My Award Nominations: Editing

My roster of personal nominees continues growing this weekend with the visual post-production categories and music.

It's one of those years when I wish I could include about seven or eight nominees for Best Editing. It pained me to make some of these cuts (heehee), but I like the final five I've wound up with:

Review - Mission: Impossible -- Rogue Nation

In an age when cinephiles continue to bemoan the glut (and the fiscal success) of unoriginal populist entertainment, I feel it's important to remember not all unoriginal populist entertainment is created equal. There's that which is dumb, lazy or poorly made, and there's that which is so well executed it truly entertains despite its familiarity. Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, the fifth in the series of Tom Cruise vehicles which had plateaued at 'mediocre' until Brad Bird's 2011 entry Ghost Protocol, falls comfortably into the latter designation.

Thankfully, you don't need to have followed the previous globe-trotting exploits of super spy Ethan Hunt (Cruise, barely aged since his first M:I outing in 1996) and his Impossible Mission Force, IMF, to enjoy Rogue Nation. You don't even need to follow this one all that closely. In a franchise whose primary draw is its star and his daring-do, story details erase themselves from one's memory as readily as the famously self-destructing messages that send Ethan on his next mission, should he choose to accept it. Which he does, of course.