Cinema Paradiso The New Version
May 2003 Reviewed by: Wes Phillips Format: DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

Cinema Paradiso is a celebration of the love of film. As such, it is delirious with passion -- passion for drama, passion for romance, and passion for the forgotten glamour of the classic movies and, as befits a soul besotted with love, it is prone to big sweeping gestures that just might possibly not tell the most complete story.

That's okay. Everybody loves a lover.

There is a lot to admire in Cinema Paradiso. As a movie-lover myself, I found it easy to lose myself in its tale of a director's lifetime love affair with the movies and how they, and his mentor, a small town projectionist, shaped his life. But even upon its American release in 1990, I always felt the story wasn't truly complete. Something was missing.

What was missing, apparently, was about 32 minutes of film -- the Italian original clocked in at 155 minutes, while the edited U.S. release was slightly over half an hour shorter. Miramax's new DVD not only contains the "original" edited U.S. release, but, on the other side of the disc, a new 174-minute cut, restoring not only the missing footage but adding an additional 19 minutes as well.

And does the new, and restored, footage make for a more satisfying movie? That's a tough question, but, on the whole, no. No more than discovering the secret of a magician's trick makes it a better illusion. The magic of Cinema Paradiso needed no explanation.

The great, unfinished story line of the original U.S. cut does, in fact, now have a resolution (any lack of specificity is intentional, since I don't wish to be a spoiler). The problem is that the unsatisfactory nature of that resolution was successfully implied in the original American cut. Actually seeing it adds very little and that is more or less true of most of the additional footage.

We do get to know the characters somewhat better, but they were beautifully sketched even in the truncated version -- more, in this case, isn't necessarily better, it's just more. Perhaps the 155-minute version successfully walked the tightrope between just enough and too much.

Of course, the new Miramax DVD doesn’t give us that choice, but it does offer two generous full-length features, and allows us to choose which to watch and that is a good thing.

The video transfer is very good, although not totally free from compression artifacts and occasional color blooming. There are a few reds that will make you sit up and take notice. However, even the darkest scenes, and there are many dark scenes in a movie set primarily in a movie theater, are detailed and grain free, and the overall look of the film is very pleasing.

The new version features a 5.1 audio mix. Ennio Morricone's marvelous score never sounded so good.

The disc has no extras to speak of other than a few trailers: the original theatrical trailer for Cinema Paradiso and three other Miramax trailers. What's worse, there is practically no text explaining what is offered on the two sides of the DVD.

Whichever version strikes your fancy, Cinema Paradiso will very probably be one of those films you find unforgettable. It's nice to have a great-looking, beautiful-sounding DVD of it at last.

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