The Raw and The Cooked

In two days I will be finished with my first cut of "Way of the Puck." It will land down at about 100 minutes, which is a good length to start with. I easily have enough interesting footage to put together a 3-hour version of this movie, but why? That sounds like a lot of work. I'm hoping the final running time will be somewhere in between 88 and 93 minutes, so I'm not keen on the idea of editing down a ton of additional scenes that will just be excised anyway. For now most of the individual scenes seem to be working, but collectively the ride is bumpy and inelegant, with long periods of inactivity. The pacing is incompetent if not downright janky.

At this point there seem to be two movies--The Raw and The Cooked. Actually, a better binary pair might be The Meat and The Pudding. The Pudding is the slick, interesting, easily digestable montage-based material that is organized around a theme (music, death, forms, combat, technology, etc). The Meat is all of the slow-to-develop character driven stuff that focuses on one of the three main players. The first hour of the film is almost all Pudding. The next twenty-five minutes are all Meat. The last fifteen are something in between...actually the last fifteen minutes contain a great deal of real-time air hockey tournament play, which is kind of like Brussels Sprouts to anyone who does not play the sport.

The trick will be to serve a meal where all the food groups complement each other and where an intoxicating wash of humor blurs the senses, stunts critical faculties, and smoothes over awkward silences.