Perhaps long-time readers will remember that George Clooney’s “Up in the Air” rocked my world. It rocked me like I haven’t been rocked since Daniel Day Lewis managed to make Tomas a million times better than anything Milan Kundera ever invented–in the movie version of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.”
Then Clooney decided to go after the solitary-monk-with-bad-habits thing again last year. So I was pretty siked when “The American” DVD showed up at the local library.
1. The sound of the reports of a custom-built rifle cut the movie’s cloudy silence like music.
2. When it seemed for a second that the mystery of Clooney’s character’s identity and destiny might be revealed in a clever, intelligently plotted manner, I thought, ‘My gosh, Hitchcock has come back from the dead!’
But I hoped for too much. When all was said and done, I stared at the screen. “Seriously?” You’re not allowed to make movies that don’t make sense.
Then it occurred to me. A specific problem has ruined the movies: No one has retained the skill of film editing.
A film editor must hold himself utterly aloof from the production process. When the time comes to cut the endless reels into the shortest-possible feature, the editor must understand the future audience’s total ignorance of the whole business. The audience should not be required to have read beforehand about “what the director is trying to do.” The film editor bears the burden of relating to the ignorant masses.
Regrettably, no one bothers to shoulder this burden anymore. My theory: The problem arises from the fissiparation of movie watching as a coherent activity. Editors do not detain themselves with the art of producing a single movie that makes sense. After all, the market devours DVDs containing deleted scenes, “director’s cuts,” and “extended editions.” Sitting and watching the movie through once, just as it is—like we used to do in theaters—this act no longer provides the editing norm.
…By the by: Long-time readers may also recall our euphoria when Ernest Shackleton’s long-lost cases of whiskey were found encased in ice. The Scottish-distillery descendant of the original maker has now come out with a reproduction of the Antarctic bottles.
Father Mark White Blog 