BRO

I spent the better part of Sunday afternoon at the Astor theatre watching Fuller's The Big Red One (The Reconstruction), which I've just discovered, much to my amusement, spells out the acronym "BRO". A reedit of the 1980 WWII film, it now contains 50 additional minutes edited from the original to reduce running time. Unlike Apocalypse Now Redux, where several scenes that deserved their place on the cutting room floor were reintroduced to no positive effect, the new scenes in BRO do create somewhat of a different and mildly deeper film. The major change was the development of the character of Schroeder, Lee Marvin's German counterpart, who was largely dropped from the original edit. There was a lot more sex and violence than I remembered, but given that I've only seen the movie on TV, who knows what was or was not in the original. The theatre itself was great [http://www.astor-theatre.com/], although admission did cost as much as a six-pack of beer at Liquorland.