I thought I'd lead this off with a quote from Sergei Eisenstein, the masterly Soviet innovator (The Battleship Potemkin, Oktober) of film-editing techniques. Surely he would have had something pithy to say about the subject, like, "Jump cuts been berry, berry good to me."
Alas, what I can find of his writings consists of sludgy Marxist claptrap such as this:
For art is always conflict:
(1) according to its social mission,
(2) according to its nature,
(3) according to its methodologyAccording to its social mission because: It is art's task to make manifest the contradictions of Being. To form equitable views by stirring up contradictions within the spectator's mind, and to forge accurate intellectual concepts from the dynamic clash of opposing passions.
I don't know what that's all about, but it sounds painful. Here are some clearer examples. We've all seen trailers for movies that, um, turn out to be rather less than advertised. Hey, if you had $100M invested in a turkey, you'd want the exciting bits all spliced together in a two-minute reel, too.
But it's one thing to make a film look more dramatic/humorous/glamorous than it is. It's another to make it look entirely like something it's not.
A few weeks back, [Robert Ryang] said, he entered a contest for editors’ assistants sponsored by the New York chapter of the Association of Independent Creative Editors. The challenge? Take any movie and cut a new trailer for it — but in an entirely different genre. Only the sound and dialogue could be modified, not the visuals, he said.
Obviously this has limitations -- you aren't going to turn Saving Private Ryan into The Bridges of Madison County however you manipulate it, but a couple of the entries used clever tricks to make Titanic and West Side Story into horror films.
Mr. Riang's winning entry turned The Shining into a sappy feel-good relationship flick. You will laugh out loud at the music clip he uses about halfway through.
Also, via Hanan at grow-a-brain (who isn't sure if this was part of the above contest), Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho recut as a romantic comedy.
Update: My bad. Link to The Shining now fixed.