TIMECODE | Blog

A few nights ago, I watched (and enjoyed) the 70s cult classic Carrie online. When the movie was finished, Netflix recommended similar offerings I might possibly enjoy, and I sadly discovered that Carrie was remade for TV in 2002. Out of sheer curiosity, and with extremely low expectations, I watched the trailer. Not surprisingly, the TV version looked even worse than I imagined. It was a joke, a perversion of the original; a stale, vapid remake like so many other stale, vapid remakes…

Since the films that have inspired me the most are overwhelmingly dramas, usually darker ones, editing comedy is something I never imagined I’d be doing. But perhaps my forays into comedy not have been without reason. As it turns out, I really enjoy editing comedy and discovered I have a natural instinct for it. Maybe this isn’t so surprising since comedy and drama are really flip sides of the same coin. After all, it’s no accident that the theater masks of ancient Greece represent both comedy and tragedy—comedic moments are frequently precipitated by tragedy (however minor) and tragedies are often incited by absurd, even laughable acts. That said, good comedy is as hard to pull off as drama; in fact, it’s sometimes easier to make people cry than laugh…

A high-pitch fever dream that explodes in your brain like an IED, Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker leaves your head spinning, ears buzzing and veins pumping with adrenaline. “War is a drug,” the film cautions from the outset, but in the hands of Bigelow so is cinema. Though watching a film is hardly a substitute for reality, this one is so realistically shot, so well acted, so tightly edited and precisely sound designed that you come close to feeling the visceral horror, fear, uncertainty, exhaustion, and strange euphoria of war, of living at a level of pure survival where the smallest decision can make the difference between life and death…