Every film editor will tell you that if they did their job right, you won't notice. This is generally true except for one thing, the virtuoso edit, the edit you're SUPPOSED to notice, the edit that actually says something by simply cutting from one shot to another. Here are five of my favorites. I welcome your thoughts on further additions to The Best Edits in Film History.
#1
2001: A Space Odyssey
This edit leaps centuries millenia and is justly famous as the best single edit ever.
#2
Apocalypse Now
This cut from attacking helicopters to a peaceful village says it all about the war in Vietnam.
#3
Women in Love
This cut from dead bodies at the bottom of a lake to a couple making love is profoundly sad.
#4
Memento
In one quick shot, we find out the hero is actually a man in a mental institution who is imagining the whole movie as an escape from the fact he accidentally killed his own wife. Pretty crazy.
#5
The Deer Hunter
After boring us to tears for more than an hour, there's finally a cut to something actually happening. Unfortunately, it's the living hell of Vietnam.
Growing up, as I more or less did, watching nothing but cartoons, I came to realize one glaring irritation: nearly every cartoon 'hero' had at least one sidekick. Seriously, look at someone like Fred Flintstone: no matter how you slice him or try to shoehorn him into his own separate story, Barney Rubble was the jelly to Fred's peanut butter. How about, say, DuckTales: Huey, Dewey, and Louie were Scrooge McDuck's sidekicks regardless of the fact that they carried most of the episodes. Now, those two examples aside, many other major characters had decent tag-a-longs as well, but then there were those few whose buddies were about as irritating as a swimsuit full of burning sand. Here are ten such samples.
10. Wheelie - Transformers the Animated Movie and beyond.
Wheelie was absolutely the most grating Transformer from the very moment he was introduced to Kup and Grimlock in the animated movie. He spoke in a high-pitched, rhyming, robotic tone that the moronic Dinobot absolutely loved. Oh sure, he had his useful moments and didn't talk nearly as much as the second most obtrusive Autobot, Blurr (voiced by Micro Machine great, John Mushida), and post film, Wheelie went on to befriend the human cast and genuinely rub everyone the wrong way for years.
9. Dorno, the Child from the Herculoids
It never failed. Each and every episode not only featured an entirely different type of alien on the Herculoids jungle world, but also the bumbling doofus, Dorno, somehow managing to get himself into hot water from said aliens. What really amazed me was that even with friends like Zok, Igoo, Tundro, Gloop, and Gleep, each sporting a talent that could easily keep the young lad protected, he still managed to get his dumb ass in dire straights.
8. Ogee: The Supposedly Innocent Little Girl on Magilla Gorilla
Speaking of high-pitched, sugary sweet sidekicks, Ogee was perhaps the most unassuming little pest around. Much akin to the little baby mouse on Tom and Jerry who wandered around in a diaper, unawares as a catastrophe went on behind him, so went Ogee. Once she managed to release Magilla from Mr. Peeble's store, the gorilla spent the remainder of the episode keeping the little shit out of trouble.
7. Jan, Jace, and Blip: The Reasons Space Ghost Even Had a Job
Forget Brak, never mind Zorak, no the real trouble makers that stuck in Space Ghost's craw were Jan and Jace and their ridiculous space monkey, Blip -possibly related to Gleek (see entry in this list), no one really knows- always egging on the enemy. Most of these bad guys were just motoring around outer space just sort of thinking about their past ass whippings from Space Ghost, when suddenly the kids and the primate would interfere with their bad guy plans and WHAM! They'd be captured. And off Space Ghost would go, begrudgingly, after his useless sidekicks.
6. Jimmy Olsen: Pal and Side-Thorn to Superman
Back in the glory days of DC Comics, Superman was always either teaching a lesson to, or receiving some kind of warped power-draining butt-whoopin' from, his 'pal', Jimmy Olsen. Yes, a sort of sidekick, though not in the traditional sense as Supes could pretty much do anything and everything with his seemingly limitless powers, Jimmy hung around with The Man of Steel through many, many adventures getting each of them into all sorts of stupid troubles.
When I stopped doing Polaroids, a little program called Kai's Power Goo was a reasonable replacement for the creation of photographic caricatures, offering the added possibility of making multiple mutilations of the same picture. Now I can make many versions of someone's face before deciding on the final version. Google's Picasa has offered me the opportunity to upload my whole damn Power Goo folder into a display I can only describe as a glorious gallery of mutants. Here are the first three rows...
