Bohemian Rhapsody was excellent. The lead actor was amazing…. but the script was following the stock music bio pic formula….
Band gets together, montage of them on tour with the names of the cities they’re touring in flies across the screen..
I wonder if it wasn’t just ONE concert they filmed but had the actors say ” we love you pittsburgh!” ” We love you Chicago!” ” We love you Boston!”
Mercifully they DIDNT do the montage of their record going up the billboard charts… or the map of the cities they go to….
I had heard BORAT wanted to play Freddie Mercury, but Rami Malek is excellent.
I’d seen Remi in THE PACIFIC…. and thought he looked enough like Freddie….
He had clearly studied the crap out of Freddie Mercury. He had the voice and flamboyant body patterns DOWN. I hope he gets an Oscar nomination. I am assuming he was wearing some kind of dental prosthetic, which helped him talk more like Freddie Mercury.
Gwilym Lee looked so much like Brian May I thought it WAS HIM.
Theres a WAYNES WORLD joke hidden in this that I wonder if most on the audience would catch. A record exec says that “Bohemian Rhapsody” is not the kind of song that young men would sing along to in their cars.
That record exec was played by MIKE MEYERS, ( under a lot of clever make up) who of course played Wayne in WAYNES WORLD, which has a scene of Wayne and Garth singing along to “Bohemian Rhapsody” in their car.
The Shots of Queen playing Wembley for LIVE AID were great, but the reverse angle, as if the camera was on the back of the stage, looked SO green screened in it was distracting.
Like everything Spike Lee does, its passionate, gripping, perhaps too over the top and I don’t agree with everything he does or says…. but its a great watch.
The klansmen seem like unrealistic buffoons.
I’ve seen other much better depictions of the KKK in film.
Mississippi Burning.
Undercover with the KKK (1979)
Topher Grace looks and sounds so much like David Duke its amazing. He should get an Oscar nomination.
It didnt make any sense how the Ron Stallworth became a uniformed cop with a big afro right after his job interview. Don’t new cops have to under a “basic training” style police academy? And aren’t there hair regulations for uniformed police?
The film is set in Colorado Springs but… it being a Spike Lee joint…. I suspect it was made in upstate New York.
Just as Ron was shown to get to be a cop too quickly and easily, I also didn’t quite get how easily he was accepted into the KKK. The most realistic character was where the second in command of KKK wanted the white cop to undergo a lie detector test. THAT I can see. Why would they ( the Klan) trust some guy they just met with secrets that could send them to jail. Surely they knew of Police / FBI infiltrations.
Spike Lee juxtaposes the Klan with the Black Power movement of the 60s and 70s. Its a realistic and believable look at the Black Power movement…… but not so much a convincing look at what might drive someone to join the KKK.
As I did years of research on my racism documentary “The Least of my Brothers” I did a lot of reading on the klan, neo nazis and other far right groups.
Only the second in command of the local Klan chapter felt real. The leader wasn’t so bad… but the fat guy who was ALWAYS drunk seemed too much like a cartoon caricature.
I couldn’t figure out the Colorado Springs Police chief. Was he racist or not? And why?
The film is at its best when Ron listens to a Black Power speech, and although he’s there to spy… you can tell the words are resounding in his mind.
And Belafontes story is intercut with the Klans reacting riotously as they watch “Birth of a Nation.”
KKK Grand Dragon Charles Lee told me the Klan regularly showed “Birth of a Nation.”
That film exagerated the original Klan and so glamourized it, that it leads to real life revival of the KKK.
The ending felt too contrived, and when I did same basic internet research, it was all made up. No bomb plot….. the ” I gotcha” phone call to David Duke never happened. The entrapment of the racist cop never happened, and even as a movie scene felt like a sitcom happy ending.
BUT! Spike Lee added in the footage of the alt-righters in Virginia and the car crash attacks on the liberal protestors. That happened so recently but I had pretty much forgottten about it. David Duke and Trumps comments on the issue were so incendiary. http://www.historyvshollywood.com/reelfaces/blackkklansman/
I read the original book last night. And I am mad at Spike Lee.
Every movie “based on a true story” condenses events and rearranges things for dramatic effect. We all know that. But theres something else going on here.
If the book is true history, and I have no reason to believe it isn’t, then the movies first third is accurate, the middle third if iff-ey, but the final third is complete fiction. Not exaggeration, not dramatic license but an absolute lie.
Its bad enough that the screenwriters invented a wholly fictitious bomb plot against a non existent Black power group. And Rons black power girlfriend didn’t exist.
But what really ticks me off is the speaker scene. In the film, a character named Jerome Turner ( beautifully played by Harry Belafonte) meets with a Black student group and tells the true story of Jesse Washington, a young African American man lynched and burned in Waco Texas in May 1916.
The scene is cross cut with the Klansmen getting all riled up watching “Birth of a Nation”. I think Spike Lee was trying to make the point that the KKK operates out of unfounded paranoia and fear, while most “Black Power” groups are simply a reaction to the Klan, and don’t mean any harm to those who aren’t trying to harm them. And that the KKK aren’t under threat from anyone but Black people ARE under threat.
Belafontes deliver is soft and understated but VERY effective.
My problem is that there is no such scene in the book. There is a very similar scene that happened several years after the David Duke visit. Similar in that it was a famous Black man giving a speech.
According to Ron Stallworth, the legendary NAACP leader, Ralph Abernathy ( second in command just under Martin Luther King) came to Colorado to help out in the protests of an “innocent” Black youth who was allegedly “railroaded” in a murder case.
Stallworth said he was assigned to protect Abernathy, and when alone he told him that the young man was clearly guilty of a thrill killing. He wasn’t railroaded. The local Black community was rallying behind a guilty person.
Most Black fears are justified, most protests against injustice are justified. But if Stallworth was right, the Black community was attempting to exonerate a guilty man just because he was Black. That’s just as bad as white racists attempting to convict an innocent man just because he was Black.
ps: Wikipedia says that:
“The Unification Church hired Ralph Abernathy as a spokesperson to protest the media’s use of the term “Moonies”, which they compared with the word “nigger“.
The Story: On September 1st, 1993, Bill Simpson, 36, was murdered 11 hours after leaving the housing complex in the notoriously all white and allegedly racist town of Vidor, Texas. Simpson was the last African-American to leave Vidor after a failed government experiment in forced integration.
Because the blacks in the Vidor Housing Complex received so many death threats, Simpson’s death is shrouded in mystery and conspiracy. After a wave of criminal trials and investigations by the Beaumont Police, The FBI, The Texas Commission on Human Rights, and The Texas NAACP and The Vidor Police, most of the story’s participants were under court gag order or went into hiding.
A five year investigation by filmmaker Matt Kordelski, now attempts to answer the question,
“What Really Happened?”
An exhaustive search has resulted in exclusive interviews with many eyewitnesses and participants, most of whom refused to speak up at the time of the murder.
The list includes Vidor residents, friends of Simpson, local and state government officials. Even representatives of the “Invisible Empire,” (Ku Klux Klan) and the right-wing Nationalist movement all agreed to speak their minds on this story.
Featured interviews include:
William Hale, Director of the The Texas Commission on Human Rights.
Richard Stewart, the Houston Chronicle reporter who covered this story from beginning to end and whose family befriended Bill.
Ross Dennis, the president of the Vidor Housing Complex Tenants’ Association.
Gerald Guilbeaux, Vidor resident who was featured on the Montel Williams Show exposé on this story.
Doris and “Skeeter” Haire, members of a Vidor Christian group that saved Simpson from a Beaumont Crack House.
Tom Oxford, attorney for East Texas Legal Services.
Mike Daniels, the lawyer who initiated the “Young vs Kemp” suit that led to the forced desegregation of 36 counties in East Texas.
Klan Grand Dragon Charles Lee and some local and regional Klansmen.
Lydia Faye Washington, the woman who saw Simpson’s murder and could identify the shooters. She gave her only interview ever for this documentary.
The Conspiracy:
For many people, Bill Simpsons death has been given an all too easy answer. Police say the death was simply a random drive-by shooting by a local Black street gang. Stories swirl around the area that the shooters knew who they were shooting, and some even say a secret witness saw a white man pull the trigger.
Simpson had received countless death threats from white supremacists in Vidor, and some of his fellow Vidor complex residents say they heard of a specific plot to kill him, which a local Klansman even boasted of participating in.
The Klan:
There were 5 known Ku Klux Klan factions operating in Vidor. The two most important were the White Camelia Knights of the Ku Klux Klan from nearby Cleveland, Texas, led by Grand Dragon Charles Lee. Lee is the Klansman whose face adorns the famous Texas Monthly cover “Vidor: Inside Texas’s most hate filled town.” Michael Lowe comes from Waco, Texas, and represents the Texas faction of the national Knights of the Ku Klux Klan operating out of Harrison, Arkansas.
Another group is located right in Vidor, The Knights of the White Kamellia. Note the different spellings of “Camellia,” a southern flower. The Vidor group uses a “K” and the Cleveland group uses a “C,” although of similar ideology, these groups are not officially aligned.
In the Summer of 1993, after the announcement that Vidor’s housing complex would be desegregated, local Klansmen and Klan supporters called in “reinforcements” from other Klan groups in Texas and the surrounding region. They organized several large rallies in Vidor and at the county courthouse in Orange, City, to generate opposition to the integration of an infamously all-white town. They were also accused of conducting and/or arranging acts of intimidation in and around Vidor to let both blacks and whites know the Klan wasn’t going to take this sitting down.
Criminal charges were filed against Klansmen from the various factions, but most were unprovable. The Camellia Klan allegedly drove their bus through the housing complex brandishing weapons. Someone hung a “White Power” sheet on a highway overpass. Threats were made to the city leaders who publicly supported integration and various anonymous threats to blow up or burn down the complex were made.
Klan leader Michael Lowe participated in a publicity stunt arranged by an Australian version of “A Current Affair” wherein Lowe showed up at Bill Simpson’s door to “talk.” Klan leaders Charles Lee and Michael Lowe were both sent to prison for short jail terms, not for any particular criminal activity but for refusing to surrender their secret membership lists.
And now that I’ve seen it…. I still kind of think that.
I enjoyed parts of it. Its technically amazing. HOW did they make those animals move? Puppetry? Advanced CGI? Or… most likely… a combination of all of them?
The characters were a clever hybrid of the original storyboard drawings and Disney cartoon models.
The real Christopher Robin:
Ewan McGregors a great actor, but this guy looks more the part:
The story is a bit remiscent of Spielbergs HOOK . The work a holic dad who cant find time to be with his family.
It also reminded me a bit of DREAM CHILD, TED, and the Harry Potters…
WHO was this movie for? Small children? Jaded Adults?
And THIS “Christopher Robin” has almost NO connection to what I know of the real one ( and I’m not even that much a Pooh buff).
If they can use the “magic tree” to teleport from London to the hundred Acre wood, why couldn’t they use it to transport back?
It has marvellous moments, but the ending was bit too much “Disney Ex Machina”
mattkprovideo 