The Art of Editing and The Snowman | Folding Ideas

The idea of a serial killer operating in Bergen who always leaves a snowman as a calling card is really kind of amusing if you've ever lived there. Winters in Bergen mostly consists of rain and slush, with maybe a week or two of actual snow on the ground per year. So now I'm imagining a frustrated serial killer getting more and more impatient as weeks and months go by with no snow at all. And then he has even worse days when it starts snowing, so he hurries out to find a victim, but by the time he has found one and has the opportunity to kill them, the snow has already turned to slush and he has to go home even more frustrated once again. He must spend a lot of time wondering why he decided to go with such a counter productive calling card when he operates in Bergen of all places. No wonder he relocated to Oslo if was dead set on sticking with the snowman gimmick.

INSPECTER HOLE? I HARDLY KNOW HER!

"Cutting things up into little pieces, that's what a child does to establish order." (Shows shot of sausage cut up.) I love this line, because it's so stupid. A child doesn't cut up their food to establish order. Their parents cut it up so the kid doesn't choke.

I started reading Nesbø’s books after The Snowman (film) came out because the trailer looked interesting, and I love me some Scandinavian noir. And what kills me is—Book!Harry speaks English fluently, guys. He knows how English speakers pronounce his name, and he knows exactly why it sounds weird and funny, and at several points in at least the first book, he expresses irritation and upset at having it mispronounced *that way*. AND YOU WANT TO TELL ME THE FILMMAKERS LET THIS CHARACTER SPEND TWO HOURS RUNNING AROUND CALLING HIMSELF HAIRY HOLE. I hate this.

The Snowman is actually brilliant if you view it through the lens of a story about a killer who dismembers bodies, so they chose to represent that with a film composed of dismembered shots.

Fun fact, the snowman is the SEVENTH part in a series of books. Wonderful place to start the story.

The movie is unwatchable because of all of the plothills.

'Harry Hole' will never stop being funny to me, but realising now that they CHOSE to name him that, despite having perfectly valid options to NOT name him 'Harry Hole', makes it about 100X funnier.

"it's not a game of cat and mouse, but a game of a plastic surgeon recklessly murdering a whole bunch of people, and the police who are too stupid to catch him because they don't bother to collect evidence" actually sounds like a very realistic depiction of serial killers

In a better timeline, the movie would have been the best version it could be, the Greatest Snowman.

If only the killer had met his own Anastasia Steele to save him from his need to punish women that remind him of his dead mom...

"hello, moe's tavern" "is detective hole there?" "who?" "hole. first name: harry" "[sigh] okay i'll check. HEY HAS ANYONE SEEN HARRY HOLE? I'M LOOKIN' FOR HARRY HOLE!"

“I don’t really have a point here, but it is very funny” - me at 6am after pulling an all nighter running out of things to say in an analytical paper that’s due in two hours

The police not collecting any evidence really gives "Mister Police you could have saved her I gave you all the clues" a new meaning

Netflix hyping this movie up brought me back here. I would like to add that according to wikipedia, the editors for this film were Thelma Schoonmaker and Claire Simpson. To put that in perspective, Schoonmaker has been Martin Scorcese's editor for over 40 years. Every film since Raging Bull. This is the woman who edited Goodfellas, Casino, The Wolf of Wall Street, so on. She's won three Oscars. Simpson is is the editor behind Platoon, which she won an Oscar for. These are editors who regardless of if you like the films they have worked on, are objectively competent, have demonstrated talent, are experienced, and know how to put together a damn film. So the fact that THEY couldn't salvage this film points to bigger problems, such as the shooting schedule, cinematography, direction, the fact that they dropped some 15% of the script, the budget... I guess what I'm trying to say is this is REALLY bad for a commercially released film, right. If two people who are considered talented editors couldn't save this film or at least make it less nonsensical, what was going on behind the scenes was probably unfathomably awful. Like, did the DP consider how their shots would actually look? Were these the only usable takes? Was production so rushed that nobody gave a shit? As an editor, this film is the stuff of nightmares.

The "Mister Police" poster gets a lot of attention, deservedly, for being dreadful, but the main poster with Fassbender walking through the snow deserves some attention too. Because it features the real tagline for the film: Soon the first snow will fall, and the hunt for a killer begins. The tagline for this film changes tense midway through. Amazing.

The irony of the studio that made this being called "Working Title" is just amazing.

What Dan fails to mention is that after the: "Can I keep these?" "No." "Can I keep these?" "*sigh* Yeah, sure." scene it cuts to a scene in which SPOILERS Michael Fassbender breaks into Rebecca Ferguson's house, FUCKING BODY SLAMS her to the ground, then pins her down while she cries about her murdered father. It's the wildest, out of nowhere, 3 beat vibe switch I've ever seen in cinema.

This and the Suicide Squad video are heavy in my comfort video rotation. There's something so soothing about the calm, reasoned assurance that things can and should make sense.

- Can I keep this? - No. exact same tone - Can I keep this? - Shit, you are really convincing. Yeah, sure.