Re: Bohemian Rhapsody (Bryan Singer, 2018)
Posted: Thu Jan 31, 2019 6:15 pm


Did you see the complete film, because the version available online is missing about 10-15 minutes, I believe?domino harvey wrote: Mon Jan 28, 2019 10:57 pm Yup, it surfaced a few years ago when I was wrapping up my initial viewingsdomino harvey wrote: Thu Aug 15, 2013 12:44 am 1931 ADDENDUM
East Lynne Recently resurfaced after decades off the grid, this is far from a forgotten masterpiece-- but it's not as bad as some of Frank Lloyd's other work in this category, either. Unhappy trophy wife is accused of cheating on her husband and in return her life is summarily ruined several times over for the duration of the picture. Sounds like a grand ol' time at the movies, don't it folks! Typical of the studio prestige fare for this era, this is a blandly stilted collection of literate speech and phony melodramatic crises that is impossibly stuffy and laboriously unhip. Films like this are of course signs of the infancy of cinema, as those who wanted it taken as a serious medium used deadly serious junk to bolster their claims by removing entertainment and spectacle from the equation. How else to explain Cavalcade's win two years later? (You can read the rest of my 1931 writeup here)
Tragically, you're about a month late on this.TMDaines wrote: Sun Feb 10, 2019 11:02 pmI fully expect this to become a cult film with a sing-a-long version doing the rounds before long.
Ha. I had little doubt that a version maybe already existed, but didn't spend the thirty seconds to check!KJones77 wrote: Sun Feb 10, 2019 11:07 pmTragically, you're about a month late on this.TMDaines wrote: Sun Feb 10, 2019 11:02 pmI fully expect this to become a cult film with a sing-a-long version doing the rounds before long.
Seeing that scene auto play silently it is pretty gross how many cuts there are, but that scene did not bother me (as an editor), it’s bad blocking/directing more than bad editing: they shot too many angles, or they had to add angles when they shot pickups and only had one or two actors available (hence the weird variety of shots that have just one person in them, being cut into shots that have three people)—it was the other concerts that bugged me, they were all awful, excessively condensed and over done effects—but some of that is on the producer/director insisting on a style or approach resulitng in these outcomes, I thought the sound design and sound editing using the actual queen tracks was far more impressive and indicative of the (shockingly common) musician-to-editor background that John Ottman has been touting as the reason he’s done such a uniquely good job (if you get together eight editors in a room, you could assemble a veteran five person band easily), but I was mostly extremely irritated at the inane way the live aid concert was edited. Every fucking cut away to the audience was wrong—disruptive rather than complementary—and every audience shot was the same type of aesthetically pleasing well coiffed white dudes in the same two shot structure except for one insert of two girls wiping away a tear at the end. That whole approach really grated me much more than any other part of the film—and I was also irritated because this is the climax and you’re cutting away from your characters to meaningless reactions rather than cutting into the emotions of your characters, boneheaded approach.soundchaser wrote:I was just about to post this in the dedicated thread. It is genuinely obscene. I don’t know how someone who has dedicated their life to editing can care so little about the meaning of a cut.mfunk9786 wrote: Mon Jan 28, 2019 7:55 pm Ladies and germs, presenting a scene from Best Editing nominee Bohemian Rhapsody
Washington Post" wrote:Ottman’s work was also the subject of a viral video on Twitter that mocked his editing of one particular restaurant scene. The whiplash cuts — between characters, and even of a chair being pulled out — were accentuated by a running counter and sound effect, generating comments on how the movie actually won the Oscar for “most editing.”
“Oh, my God! Wow,” he said. “I didn’t know about that, but I know why that’s out there.”
It was one of the scenes shot by Fletcher in the post-Singer home stretch. Fletcher mostly picked up Freddie’s relationship moments, along with the origination of “We Will Rock You” and “Another One Bites the Dust.” But the story line also got reordered a bit, and dialogue in the original meeting between the band and manager John Reid no longer made sense.
So Fletcher shot the one that takes place outside a London pub.
Ottman was under pressure to make the film’s first act move swiftly, but test audiences never got bored and actually wanted more of the band’s early days. So he went back and slowed those scenes down and let them breathe more — but he didn’t have time to do so with that meeting.
“Whenever I see it, I want to put a bag over my head. Because that’s not my aesthetic,” he said. “If there’s ever an extended version of the film where I can put a couple scenes back, I will recut that scene!”
I saw this video before watching the full movie, and while one poorly edited scene shouldn't be made representative of the whole movie, unfortunely, the rest of the movie isn't much better edited than this (though yeah, this probably is the worst moment regarding editing).mfunk9786 wrote: Thu Mar 07, 2019 11:52 pm That makes me like the guy a bit more, but man oh man, talk about a movie being made by committee
I got the impression that the film thoroughly tweaks and changes every detail of their real life story, to the point where it's complete myth-making, far moreso than The Buddy Holly Story. I wouldn't take any of it as an accurate reflection of what happened.Roger Ryan wrote: Fri Mar 08, 2019 1:08 pm In reality, manager John Reid was not introduced to the band until after the success of A Night at the Opera (Queen's fourth album), whereas the finished film implies that Reid approached the band two or three years earlier before a recording contract had been signed. This, along with Ottman noting that Fletcher was responsible for the scene where "We Will Rock You" is conceived of three years after it had already been released, makes me think that some of the major chronological gaffes came about near the end of production after Singer had been fired.
The best/worst was the first U.S. tour montage, when the band was playing 1978's "Fat Bottomed Girls" in 1974.tenia wrote: Fri Mar 08, 2019 3:40 pm Some of these changes seemed so pointless in the way they're not useful at all for the movie, I wondered if they might actually simply be a total lack of knowledge or a disregard about the real life events. While I get changing some stuff to make the movie plays in a more cinematically dramatic fashion, some just looked like pure factual errors. For instance, during the Another One Bites The Dust montage, they show an album disc turning in the background, and that's News of the World. I have no idea why they chose to show this one rather than just showing The Game, since it has no use except illustrating the montage with a disc playing, but the movie seemed full of small things like that.
Additionnally, hearing in the extra features Graham King seemingly believing the Live Aid show really was the band getting back together after a long time without playing together wasn't helping the movie was partially done by people who did no research whatsoever about this kind of things.
I could afford to be magnanimous too if I won an Oscarmfunk9786 wrote: Thu Mar 07, 2019 11:52 pm That makes me like the guy a bit more, but man oh man, talk about a movie being made by committee
Myth making? If you mean about Freddy Mercury I'd say quite the contrary. My read on all this rewriting of Queen's history is that's about Brian May and Roger Taylor's ego (if I had any doubt the appalling Oscar performance closed it). I'm no Queen fan, but how Freddy came off in this film was unbelievable. I still can not believe they put a scene in with him begging the band to let him back in before sending him out the room like they were doing him a favor. There were so many things like that, but even more subtle things in this film that really served to boost May & Tayler while diminishing Mercury. It's a shame millions of people have seen and love this film thinking this was Freddy Mercury.hearthesilence wrote: Fri Mar 08, 2019 3:28 pmI got the impression that the film thoroughly tweaks and changes every detail of their real life story, to the point where it's complete myth-making, far moreso than The Buddy Holly Story. I wouldn't take any of it as an accurate reflection of what happened.