It's not confirming it.  What is publicly known is that Rhaegat 1) Presented Lyanna with Winter Flowers publicly at the tournament at harrenhal.  And 2) he kidnapped her.  I totally think that the Rhaegar Leanna love affair was consensual, but you don't have to to say that Rhaegar left Ellia for another woman.

1) DIstrict 9
2) Raiders
3) Star Trek
4) Twilight
5) Surrogates

LOTR and HP are kind of their own thing but both are excellent

Next up:  Top Five Stand Up comedians of the 1990's.

In all seriousness, I've said so privately, but this is outstanding work.  It's things like this that make me proud to be part of this community.

Oh here we go, my favorite episode of Tokes and Stokes was when in the cold open, Tokes and Stokes pull over a speeding sedan and find that the driver had actually stolen plans for a top secret missile that could wipe out an entire city. 

Later, a young officer named Rick Nichols reports to Lt. John LeGarre for assignment with a martial arts group named "Force Seven". Shortly, the Force Seven group gets an assignment to recover a stolen missile.  We learn that Rick is actually a black belt in Tae Kwon Do AND Karate.  Lt. LeGarre (played by former Oakland Raider Fred Dryer) gives Rick his new uniform and tells him that Force Seven doesn't use guns.  He is introduced to the rest of the team: Officers Cindy Davis and "Sly" Angeletti (and Sly's puppet "YinYang").  Rick bristles at the thought of having to work with a team, but as he explained earlier, he has nowhere else to go. 

Before we know it, the Force Seven team is sneaking into a warehouse looking for clues.  Angelleti asks what's so special about Rick.  LeGarre suspects that he posses "chi," and is capable of great things.  When Rick makes some noise, they're discovered and have to escape. That night, they try again (their Force Seven Uniforms are reversible Ninja outfits, you see) and are discovered again. They fight the employees and win. After the victory, an old friend of LeGarre, named Nakura (JOnathon Rhys-Davies), appears and captures them. After the Force Seven members escape, Nakura sets his plan into action and arms his stolen missile.

Nakura sends a taped message to the mayor and threatens to use the missile unless his demands are met. By examining the stars in the background of the videotape, Force Seven figures out where Nakura is hiding his missile.

The next morning, the Force Seven team sneaks into Nakura's compound using some pretty nifty martial arts skills. With 15 seconds to spare, they get Nakura to tell them the abort code of 666.
After the commercial, Nakura realizes that the warhead's armed to go off in one minute. Rick uses his magic Chi powers to disarm the warhead just before it detonates.

Later, at Central, the Chief meets Tokes and Stokes in the hallway and congratulates them for discovering the confidential papers which led the police to "the crazy" with the missile.

My bad, that was actually my favorite episode of 21 Jump Street and instead of Tokes it was Johnny Depp.

My favorite episode of Tokes and Stokes was when Tokes shot that one guy and chief was all, "Badge and gun, Tokes!" and Tokes slams his gun down but removes the bullets first and is all "You can have the gun...the bullets are MINE!"

Miki asked me to come over yesterday to help her with an editing related thing.  I was unable because pregnant wife+doucmentary production=scant free time, but it did get me thinking about something I wanted to talk about in terms of "proper" editing, and if such a concept can even exist.  Strap in, I've got thoughts on Instinct vs acquired skill.

Instincts are interesting when it comes to filmmaking because in many ways, they're never enough to execute your vision.  If you're a DP, your "instinct," can tell you that a shot needs to be composed a certain way, that the lights should be x, that the framing should be y, that movement should be z.  But without extensive technical knowledge, it is impossible to execute those instincts.  Editing is unique in that in many ways, it requires the least amount of technical know how than many other film trades.  Bear in mind I'm not speaking of media management, file sharing, audio mixing, color correction, or any of the other myriad things an Editor must know in 2014, I'm referring only to the craft of cutting from one shot to a next.  On most Non-Linear Editing machines it's literally just one button.  Because of this, I, and many others argue that natural instinct plays a larger role in editing than some of the other trades.  I say this partially because of a scenario that I see born out in about 1-20 editors careers.  Most of us start as PA's and apprentices, then move to Assistant Editor, where our job is 80% technical.  Project setup, media management, track management, exports, etc.  Eventually you're allowed to cut scenes, and when opportunity arises and you've proven your potential, you're given a shot, and you move up.  But in the aforementioned 1 in 20, you see them perform very well on the technical side, but sink like a rock when creative choices are required.  When I interned at Bunim-Murray in the summer of 2000, Mark Raudonis let me cut scenes.  This was unheard of for Interns to do.  I would assemble something, and though rough and reflective of my experience level at the time, Mark's reaction was, "This is fine.  It's really simple, Eddie.  You get it, and people either get it or they don't." 

I've tried for a long time to reverse engineer my instincts into something quantifiable.  The reason I praise Walter Murch so much and reference him, is that he's one of the few to articulate those instincts and quantify how exactly a cut becomes "good."  There's no single answer for an individual cut from one shot to a next.  I have found that no single cut exists in a vacuum and wether or not a cut is good is entirely dependent to it's relationship with other cuts in the scene and even in other scenes or even other acts. 

The best visual analogy I can think of is Lego's, but a step further.  Imagine having a smaller piece that makes up the popular blocks you know now (the 4 top block, the six top rectangle, the thing with two knobs and then slopes down).  So In addition to trying to build a spaceship out of lego blocks, you ale have to BUILD THE BLOCKS out of a finite amount of Sub-Lego material.  You can build virtually any piece, but at the expense of building other pieces that you'll know you'll eventually need.  So yes, you can L-cut everything, and fill it with all the cutaways imaginable, but how will that fit into the next scene that doesn't necessarily need or warrant that.  If your conversation between your two leads in a bar feels more frenetic and jumpy than the scene where your lead is piloting the Mind-Saucer through the DoomGate, does that make sense?  In fact it very well make perfect sense to that movie (looking at YOU John Dies in the End) and not to another.  Every cut is based on relations and there's little way to quantify it.

When Tatiana Maslany is getting dressed in any given scene in Orphan Black, there is roughly a 1000% increase in the rate of cuts than in any fight scene in The Raid.  Both are correct.  When it comes to Drug use, we have CGI assisted one-ers in Enter the Void and what Arronofsky referred to as "hip hop montages" in Requiem for a Dream.  He also utilizes the most sensual split screen in the same movie that I've ever seen.  Both work in context.  It's often said that Editing is the last rewrite and I guess that's true, but only as a byproduct of the editorial process.  It's like saying reconstructive surgery is the last throes of puberty.  I think editing is more of a laboratory where transmutation and alchemy occur. 

So what does this mean to you, person trying to learn editing?  Are you doomed from jump street if you don't "get it," from day one?  I don't think so.  I think instincts like anything else can be cultivated.  Those 1-20 that I mentioned before, tended to approach storytelling as if there were a magical formula to be cracked.  If you approach editing like you would approach reading a story to children, you'll find more success.  The words themselves in a storybook have an inherit value that is compelling, but any story teller who doesn't perform it won't make that story come alive.

So my process is basically this, and I repeat it every 20-40 minutes worth of cutting.  I cut on instinct, which I've developed over 12 years of doing this for a living.  I cut without conscious though, simply reacting to what I see and I don't second guess it for about 20-40 minutes.  Then I stop and rematch whatever I've done, again, not consciously thinking just watching.  Then I ask myself, "What am I trying to say/accomplish with this scene, and does it fit with what I've just done?"  The answer is almost always, "Yes, but..."

So I adjust, re-edit, slip, open up, etc.  I play, essentially.  Then I re-watch.  Once I'm satisfied (and I reserve the right to be unsatisfied later and abort the whole fucking thing) I move on to the next scene.  About once every hour, I rematch everything I've done until that point.  My timeframe of 20 to 40 minutes is just the metric I use for myself, yours can and should vary.  I physically cut very fast.  That is to say my hands move fast on the keyboard.  That is not a brag, as it's both blessing and curse.   But for my physical speed, that time frame works for me.

Most editors who know what they're doing will have similar practices.  Even in other Post Production crafts like VFX or color correction, you'll see a similar philosophy.  What I'm particularly lying attention to is emotional tone, narrative, energy, pacing, shot integrity, and continuity in that order.  This is similar to Murch's rule of six, but with some of my own preferences mixed in.  Emotional tone (or emotion AND tone, if you will) is always first, and yes, even over story (though not by much, and in some cases story has to overrule).  Notice that continuity is last.  There are sometimes where continuity is so blatantly wrong you have to address it, but I've amassed enough tricks over the years to get around most visual continuity issues to where I make the cut I want and then shoehorn continuity where I need it go after the fact.  Thelma Schoonmaker (my favorite regularly working editor since Sally died) stopped giving a fuck about continuity 30 years ago, and that's good enough for me.  Energy and pacing are in fact separate things.  Energy the right dynamism of the frame for the duration of the shot, pursuant to the story you are telling.  Where the shot begins and ends in relation to the next is pacing, but energy can be cutting to a moving frame and where you come in.  It seems like splitting hairs, but in fact theres a world of difference. 

In conclusion, while there's no instruction manual on how to cut right, by watching movies and tv and just putting in the hours you can hone and cultivate your instinct to make good decisions more often than not.  In that way it's similar than all the other film crafts, but different as well.  A good DP is an artist with a blank canvas.  Same with a writer.  An editor is more like Tesla, taking things that exist and making things previously thought unimaginable.  SO in that way, Editors are the coolest of them all.

Dazed and Confused is in my top 20 of all time.  I'd be more than happy to do that.

I have a lot of love for The Departed.

He's talked a bit about this before.  Something else I think I heard him talk about was that editing the film is also editing the screenplay, but not with ink and paper but the film itself.  It seems so obvious a though, but hearing that it was pretty liberating.  Many editors when they cut something tend to use the screenplay as an instruction manual.  Murch's way of thinking is rewriting while assembling so that you reach the intended shared vision of the filmmakers and not a literal 1:1 of the screenplay as written.

That's why you hear people talk about immaculate conception and virgin birth as separate concepts.

I played electric guitar in a band that opened for Eve 6 in High School (They were called Yakoo back then).  Shockingly, I in fact received no pussy, and was still treated like a dork in high school.

Jarm Logue, the author in that second letter I linked to, endured far worse than Solomon Northrup.  The following is pretty disturbing, and 100% historically accurate.  Jarm was 14 when this particular event occurred.

"Blazing with alcohol and Hell within, he picked up the long wedge, and swore the boy should swallow it. As if to compel him to do so, he ordered Jarm to open his mouth. Jarm instinctively demurred to the absurd proposition, but Manasseth was inflexible. So soon as Jarm hesitated, his enemy struck him a blow on the side of the head, with his fist, which brought him to the ground.

The brute, with increased passion, leaped on him, and held him down--and in that condition charged the boy to open his mouth, on peril of his life--at the same time pressing the wood against his lips and teeth. Jarm, fearing he would break in all his teeth, opened his jaws, and the wretch immediately crowded the wedge in until it reached the roof of his mouth, before he could stop it with his teeth. He began to pound it in with his heavy fist. Not withstanding Jarm held on with his teeth, the wedge driven into the roof of his mouth, and mangled it frightfully. The blood flowed down his throat, and profusely from his mouth.

So soon as Jarm found his teeth were likely all to be broken, and that there was no hope of sympathy from the intoxicated wretch, he obeyed the instincts of nature, and by a sudden and powerful effort, he seized the wedge and the hand that held it, and turning his head at the same time, delivered his mouth from the instrument, and turned it towards the ground--resolved, if he was to be murdered, he not be murdered in that way. The heartless man then commenced punching the boy with the sharp end of the wedge, on his head and mouth, making bloody gashes--Jarm dodging, as well as be could, to avoid the blows...

This experience was valuable to Jarm, for it revealed to him his positions and relations to slavery, which he ever afterwards remembered with perfect distinctness. He was now about fourteen years of age, of excellent strength and health, and saw there was no other way for him, but to bear his trials with all possible discretion --and if an opportunity occurred to escape, to embrace it at whatever peril--but if doomed to remain a slave, to die struggling with his tyrant, when driven to the last extremity. To this resolution he was always obedient--ever mindful of the occasion that induced him to make it."