Bohemian Rhapsody

[Greg]

It was nice to hear Queen songs. Probably would have been better just to listen to an album.

This was really the Freddie Mercury story not the story of the band. Brian May, John Deacon, and Roger Taylor just seem to be afterthoughts or even bit players in the story of Queen.

It was a very choppy narrative. Here's how we got the name Queen. Here's how he became Freddie Mercury. Here's how the band got together. Here's why we wrote We will rock you. There wasn't a lot of flow to the story. Just a bunch of snippets of how things happened.

I think it really got going towards the end when Mercury's life is in crisis and the band is breaking up and they are getting ready for Live-Aid. But it still felt lumpy.

And why be proud about a complete recreation of the Live Aid set? Why not just show the original with the actual Freddie Mercury?  Another question I kept asking was Rami Malek who plays Mercury a great actor or just a great imitator? Or is there a difference? I'm thinking this story would be better served as a documentary rather than a dramatic movie.

[Drunk Monk]

Documentaries are always better.  The magic resides in the subject, not the biopic.  

Rami looked more like Jagger than Mercury.  Everything happened to easily.  Oh, here's how we became a band.  Here's how we became megastars.  Here's how we composed Bohemian Rhapsody.  May was a producer and came off well, but the other bandmates were minor characters.  It did make me recall the AIDS years.  I remembered Chevy, a packer at AFS who was caring for his AIDS stricken lover.  Chevy was a stoner and unloaded a lot of what he was going through to DM during breaks in the alley.  Such an ordeal.  But yeah, overall, I agree with Greg.  It didn't hang together that well and I was generally unimpressed, especially given all the buzz that was around this film. The Live Aid concert was pretty convincing but went a bit too long.    

It was weird to see this after Sing Street because both Lucy Boynton and Little Finger from GoT are in both.  Lucy looked disturbingly like Ivanka.  Downton factor 1: Tom Branson. 

I want to see the real Live Aid Queen footage now.

[Greg]

Rocketman.

[cranefly]

Haven't seen this, but I have trouble seeing Rami as Mercury.  The posters framed Rami in mid-voice and turned oddly so that, okay, maybe he does resemble Mercury.  But when you look at Rami on the talk shows, he just doesn't come close to Mercury's robust vitality in his prime.  Which doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad movie.

But I recently watched Fassbinder's World on a Wire, made in 1973 and essentially The Matrix made back when computers were hardly a thing.  It's slow-going, but fascinating with a '60s SF vibe.  But the relevancy here is that there's an actress in it, Barbara Valentin, who's hideously beautiful, which prompted me to look her up.  She lived an unconventional life, was nicknamed "the German Jane Mansfield," was big in the gay scene, and was Mercury's companion.  Not that they were lovers.  They just shared the same sensibilities and sense of humor.  They even bought a flat together.  Friends of Mercury seem to have different opinions of her, but she was a huge part of his life...

...and she was entirely excluded from the movie.

At least that's what I've heard.

Fassbinder was himself gay, and lived with various women throughout his life.  He just got along better with them, in a domestic environment.  Or maybe because they were easier to boss around.  He was known to be a bit sadistic in his behavior.  Anyway, I just find it interesting that these two very creative men, both gay, were most comfortable living with a woman.

Note: I haven't researched this much.  So my perception could be skewed in any number of ways.

[Greg]

Go ahead and ask me about cutting out story lines for time. I'm ready to make another movie from all the stuff I cut out of Stro. I could do a solid twenty minutes on both Neil Diamond and Stro's fellow at SJSU, Dr. Gaugler.