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The Comment Spam I Couldn’t Let Go

by Tony Nigro

Spam filters are too good now.  I don’t receive as many cryptic emails and blog comments that seem to fall somewhere between beat poetry and Jabberwocky.  You know the kind, lacking in punctuation and anything resembling proper grammar — even for the Internet — a work of spontaneous, inadvertent art that somehow is supposed to trick you into buying Viagra or sending a Nigerian dude some money.

As an act of preservation, I’d like to offer a piece of comment spam that got trapped in our filter and was so cute I couldn’t let it go.

New on DVD: Trumbo

by Lewis Manalo

I am Dalton Trumbo!

I’m not really that into glorifying blacklisted Hollywood anymore than I’m into manipulating Pat Tillman‘s death or Jessica Lynch‘s capture into propaganda, but in addition to being a great writer, Trumbo was a great character.

We Love the Movies

by Tony Nigro

I love movies.  I hate “we love the movies.”

Let me explain:

It’s not a paradox like “I always tell the truth.  That last statement was a lie.”  But how else do you describe the elation of watching a great movie without calling up the industry’s prepackaged, commercialized nostalgia of movie watching?  You know the type: 1950s, Fade up on a point-of-view of a movie screen; track across rows of wide-eyed faces lit up by flickering projector; as the hero on-screen saves the girl (or something), romantic music swells and we close-up on timid hands, destined for romance, meeting on the sweaty top of a cola bottle.  Coke is it. We Love The Movies^TM.

The celebration of watching movies seems to be taking away from the actual watching, feeling, and understanding that are the basis for discussing a film and cinema overall.  It’s become a sales pitch for going to see movies rather than a focus on the films themselves, what draws us in and why.  As we buy into that sales pitch, movies seem to be treated as more and more disposable. To critique a film is to find more meaning in it, make it more valuable. To think about it is to make it less disposable.

And it doesn’t end with the cinema. I’m just starting up the discussion there.

Coming soon: Split Edit

Split Edit is a site dedicated to film criticism and writing about cinema.  We are currently under construction and hope to have some interesting reading posted for you soon.

A split edit, also known as an asymmetrical cut or an L-cut, is a film editing technique used to make a cut more effective.  It occurs when a picture edit does not line up with a sound edit.  That is, the picture and sound to not coincide for a short time, such as in a conversation scene when a person’s voice is heard before cutting to them.  A split edit is sometimes also called a “prelap.”