I guess I just don’t enjoy good editing, because those two things (especially the latter) were sore points for me as well.
The type of thing that makes me aware I’m watching a movie, and ironically takes me out of the movie.
I guess it’s a mileage may vary based on what you want out of a film experience. To me character growth and relationship development are the central part. If I just want to know what happened in his life I can read Wikipedia. Very good movie but the relative lack of those things made it a bit like Mickey Rooney and hey kids let’s put on a show! Leaving the what made him tick as a person being going against his crappy father saying that he was nothing and nobody and never would be someone was a bit too superficial for my taste. And not convincingly acted for that part.
Can’t please everybody all the time, I guess.
Movies are always a trade-off of what to include and what to excise. And some viewers will always complain why cut this and keep that. I can usually forgive filmmakers cutting what may seem to be important to fit inside of the ~2 hour timeframe they’re given. I enjoyed the pacing of Dolemite, so I’m okay with the choices made. But different things will take me out of pictures, too, some which you may not mind. To each, his/her own.
I think a comparison I would make is to Rocketman. In that film I felt they spent too much time mooning about emphasizing angst, along with multiple scenes of the family berating him. In Dolemite they rely on the audience to get the point when they make the point and move on.
As for Queen Bee, I’m going to speculate that they wrote and filmed more scenes with her and their relationship. But once it came time to edit the film down, they ended up on the editing room floor. Yes, it would have been good to give us more of her. But like so many films, there were 100 male roles to 1 female role. They included her for historical accuracy, and representation, but keeping the film from slowing down and running to 3 hours, choices are made.
At the risk of over-belaboring the point I don’t think this an editing for time issue as much as it is a writing and directing one. Same scene could have shown something of Lady Lane that stood out as talent and his recognition of it. They instead decided to go with an implication of his admiration and identification of her as someone being told they are worthless and fighting against it. And that just didn’t come off as real or … enough.
The director or writer or both made a choice to tell more a chronology. The chronology was interesting enough that the movie was good but the same scenes better written and directed could have also had us feeling more about them.
Eh, to each. I saw it as a nod to the old The Seven Samurai tale - collecting the team, with the writer, director, Queen Bee, each one got a few scenes to establish them, then on with the story.
Yes, that’s true. They could have slipped in some more character development while advancing the plot. But I think the way they went was fine, too.
Maybe it’s just because I’ve seen the original film so many times and I’m so familiar with the delivery…I didn’t expect Eddie to play RRM like Dolemite, but when he’s literally reenacting scenes from the film or doing the stage act (playing RRM playing Dolemite), I expected him to shoot for “Dolemite” levels. That over-the-top delivery is a big part of what makes the original film fun to watch, and showing him “turning it on” when the cameras started rolling or when he stepped on stage would have made it clear that RRM was playing a character and that he wasn’t Dolemite in real life.