Dissecting a movies cuts is always fascinating though. One of the Film Studies 101 exercises is to story-board the gas station explosion in The Birds. I like doing cut analysis on animated films, because they have to be so deliberate. Films are edited in a winnowing approach, but animation (because of the cost per frame) is edited first, then filled in second.

When I was doing a lot of editing in school my approach was to use markers first to set a beat for the mood of the piece (sometimes relating to music, a presence track or even just a bpm/heartbeat), and edit to that.

If you want to read about editing:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuleshov_Effect

The original experiment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gLBXikghE0

A case study in editing: The Odessa Steps sequence from Battleship Potempkin - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ps-v-kZzfec

The Birds gas station scene: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-HYj5cLfEI

Andrey Tarkovsky's films are awesome that way. A part of brain will keep track of the length - perhaps the same way as a music aficionado keeps track of the the current note and the starting note of a melody (or the way jvm keeps track of a stack trace).