The last movie you saw Thread

[RoseMorninStar]

[Túrin Turambar]

I’m still plugging through Bolívar, and I’m becoming fascinated by the entire thing at a meta level. I’ve never quite seen anything like this and I’m at a complete loss as to who the target audience is meant to be. I’m now twelve episodes in. Bolívar is nineteen, and the whole courtship of his wife took hours and was so sentimentalised it seemed to be pitched to the same sort of people who read Mills and Boon novels. Do these people also watch sixty hour-long historical dramas centred on politics and revolution? Then there’s the meandering sub-plots around the minor characters, who tend to be ciphers like ‘the crazy one’ or ‘the corrupt one’. It’s very soap-opera-ish and is a bit like watching Neighbours in period dress with the occasional execution.

I found the trailer on Youtube, which catches the heavy melodrama but can’t quite give the true sense of grandeur of a biopic that’s literally twenty times longer than a long movie:



(random observation – as you can see in the trailer the subtitles translate criollo as ‘creole’. I thought a criollo was a Latin American of Spanish ancestry – which would fit Bolívar – whereas in English ‘creole’ refers to a mixed-race person)

[Frelga]

This was probably meant to watch one episode a week so the saga would unfold over more than a year.

Just like the bulky novels of Dickens or Dumas were written to be published in installments. As someone said, we are now binging the classics.

[Maria]

Last night, my husband was wanting to watch a movie. This doesn't happen often, and he was flicking through the HBO selection. He stopped on that movie with Dwayne Johnson and the giant ape and asked me if I wanted that one. I said I'd rather watch Bohemian Rhapsody than that (it was in sight a few spaces further). He was startled because I almost never watch anything but sci fi or fantasy.

"Are you a Queen fan?" he asked in confusion.
"Not particularly," I said "but I'm vaguely interested in how they did the vocals and lip syncing and if the sound matches the original. That can't be easy with a voice of the range of their lead singer."

We agreed to start the movie and quit watching if it got tiresome. Since my husband has been bingeing youtube vids for months now, I figured his attention span has been shortened and we'd only get through half an hour or so.

We watched the whole thing in one sitting- with no bathroom breaks!

So, yeah. It was a pretty impressive story. Afterwards, my husband dug up this youtube he'd seen: a comparison of the movie depiction of the Live Aid concert and the tapes of the actual band during the same concert.

EDIT: (I removed the video link because it started showing a different video. Weird. )

What struck me most watching the two simultaneously was how differently the two men strike me. The actor seems kind of creepy. The singer was absolutely magnificent. I guess there is a significant difference between real charisma and acting charismatic.

[RoseMorninStar]

I agree. I enjoyed the film but (as an old Queen fan) I found the actor not creepy.. maybe distracting (?) Ain't no one like Freddie. It's a bit much for anyone to fill those skinny jeans.

[Maria]

I have been afflicted with Queen earworms for a week now. On the theory that listening to the music will abate the problem, I've been watching videos of live performances of Queen, their music videos and just plain listening to the songs.

My brain is still singing those songs at me, even the ones that weren't in the movie.

This morning so far it's been "Under Pressure" "Radio Ga Ga" and, of course, "Bohemian Rhapsody." It seems to be a random playlist running through my head.

I'm officially giving up on the "listen to the music to make it go away" strategy. This is as bad as closing my eyes and seeing tetris blocks fall.

[RoseMorninStar]

At least (dare I say it?) you don't have 'Fat Bottomed Girls' running around in your head. You're welcome.

[Frelga]

Neil Gaiman did say that any tape left in a car for more than two weeks becomes Queen's greatest hits.

[Maria]

I was wondering if that was the artist mentioned in Good Omens! I was going to go back and look but you've saved me the trouble, Frelga!

Oh, and "Fat Bottomed Girls" gets its playtime in my head too. And I do like the song... Just not today. Maybe.

Right now it's "Somebody to Love" which I also like, but all those "somebody"s don't leave much room for anything else right now.


This is why I usually avoid music with lyrics. If it gets past my barriers, it's stuck in my brain for weeks at a time. The only way to drown it out is to listen to an audiobook, but I can't really do that at work, can I?

I even tried listening to the Muppet version of Bohemian Rhapsody, but it only derailed my internal Queen music list for the amount of time we were laughing at it.

[RoseMorninStar]

Maybe Get on your bike & ride?

[Frelga]

Reminds me of the time when my boss said, "Move 'em on, head 'em up" to get us into the conference room, and I had Rawhide stuck in my head for two weeks. Playing it on loop and learning the lyrics so I could sing it myself did nothing to dislodge it. Like a virus, it just had to work through my system.

[Alatar]

Just watched The Dark Tower. Bizarre experience. Its like if somebody made a 20 minute edit of Lord of the Rings and managed to hit most of the beats. Or used a scissors and a 1000 pc Jigsaw to produce a similar picture to the original using 10% of the pieces? I mean its all kinds of wrong but its kind of impressive at the same time.

[Inanna]

Now *I* have "somebody to love" stuck in my head. Thank you, Maria.

However I do NOT get this strategy of exposing yourself to more of the music you want to get out of your head. How is that supposed to work?

[RoseMorninStar]

Now *I* have "somebody to love" stuck in my head. Thank you, Maria.

However I do NOT get this strategy of exposing yourself to more of the music you want to get out of your head. How is that supposed to work?

I don't get that either.

I've had Barcelona! stuck in my head. It's not a bad thing.

[Frelga]

The theory has something to do with the brain perceiving the fragment of a song as an incomplete task?

[yovargas]

I always thought of it more like how when you are craving a certain food, once you eat it and are full, the craving goes away.

[Frelga]

I always thought of it more like how when you are craving a certain food, once you eat it and are full, the craving goes away.

I have performed extensive testing of this theory on chocolate and have concluded that it is false.

[elengil]

Rutger Hauer has passed on at the age of 75. He was the main replicant in Blade Runner, the main guy who was not Matthew Broderick in Ladyhawke, and if you've ever seen it, he was the huntsman in The 10th Kingdom.

I browsed through his IMDB and was surprised at both his volume of work and how little of it I'd seen.

[Alatar]

He was also The Hitcher. Loved him as an actor.

[RoseMorninStar]

I always thought of it more like how when you are craving a certain food, once you eat it and are full, the craving goes away.

I have performed extensive testing of this theory on chocolate and have concluded that it is false.

You're on a roll today Frelga!