if you're watching it years after the fact (i.e., it's made with skill, sometimes a lot of skill, and some of the cinematography is beautiful), but at a certain point, you just lose track of who anyone is or why they're doing what they're doing. The violent reaction to it in 1981 seemed to have a lot to do with humbling Cimino.

I do think the opening sequence (I assume you mean the commencement--there's a brief prologue, right?) is one of the two or three best things in the film. Not sure I could convince you of its point (the last time any of these people will ever be happy?), but it's virtuoso filmmaking.

This is new to me - Godard visiting Huppert on the set of Heaven's Gate:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqEdM_uWzO4

If you look really closely, I think you can spot him as an extra in the big roller-skating scene.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xBkiYMR5qKU/TyrBtbFp8EI/AAAAAAAAHQI/Hig4nha38yw/s1600/HGRollerRink.jpg

I do think the opening sequence (I assume you mean the commencement--there's a brief prologue, right?) is one of the two or three best things in the film. Not sure I could convince you of its point (the last time any of these people will ever be happy?), but it's virtuoso filmmaking.
--clemenza

But Hurt and Kristofferson's characters are only ones (other than the girl who appears in the epilogue but she has zero dialogue) and the former's character is basically with function in the remainder of the film. And Kristofferson's character seems happier with Huppert than he is in the opening. I don't have a problem with sequence for it's cinematic qualities.

I also don't understand why anyone would choose to ostensibly make a movie about the Johnson County War then mess with the entire subject so completely including keeping people's names but completely changing their entire history. If you aren't going to bother with any historical accuracy why use anyone's real name? This didn't my enjoyment or lack thereof. I just found it odd.

Some really amazing moments and not that boring but it is still a total mess.

Decided last night to watch Soderbergh's 110 minute fan edit of this without ever having seen any other versions, which maybe was not the smartest decision but what can i say i'm a wildman.

My entire time watching the film, it had a palpable feeling of being a shorter film cut together from a much longer film, scenes starting in media res, characters popping up without any introduction or exposition. i was constantly wondering who was who, what their relationships and motivations were, what different things had to do with each other, and i was thinking "well, I guess thats probably clearer if you've seen the rest of heavens gate." Its funny reading through this thread this morning and seeing people saying basically the same stuff about every other longer version, so I feel a little better.

What appears to be the biggest change, from what I can tell, is that he put the Harvard prologue stuff at the end, which - I wouldnt say it totally makes sense, but it certainly made more sense than I imagine it would have if it had been at the beginning, lol.

allow me to be the 9 millionth person to declare it (or at least the 110 minutes that I saw) not terrible but not a masterpiece. everyone talks about how good it looks but i still wasnt prepared for how truly jawdroppingly beautiful so many of the images were. not even just the landscapes - the one shot of the train arriving with sam waterston on it, light streaming through the windows between the heads of the seated mercernaries, all the beams canted at different angles, almost knocked me out of my chair. Looked like Shanghai Express goes west. I thought I was saving myself time by watching the short cut but tbh I'm tempted now to watch the long version just to see more of the images they captured.

Yeah I had a holy shit reaction to the beauty of individual shots. Completely unreal. The Harvard stuff in particular is being sent from a time machine. Only place I think it suffers is the action climax. It feels rudimentary in comparison and bleak in an unimaginative way. If it had built to something that fit more naturally/aesthetically w those earlier moments it would have a better reputation imo

yeah the battle seemed kind of fatally flawed in the way it was shot & directed, maybe i was getting tired but i was lost following who was who and where anything was, everyone and every shot kind of looked the same. they had that whole field setup, but it felt everything was shot in tight shots and closeups. tbh even when the cavalry rode in at the end it took me a minute to deduce what they were doing.

Decided last night to watch Soderbergh's 110 minute fan edit of this

hours later, he revealed he made another edit of it last year!

FUN FACT: To help recoup budget overages, United Artists gave consideration to taking landscape stills from the film and sell them as postcards.

lol, i think i must have watched the newer soderbergh cut? its the one thats posted on his site now, he billed it as "upgraded" but i assumed he just meant image quality. jfc even the fan edits of this are a confusing mess

Here's the 2014 link for the 2006 cut - he listed a Butcher's Cut (Redux) on his list of 2020 viewing & reading the other day, so maybe you did see an upgrade of the old Butcher Cut

Watch the 216 minute cut, the one Criterion put out... no "fan edit" of this movie is going to surpass insane Cimino's version, however close the 2016 cut is.

I agree with your assessment, it's obviously bloated and inert but often stunning. Doesn't get enough credit for how brutal it is, either: Sam Waterston executing a prisoner chained to a wheel by shooting him point blank in the skull after being challenged on his manhood, only proving Kristoffersen's (right?) point--feckless sociopath. Perhaps too far gone to say the movie was sabotaged for its unsentimental and critical treatment of largely unknown American history, but I wish Cimino kept making movies like this and Deer Hunter.

The US Theatrical Version (150 minutes & otherwise unavailable on disc) is streaming on Prime rn.

Having just survived both Megalopolis (twice) and Joker: Folie à Deux, might be a good time to give this yet one more try--may look like Bergman or Ozu by comparison (but, I expect, won't seem any less meandering).

Man, imagine Michael Cimino's Joker...

You've just invented a game: what would each venerated '70s American director's Joker look like?

Cimino Joker:

-Walken is The Joker
-Meryl Streep is Harley Quinn
-A lot of Batman in the beginning, small bits of Batman interspersed over the next 3 hours, slightly more Batman in the closing set piece.

-John Hurt is Batman for some reason