This movie has so much going for it. The preview was brilliant. Willam Dafoe is in it. Jeff Goldblum is in it. Bill Murray, Angelica Huston, Cate Blanchett, Owen Wilson all also star. It had an great premise, and an amazing set to go with it. The music was suble but if you paid attention it was brilliant, all Portuguese renditions of David Bowie songs. If you dissect the plot, a LOT happens, there are build-ups, climaxes, fight scenes, humour, sex, everything. What happened?
If afterwards I start to like a movie better than I did while watching it, I tend to fault the editing. I’m not sure why. Maybe because its the only thing left to blame. If the plot was good, the acting was good, the directing in reference to the acting and to the cinematography seem fine, if all key elements were present, nothing felt missing, and the mise en scene was great, and if remembering scenes after the movie ended made them seem better, what is to blame? I think editing. A lot happens in this movie, and its not that long, and remembering it rather than watching it makes it not drag. And I think the dragging is the fault of the editor. Something about the scene transitions in this film give too much pause between every moment, and the movie stutters through the plot. Like when someone is telling a great story, and continually getting interrupted, you might remember the story better later on, but during it, you’re annoyed, you’re impatient, you’re wondering why this great story seems to stop and start and stutter. And the clincher, is that the preview is one of the best I’ve seen. I bet the preview was edited by someone else. Someone who understands better how to transition from moment to moment in a way to entice, excite, and build rather than to delay, pause, and decay the audience’s reaction.
This of course is just a guess. but I will watch it again and analyze further. The pacing is interesting in his other films as well, but for some reason not as problematic. Its a style that seems to work better with certain characters and plot structures. Here it didn’t go with his overall design. I think the stuttering works in Rushmore, it reflects on his main characters, stumbling nerds who also have pacing issues. But I have to say, I liked Rushmore better in retrospect as well.
Is this one of those movies you would hypothetically re-edit (taking what is publicly available) and be able to make it work?
Given that the trailer is an edited version that SO WORKS!!! My god, the trailer makes you want to stand up and cheer, for pete’s sake. I would hope I could do it. Of course having various shots of scenes would make a difference though - sometimes a transition between scenes can be better just by keeping camera shots the same, or radically different, to create a sense of time lapse when there isn’t one, or vice versa.
One movie (that I should write about soon) that really does editing better than I think almost any other film, is Leaving Las Vegas. It does some extremely subtle tricks that really manipulate the audience into thinking time is flowing differently than it is. If that can be done, this movie could drag less with some editing changes.