“It’s not what a movie is about,” Roger Ebert famous­ly wrote, “it’s how it is about it.” Sub­ject mat­ter, we might say, sep­a­rates the weak film­mak­ers from the strong: those who require a strik­ing “high con­cept” (killer doll, body switch, Snakes on a Plane) fall into the for­mer group, while those who can make a film about absolute­ly any­thing fall into the lat­ter. It’s safe to say that not every­one is moved by the scene in Amer­i­can Beau­ty where the cam­corder-tot­ing teenag­er wax­es poet­ic about his footage of a plas­tic bag in the wind. But what would sim­i­lar mate­r­i­al look like in the hands of a more assured direc­tor?

For an exam­ple, have a look at Plas­tic Bag, the eigh­teen-minute short above. Every cinephile with an inter­est in Amer­i­can film knows the name of Plas­tic Bag’s direc­tor, Ramin Bahrani. Over the past decade and a half he has emerged as the mak­er of unusu­al­ly pow­er­ful and real­is­tic glimpses of life in his home­land, focus­ing on char­ac­ters like a Pak­istani immi­grant run­ning a New York bagel cart, an orphan work­ing at a chop shop, and a Sene­galese cab dri­ver in North Car­oli­na.

In its own way, the pro­tag­o­nist and title char­ac­ter of Plas­tic Bag is also at once an out­sider to Amer­i­can life and a fig­ure insep­a­ra­ble from it — and voiced by an insid­er-out­sider of anoth­er kind, the Ger­man film­mak­er Wern­er Her­zog. (Their col­lab­o­ra­tion has con­tin­ued: you may remem­ber Her­zog’s appear­ance in a Bahrani-direct­ed episode of Mor­gan Spur­lock­’s series We the Econ­o­my about a lemon­ade stand.)

Begin­ning his jour­ney at a gro­cery-store check­out counter, he spends his first few hap­py days at the home of his pur­chas­er. But not long after this idyll of ser­vice — car­ry­ing ten­nis balls, being filled with ice to numb a sprain — comes to its inevitable end, he finds him­self deposit­ed into a land­fill. But the wind comes to his res­cue, car­ry­ing him across a series of sub­ur­ban, post-indus­tri­al, and final­ly rur­al land­scapes as he looks des­per­ate­ly for his own­er.

Ulti­mate­ly the bag makes it into places sel­dom seen by human eyes, with a com­bi­na­tion of grav­i­tas and won­der imbued by both Her­zog’s dic­tion and the music of Sig­ur Rós’ Kjar­tan Sveins­son. Watched today, Plas­tic Bag feels more ele­giac than it did when it debuted a decade ago, since which time plas­tic-bag bans have con­tin­ued to spread unabat­ed across the world. How long before not just the hero of Bahrani’s film, but all his poly­eth­yl­ene kind fade from exis­tence — for­got­ten, if not quite decom­posed?

Plas­tic Bag has been added to our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Wern­er Her­zog, Mor­gan Spur­lock & Oth­er Stars Explain Eco­nom­ic The­o­ry in 20 Short Films

Wern­er Her­zog Nar­rates Poké­mon Go: Imag­ines It as a Mur­der­ous Metaphor for the Bat­tle to Sur­vive

Wern­er Her­zog Reads From Cor­mac McCarthy’s All the Pret­ty Hors­es

Wern­er Her­zog Cre­ates Required Read­ing & Movie View­ing Lists for Enrolling in His Film School

Watch Wern­er Herzog’s Very First Film, Her­ak­les, Made When He Was Only 19-Years-Old (1962)

Start Your Day with Wern­er Her­zog Inspi­ra­tional Posters

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Will zom­bies ever die? To zom­bie enthu­si­asts, of course, that ques­tion makes no sense: zom­bies are already dead, drained of life and rean­i­mat­ed by some mag­i­cal, bio­log­i­cal, or even tech­no­log­i­cal force. Most of us have nev­er known a world with­out zom­bies, in the sense of zom­bies as a pres­ence in film, tele­vi­sion, lit­er­a­ture, and video games. In the video essay “Where Zom­bies Come From,” video essay­ist Evan Puschak, bet­ter known as the Nerd­writer, goes back to the dawn of these dead fig­ures to pin­point the ori­gin of this robust “mod­ern myth.”

The first men­tion of zom­bies appears in 1929’s The Mag­ic Island, a book on Haiti by “jour­nal­ist, occultist, and gen­er­al­ly eccen­tric minor celebri­ty” William Seabrook. “The zom­bie, they say, is a soul­less human corpse, still dead, but tak­en from the grave and endowed by sor­cery with a mechan­i­cal sem­blance of life — it is a dead body which is made to walk and act and move as if it were alive.”

That 90-year-old descrip­tion may sound more or less like the zom­bies that con­tin­ue to scare and amuse us today, but the mod­ern image of the zom­bie did­n’t emerge ful­ly formed; 1932’s Bela Lugosi-star­ring White Zom­bie, the very first zom­bie film, may not strike us today as ful­ly rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the genre it found­ed.

But “in 1968 every­thing changed.” That year, the young film­mak­er George A. Romero’s Night of the Liv­ing Dead (watch it online) laid down the rules for zom­bies: they “devour liv­ing human beings. They hob­ble for­ward awk­ward­ly but relent­less­ly. They’re dumb, able to use objects as blunt-force instru­ments but noth­ing else. They can only be killed by being shot in the head or burned, and if one bites or scratch­es you, you’ll die not long after, then trans­form into one and pur­sue whomev­er is near­by, fam­i­ly or not.” To Puschak’s mind, the film holds up not just as a zom­bie movie, but as a movie: “In its neo­re­al­ist, black-and-white style, it is a smart, tight­ly craft­ed sto­ry made on a shoe­string bud­get with a third act that is absolute­ly bru­tal and pun­ish­ing even now, 50 years lat­er.”

Night of the Liv­ing Dead did­n’t call its zom­bies zom­bies, but its sequel, 1978’s Dawn of the Dead, put the label of zom­bie on not just them but us: “The film, which takes place almost entire­ly in a mall, uses zom­bies to cri­tique con­sumerism: as the zom­bies lum­ber through this famil­iar place, we see our own behav­ior as a grotesque reflec­tion. A zom­bie’s thought­less­ness, Romero under­stood, is the per­fect mir­ror for our own.” Dawn of the Dead bol­stered the poten­tial of zom­bies not just as as “cre­ative, pri­mal mon­sters,” but as satir­i­cal devices, and the finest zom­bie movies know how to use them as both at once. (So far I’ve seen that bal­ance no more impres­sive­ly struck than in a Kore­an zom­bie movie, Yeon Sang-ho’s Train to Busan.)

Over the past half-cen­tu­ry, post-Night of the Liv­ing Dead zom­bie sto­ries have made all man­ner of tweaks on and vari­a­tions to the stan­dard zom­bie for­mu­la. Dan­ny Boyle’s 28 Days Lat­er, for exam­ple, pop­u­lar­ized the fast-mov­ing zom­bie, and Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead pio­neered the full-on zom­bie com­e­dy. Most recent­ly, no less astute an observ­er of Amer­i­can cul­ture and re-ani­ma­tor of seem­ing­ly dead cin­e­mat­ic tropes than Jim Jar­musch has offered us his own entry into the zom­bie canon, The Dead Don’t Die. Jar­muschi­an zom­bies sham­ble com­pul­sive­ly toward that which they desired in life: cof­fee, wi-fi, chardon­nay, Xanax. As long as we can still see these our­selves in these both fun­ny and ter­ri­fy­ing crea­tures, the zom­bie apoc­a­lypse will always seem dead ahead.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Night of the Liv­ing Dead, the Sem­i­nal Zom­bie Movie, Free Online

How to Sur­vive the Com­ing Zom­bie Apoc­a­lypse: An Online Course by Michi­gan State

Decay: Zom­bies Invade the Large Hadron Col­lid­er in Movie Made by Ph.D. Stu­dents

Mar­tin Scors­ese Cre­ates a List of the 11 Scari­est Hor­ror Films

What Makes a Good Hor­ror Movie? The Answer Revealed with a Jour­ney Through Clas­sic Hor­ror Films Clips

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

It’s one of cin­e­ma’s great­est ironies that edit­ing can make or break a film, but few movie­go­ers under­stand what an edi­tor actu­al­ly does. Edit­ing involves tak­ing shots and assem­bling them in the right order, yes, but what makes an order — all the tran­si­tions from moment to moment and scene to scene — “right”? Even if we can’t explain good edit­ing, we know bad edit­ing when we see it, and even more so when when we feel it. The hard-to-pin-down sen­sa­tion of a movie being “off” or “wrong” often comes out of incom­pe­tent edit­ing, and by break­ing down the bad edit­ing in a vari­ety of recent pic­tures, these three videos throw into con­trast what it takes for edit­ing to be good.

Most of the nine “Movies that Were Ruined by Real­ly Bad Edit­ing” in the Loop­er video at the top of the post are part of high-pro­file fran­chis­es. Giv­en the size of their bud­gets and the impor­tance of their box-office per­for­mance, you might think such films would­n’t per­mit tech­ni­cal slop­pi­ness of any kind. Yet in Alien: Covenant every­thing hap­pens in an order that kills the dra­mat­ic ten­sion; the chaot­ic Tak­en 3, “a severe case of death by a thou­sand cin­e­mat­ic cuts,” plays out “at the speed any oth­er movie would run if you acci­den­tal­ly hit the fast-for­ward but­ton sev­er­al times”; Trans­form­ers: Age of Extinc­tion goes heavy on the wrong scenes and “treats its robot aliens as a sub­plot”; and Sui­cide Squad pro­vides an exam­ple of “a stu­dio pub­licly adver­tis­ing a movie as one thing, pan­ick­ing, then com­plete­ly reshap­ing the same film all inside of one fran­tic mar­ket­ing blitz.”

“Edit­ing is going down the crap­per these days,” says Fold­ing Ideas host Dan Olson in his in-depth exam­i­na­tion of Sui­cide Squad’s incom­pe­tent cut­ting. “The edit­ing was shock­ing­ly awful in every way,” he says, turn­ing it into a kind of neg­a­tive show­case of the edi­tor’s art: “I would seri­ous­ly advise any­one with an inter­est in the art of cin­e­mat­ic edit­ing to do their own full autop­sy to see just how much went wrong and plain old does­n’t work.” Olson points to exam­ples of Sui­cide Squad’s often inex­plic­a­ble choic­es, such as fill­ing the first half of the film with hyper­ki­net­ic char­ac­ter intro­duc­tions that play more like trail­ers, devel­op­ing char­ac­ters only to sud­den­ly drop them, los­ing track of the phys­i­cal loca­tions of char­ac­ters, and repeat­ed­ly abus­ing the Kuleshov Effect in a way that feels like the “cin­e­mat­ic equiv­a­lent of putting the emphasis on the wrong syllable.”

But then, it would have been more of a sur­prise for a crit­i­cal dis­as­ter like Sui­cide Squad to have been well-edit­ed. What about the Fred­die Mer­cury biopic Bohemi­an Rhap­sody, which won an Acad­e­my Award specif­i­cal­ly for its edit­ing? Its recep­tion of that par­tic­u­lar Oscar is inter­est­ing, says video essay­ist Thomas Flight, “because the movie con­tains sev­er­al scenes that are mas­ter class­es in poor edit­ing.” In one offend­ing sequence, “many of the cuts are unmo­ti­vat­ed,” which mean that the edi­tor made them for no appar­ent rea­son, at least none serv­ing sto­ry or the dra­ma. Oth­ers “ignore spa­tial con­ti­nu­ity,” which makes it dif­fi­cult or impos­si­ble for the audi­ence to under­stand who and what is sup­posed to be where. And “the pace is sim­ply too fast,” mean­ing that the lengths of the shots are too short for the action: edit­ing that suits a rock con­cert does­n’t suit a con­ver­sa­tion.

Even view­ers who oth­er­wise enjoyed Bohemi­an Rhap­sody will have sensed some­thing the mat­ter with the cuts in the scene Flight high­lights. But nobody could have a worse reac­tion to it than John Ottman, the man who edit­ed the film, and whose work has been cred­it­ed with mak­ing (rather than fur­ther break­ing) the trou­bled pro­duc­tion. As men­tioned in March here on Open Cul­ture, that par­tic­u­lar scene was cut not by Ottman but direc­tor Dex­ter Fletch­er, who came in to take Bohemi­an Rhap­sody’s reins after the depar­ture of Bryan Singer. “When­ev­er I see it, I want to put a bag over my head,” Ottman told the Wash­ing­ton Post. Most movie­go­ers don’t see edit­ing when it’s good, only when it’s bad — but when it’s espe­cial­ly bad, it makes edi­tors them­selves long for invis­i­bil­i­ty.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Dark Knight: Anato­my of a Flawed Action Scene

Alfred Hitchcock’s 7‑Minute Mas­ter Class on Film Edit­ing

Hitch­cock on the Filmmaker’s Essen­tial Tool: The Kuleshov Effect

A Visu­al Intro­duc­tion to Sovi­et Mon­tage The­o­ry: A Rev­o­lu­tion in Film­mak­ing

Bohemi­an Rhap­sody’s Bad Edit­ing: A Break­down

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.