The director wants to show us a car skidding to a halt. So he films a car skidding to a halt, from a single camera angle; then he shows us the whole shot but with several consecutive frames simply missing. He does this continually, throughout the entire film, so that a character can't walk across the room for the most trivial of reasons without jerking from place to place like an electron.
In an interview, Bill Bennett justified this practise by saying that we don't really need to see the missing footage in order to tell what's going on. An appalling argument. We don't need to see ANY of the footage in order to tell what's going on. We could probably reconstruct it from the dialogue track alone - even then, we'd probably have a fair idea of what's going on if every tenth word were removed. Why doesn't Bennett just mail us the script? This is yet more proof that artists shouldn't theorise about art. Bill Bennett clearly thinks he has the right to impose his failed experiments and half-baked theories on my aching eyes - and I resent it.
It's more of a pity because the basic script is fine. (What there is of it. Some dialogue has been improvised - a touch that sometimes works well, sometimes doesn't.) There's a decent suspense story here and there's a nice touch using remote regions of Australia which I'd rather leave a surprise. The story is strong enough to transcend the childish editing and push "Kiss or Kill" into the "watchable" category. How good it would have been if edited in a sane manner is hard to tell. I simply can't evaluate such abstruse hypothetical questions. Nor should I have to.
In an interview, Bill Bennett justified this practise by saying that we don't really need to see the missing footage in order to tell what's going on. An appalling argument. We don't need to see ANY of the footage in order to tell what's going on. We could probably reconstruct it from the dialogue track alone - even then, we'd probably have a fair idea of what's going on if every tenth word were removed. Why doesn't Bennett just mail us the script? This is yet more proof that artists shouldn't theorise about art. Bill Bennett clearly thinks he has the right to impose his failed experiments and half-baked theories on my aching eyes - and I resent it.
It's more of a pity because the basic script is fine. (What there is of it. Some dialogue has been improvised - a touch that sometimes works well, sometimes doesn't.) There's a decent suspense story here and there's a nice touch using remote regions of Australia which I'd rather leave a surprise. The story is strong enough to transcend the childish editing and push "Kiss or Kill" into the "watchable" category. How good it would have been if edited in a sane manner is hard to tell. I simply can't evaluate such abstruse hypothetical questions. Nor should I have to.