I think all the pictures there are strangely gray.
I would have LOVED for the flashbacks to have more, including the suicide and the rumored sex scene. I thought about the possibility of going to flashback before the song starts, maybe cutting to a close-up of Roger after he puts aside the guitar and going to the club, allowing them to include some of what he was singing there. But then what? It would be awkward to go back and get Roger up to the roof, and weird to go back into flashbacks during the song, especially since the club scenes fit so well where they are now.
So how about restructuring the flashbacks? Do we go from Roger and April talking to them in bed? That might make their attraction too much about sex and not enough about love, which is so important. I can't see dropping any of the shots that are in now. Even the drug buy is important for how it's echoed later with Mimi. So do we include the sex scene and bathtub scene and see less of Roger singing? That probably felt too "crowded," as Columbus said. It feels vital to see him doing that whole last part of the song.
These kind of problems are made much more difficult by having to edit within the tight structure of a song. With dialog, the editor can easily lengthen or shorten the pacing, but not so within a song. You can see that with the awkward extra measures in Goodbye Love to get Mimi from the stairwell to her window.
I still would have liked to see some things different, as we've all discussed in the past, but when I think about the practical difficulties in making certain changes, I can see why Columbus made a lot of the decisions he did.
Updated On: 3/1/06 at 02:11 PM
