That's called "the apotheosis of the critic" in the circles I used to run, and they considered that a good thing. ("You mere writers and directors, you should be so lucky as for us to do tendentious psychoanalytic interpretations of your work.")

I didn't want to talk about the collaborative nature of film quite so much so soon, but whatever, we keep needing to: this is one of the areas in which literary criticism doesn't map well onto film criticism. Do you know how much it costs to type a word, think it's the right one, decide it isn't, delete it, then…

We'll get to editing later, but yes, the role of the editor in the creative process can't be overstated. (Scorsese once said that half of the techniques that are recognizably "his" actually belong to Thelma Schoonmaker.)

I should note that if Jonathan's comment sounded a little harsh, that's just because we've known each other for almost a decade and speak in a kind of code that other people sometimes mistake for rude. It's not. (I just didn't want anyone to think he was being rude to me or I to him. We just speak to each other…

[Read my comment below this one first, as I did this backwards.]

"That is an inarguable point, although one that I'd resist prioritizing
the director within if only to acknowledge the labor of below-the-line laborers at other stages of the creative process"

Since a few people sent emails asking, I thought I'd slip this in way down here as an "official" response: Yes, I am "Professor Office Sex," as the Great Google likes to say.

Different sets of eyes are never a bad thing. I'm sure there are elements of scene-staging and blocking that seem obvious to you that I wouldn't notice. In fact, there's quite a bit of Breaking Bad that a theater critic might have a better eye for, e.g.:

"if I converted Barry Lyndon into 3D I would do it exactly like this"

I can do to you what I mentioned I did to my students earlier. Go here:

For the moment, I think we're going to try and aim for every third Wednesday or Thursday. Preferably Wednesday, since I usually work on Thursdays, but we'll see. (In case you're curious, I'm the same "Scott Kaufman" who writes for the Raw Story, which is my day job now.)

He's currently finishing up his dissertation, I do believe, and then I'm sure he'll write more. (And our podcast will start up again as soon as I figure out which of the many boxes in this place has my Season One Game of Thrones DVDs in it. It's one of the ones marked "DVDs," but unfortunately that's not all that…

Couldn't have said it better myself.

"Are you going to do any Whedon shows?"

[Resist the urge to reply… Resist the urge to reply… Resist the urge to reply…]

I was teaching college freshmen at the University of California, Irvine, and they're ALL too young to have seen it. If you ever want to feel old, you can do what teachers do and read the Mindset List. Here's this year's:

"So if there was a movie about people in an office where someone was
framed in the same way, eliding their feet, would that prove the
character wasn't part of the office, was a stranger, an interloper, or
was antagonistic to the corporate world, or what?"

"what if the director just picked the only shot that worked in the editing room and said, 'Fuck it'?"

"What if the director just did what he could and had to choose the best
shot he got on the day? Wouldn't that shoot the whole 'the woods are a
prison' thing to hell?"

Jonathan, there are two reasons I called it a lie. The first is just that it's physically true: I'm not working with actual frames the way I would be if, for example, I took the actual frame from The Holy Grail that I own and analyzed it.