Movies with bad editing

[Jason Diebler]

Yeah, I disagree with some of those aforementioned films as well. “There Will Be Blood” is a great movie. It does not have bad editing, it just has slow pacing. Paul Thomas Anderson is famous for his character development and nice slow tracking shots. All of his movies have this type of pacing, and maybe that’s not one’s taste, but I’d hardly put PTA in the “movies w/ bad editing” category.

“The deepest blues are black” – Foo Fighters
(this doesn’t help me when I’m chroma keying!)

[Mark Suszko]

About “There Will Be Blood“. It has been a long time since I really hated a movie. But I hated this movie.

And I’ve seen “Spice World“.

I was okay with “There Will Be Blood” for a while, but yes, I found it quite lugubrious and glacial, and I felt the script and direction wandered a lot after the first third, without going much of any place. I might have walked out on the movie, but I was watching it at home on DVD. I stuck with it, but more out of a sense of sheer cussedness and disbelief that everybody else seemed to think this was a masterpiece and I wasn’t “getting it”. I don’t mind other films that are slow-paced. This one though – I thought I was watching it in time-lapse:-) I think what bothered me was that the amount of time spent compared to the amount of insight revealed in the characters and advancement of plot was too high a ratio for me.

[Rocco Rocco]

Hah! You should watch Gus Van Sant’s “Gerry” ;o)

[Misha Aranyshev]

[grinner hester] “A bad edit is simply an edit without intention.”

Cuts in boat scenes in “Jaws” are full of intention. Intention to frighten. But the editing is bad because what the audience is scared of isn’t a shark but Quint. Of course here it is probably directing that’s bad, not the editing.

[Mark Suszko]

I have to disagree about JAWS, it is famous as a movie “saved” by the editing.
It took me a while to think of a movie that I thought had really bad editing, but I came up with the comedy “Nacho Libre”. That one definitely needed to be shortened, and it has some really glaring continuity problems in it as well. I felt Jack Black had something promising going in this, but the editing killed off the pacing and distorted the plot lines. Parts of it looked like they were editing around some missing footage.

I have ranted at length about the the final part of the last Star Wars Trilogy. In brief, Lucas doesn’t show a convincing motivation for Anakin to turn to the Dark Side and become Lord Vader. He shot sequences that show Padme Amadala helping to form what will become the Rebel Alliance, but these sequences were cut for time to let more space battles be up longer. I think that was a glaring error. To have Anakin find out that his lover and mother of his kids “betrayed” him and the Republic he thinks he’s defending with his life, and that his best friend and mentor, a Jedi, was in on it, THAT is the strong shock and hurt that could motivate a guy to turn bad, or make him vulnerable to BE turned at a critical moment.
To me this was glaringly obvious. I can’t be the only one that thinks so.

[John Paul]

You are completely wrong. First of all, Thelma has been doing that on purpose for the last few films. Notice in the Aviator, she makes great use of those seemingly “bad” on axis cuts, with mismatched body position and ‘continuity’. Case in point when Noah Deitrich introduces himself to Hughes on the airfield. And Anne has always been non-traditional, she cut for Soderberg. It’s a style choice, based on the performances and the movement of the piece.

Second, and more importantly, the best editors have always been women. And not because they could make a good cut. Technical ability is really commonplace. Anybody can cut a scene, anybody can cut an action movie. But not anybody can craft a good performance. Which is why so many women have been great editors: their attention to the subtly meaning behind a performance is their power. A film like Doubt is far more difficult than Transformers 2.