Some critics seem to think that messing with a film’s chronology is a bad idea. Case in point is Ebert’s review of 21 Grams. The question beckons: What is needless tinkering and what is necessary reorganising? After all, even the Hollywood editing aesthetic and the way it represents time isn’t natural as such, just one way of reading that the viewers have come to understand.

The other big question is can you put your money where your mouth is? I’m not suggesting that proper film critics would do it, because they won’t*. However, now that video editing software is ubiquitous and DVDs are everywhere, even the most technologically inept person could easily recut almost any movie. The most famous example of this is the Phantom edit, one dissatisfied fan’s vision of what Star Wars Episode 1 should’ve been like.

My core argument is that one could easily tell if this temporal mangling was necessary by rearranging movies into proper chronological order and comparing the results with the originals. You’ve got Windows Movie Maker, iMovie or Cinelerra installed and you’ve got 21 Grams, Irréversible, Pulp Fiction and Memento on DVD, haven’t you? So why don’t you go do it already?

*: Well, I’d really like to see Mikael Fränti improve upon a sloppily edited movie. And after that could we get peace on Earth? (ramblings courtesy of Jussi)