On the Proper and Improper Use of Jump Cuts

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The Fog of War, one of the only movies that uses jump cuts well.

Jump cuts have always been fascinating to me.  The entire idea of editing is fascinating, obviously.  It’s this whole thing of, ‘How can we make this look fluid?’  ‘How will these compositions work together?’  There is even editing happening in a long sequence without cuts, because the composition is changing.  Just think of the opening of Touch of Evil or Boogie Nights—there’s no actual editing, but the camera’s movement is editing as it goes along—it’s moving from one idea to another, and the varying compositions must fit together in a logical way.  Think about that great shot in Raging Bull where we follow Jake out to the ring.  There are no cuts, but the transition from intimate medium shot to huge, wide, crane shot is an editing choice within the same shot.

If you can intuit these principles naturally, you really have a leg up as a filmmaker.  Kubrick, Tarantino, Scorsese, Aronofsky, Lee, Zemeckis, Spielberg, the Coens—whether you like their movies or not, these guys all have a handle on how to construct a scene.  They have a handle on the principles.
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An Interview with Madeline Blue of ‘Wet Hot American Summer’ and ‘Justified’

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I met Madeline Blue in quite the serendipitous way. My friend / next door neighbor Jeanine asked me how my mom was doing, because she’s been quite ill this winter. I told her she was a bit better, but still very much on the mend, and that I’d been spending a lot of time with her watching TV—in particular, we’d been marathoning the brilliant FX series Justified. “My friend was on Justified!” My jaw dropped. “Yeah, and she’s been staying with me the past couple days!” My jaw dislodged entirely and fell to the floor and spent way longer than the five-second rule there.

Turns out her friend Madeline had played a prostitute by the name of Minerva in the third season. A quick IMDb-ing refreshed me as to which prostitute this was, and also enlightened me to the fact that this very same actress had also played the highly-memorable role of ‘Cure Girl’ in one of the greatest comedies of all time, Wet Hot American Summer—a favorite not only of mine, but of my mom’s as well.

I knew that a surprise visit from her would be the perfect thing to help perk my mom up. Jeanine agreed, and put me and Madeline together, who immediately got the synchronicity of it and was more than happy to do it. And it couldn’t have gone better.
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‘Tomboy’: Quietly Reinventing The Spy Genre

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Tomboy (2011)
Written and Directed by Céline Sciamma
82 min.

Spoiler-free.

Say what you want about Netflix Instant man, but there’s gold to be found on there if you really look. Sure, their catalogue is padded to the rafters with 1-star stuff, and you’re lucky if you’re able to find more than one movie a week that is truly up your alley. But, if you take random chances here and there, clicking around and trying a few minutes of a lot of different things in a row, sometimes you’ll find something that you never in a million years would have assumed you’d dig, but is so the goddamn movie for you it’s ridiculous. Such was the case with this one, for me.
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An Interview with Lawrence Gordon Clark, Master of Ghostly Horror

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Lawrence Gordon Clark, with one of his monsters from The Ash Tree.

Y’all ever see that movie The Signalman? About the British railwayman who sees a ghost? It’s part of a series the BBC did from 1971-1978, called A Ghost Story for Christmas. All but a handful of these films were adaptations of M. R. James stories, and all but one were directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark, who’s directed dozens of programs and telefilms for British television from the 1970s to his retirement in the early 2000s.

Mr. Clark wrote a book called The Christmas Ghost Stories of Lawrence Gordon Clark, a collection of the original M. R. James and Charles Dickens source material alongside recollections of the productions. He also has a short story collection, Telling Stories, due out soon.

Mr. Clark was kind enough to speak to me about M. R. James, Alfred Hitchcock, and his long and fascinating career:
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An (Imaginary) Interview with Spike Lee

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I’ve also done an (imaginary) interview with Steven Spielberg.  That one is cool too.

White people hate Spike Lee and I have no idea why.  When I was in film school, they brought in this huckster guy to talk to us about producing, and he mentioned Spike Lee, and then, as an aside, he made sure to tell us that he doesn’t think Mr. Lee is talented.  Things like that happen all the time and I don’t get why.

When I was seventeen, Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing was my favorite movie, if you can believe it.  At that time I was exploring American independent and foreign ‘cinema’. They say the best way to be an atheist is to read the bible. Well, the best way to love real movies like Back to the Future is to watch French movies and American indies. However, in small ways, Do the Right Thing holds up for me. It’s definitely Spike’s most complete movie—it has arcs and a brilliant ensemble.  The compositions and camera movements are mind-blowing, and it does a great job of making you feel like you’re on the block. It’s alive and adventurous—it’s filled with music and color and jokes and fun—not to mention, some very touching human moments. In fact, the only thing it really lacks is clarity. It’s so much of a hang-out movie that you end up having to accuse it of loitering. But, I’ll always have an affection for it, and I’ll never call it a bad movie.
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