Watching It's A Wonderful Life (Part of the fascist xmastime regime) - and I ran up to put on the record how awful the editing is. I discover via IMDB that William Hornbeck did the editing, and his work on the film was nominated for an academy award.
This blows my mind. Seriously - my brain is saying "don't taze me, bro" to this piece of news. The movie has so many unnecessary short shots, and awkward jumps. There's a scene with George and Mary on the bed. They share a kiss, and mid-kiss, it cuts to the same shot, only they are done kissing, and the angle is slightly different. And once you notice this about the movie, you can't even watch it normally anymore, because you are waiting to find that kind of film chopping in almost every scene. And there are weirder shots, that make you wonder how somebody made a conscious decision to present the film in that manner. I'm not knocking the treacly and bizarre story-line and its unabashed anti-establishment messages - that would be to easy. Just from a purely technical aspect of execution, this film is a failure. I get that some of the "special effects" were probably ground breaking at the time, but when you can't present a normal shot of two people speaking in a room, you shouldn't be getting nominations for the fancy stuff.
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