Bohemian Rhapsody | The Boneyard

Bohemian Rhapsody

Looking forward to seeing it
 
My son loved it - is a huge fan. Read a couple of articles about it saying that the liberties they took with the story were odd - and that the real story was better in most cases. But overall I've heard a lot of good things.
 
i saw it with 3 other couples, everyone in our group thought it was great.
 
I'll eventually see it, but what I hear is in 2 pretty distinct camps:

1) Awesome and incredible. One friend saw it back to back nights.
2) Malek is award worthy but the story is all over the place and there's no real point.

The remaining members of Queen had say in it, so you know there's nothing that makes Freddie look bad or show anything too controversial. I can assume the live crowd scenes are great.
 
Saw it this past weekend and we really liked it. The band scenes and concert footage was great. Brian May and Roger Taylor were listed as executive producers so they must have tried to stay true to the story as much as possible. Went back and watch the Live Aid part with Queen and Malek nailed it!
 
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I saw it this weekend and didn't like it at all. Thought the story was all over the road and, read later, that they took a ton of timeline liberties to make the story appear more interesting.

For instance, Mercury didn't tell Queen he had AIDS before Live Aid and that was not at ALL the reason they got back together for that "once in a lifetime" or farewell type performance. They ended up touring together the year after.

I thought a lot of the scenes were fluffy and contrived. Like how they were just fooling around in the studio and came up with Bohemian Rhapsody. The Mike Myers scenes were awful. The last 15 minutes was great, but the 2 hours leading up to it, I thought, was kinda cheesy.
 
Deepster said:
I saw it this weekend and didn't like it at all. Thought the story was all over the road and, read later, that they took a ton of timeline liberties to make the story appear more interesting.

For instance, Mercury didn't tell Queen he had AIDS before Live Aid and that was not at ALL the reason they got back together for that "once in a lifetime" or farewell type performance. They ended up touring together the year after.

I thought a lot of the scenes were fluffy and contrived. Like how they were just fooling around in the studio and came up with Bohemian Rhapsody. The Mike Myers scenes were awful. The last 15 minutes was great, but the 2 hours leading up to it, I thought, was kinda cheesy.
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This kind of stuff is why I'll wait for it to appear on cable. Freddie was a great frontman, but I don't really get how he became legendary. Their songs after the first four albums were generally pretty uninterestingly mediocre musically compared to their pre-1975 work. Formulaic arena rock stuff. Queen was basically a has-been for the two years leading up to Live Aid. They were surprised Geldof even invited them. But, the reason they killed was that they rehearsed hard for that performance when few other acts did (see the Live Aid doc for support on this - it's really interesting). Live Aid momentum got Queen back into the studio.

I think Deepster nailed it in suggesting that May and Taylor would not allow the filmmakers to show Freddie too bad of a bad light. Like our current CiC, if you get the bully pulpit and tell enough lies, eventually it becomes truth for some folks.

Hope you all had a delicious and Happy Thanksgiving.
 
Finally saw this tonight. Good watch. I don’t think it was the best movie, but I won’t be surprised if Malik wins best actor. Great performance
 
Deepster said:
I'll eventually see it, but what I hear is in 2 pretty distinct camps:

1) Awesome and incredible. One friend saw it back to back nights.
2) Malek is award worthy but the story is all over the place and there's no real point.

The remaining members of Queen had say in it, so you know there's nothing that makes Freddie look bad or show anything too controversial. I can assume the live crowd scenes are great.
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I thought the movie wasn’t that great. Malik was great, but Freddy Mercury came off as a self absorbed and kind of unlikeable so it was impossible to root for him.

I watched the actual Live Aid performance on YouTube and I thought they did a great job replicating that performance.
 
I had an interesting experience watching this. Saw first half on a plane on the way to Orlando. As we are de-plane-ing I'm talking to my wife about how it was too much the Freddie Mercury story and not the Queen story and a slightly older (say mid-50s) guy in front of me chimed in that it was too much about Mercury's sexuality and he turned it off. This is interesting as more commonly the movie is criticized for not being gay enough, but I think the guy kinda had a point (although he commented that it was too gay and that brought convo to a screeching halt) - I had hoped it was a movie about a band, not about Freddie and not so predominantly about his sexuality and relationships.

So then I saw the second half a week later on the way home. SPOILER ALERT - once he finally finally dumped the psycho manager the movie got very good and Freddie's individuality was now something to celebrate and enjoy. Previously this had been co-opted into his personality/relationships/performances only being about being gay and over the top and how this was leading to his and the band's downfall.

Anyway, the last 20 minutes were PHENOMENAL - and especially with the first half of the movie one week in my rear-view mirror, I enjoyed it. The guy who turned it off missed out due, kinda due to his prejudice.

Overall they definitely condensed too much and built a dramatic structure that was unnecessarily tidy. All bands are messy and 95% ultimately breakup. For 3/4 of the movie everything was shoved into and defined almost entirely by the Freddie identity search and even with the cathartic ending this doesn't pay off. Ultimately because he dies it is unavoidable that his time out of control is indicted for temporarily ruining the band and ultimately killing him. Real life is more complicated than that and there coulda shoulda been more layers to all of it - but again last 20 minutes great.
 
Saw it over the weekend. It is a fundamentally dishonest movie. Sascha Baron Cohen wanted to make a very different movie, and Brian May vetoed it, and that was it for Cohen. I am disappointed that so many reviewers let May and Taylor get away with a band biopic that treats Mercury with kid gloves and completely whitewashes any bad behavior by May, Deacon and Taylor. I was basically just watching a 2 hour music video.

I can live with the time jumps and other narrative techniques where key people were blended into one (the Michael Myers character), but I have a problem when a biopic fundamentally changes the key characters' personalities and behavior. What is the point of watching a biopic if the story fundamentally changes the main characters that the movie is about?
 
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Steve Jobs is one of my favorite biopics. Sorkin adapted Walter Isaacson's authorized biography into a weird narrative construct where all the key interactions between the characters occur at three product release shows. That obviously didn't happen, but Sorkin needed a way to get the key characters at the same spot because he didn't want to write 100 scenes at 100 sets. Sorkin shoehorned decades of interactions into those three acts that in the movie each take place over the space of about an hour. And he nailed it. He nailed the characters, he nailed their relationship with each other, and he told a great movie about a complex person in a complicated industry. As validation, Steve Wozniak loved the movie.

And that is my problem with Bohemian Rhapsody. There are inherent problems with biopics, and I am willing to give writers a long leash in adapting someone's life to the big screen, but when there is a full-blown white washing of the main characters then I feel a little robbed by the writers. There isn't going to be another biopic about Freddie Mercury and Queen, and this one left a lot out of important things out of the story.
 
I didn't think it was a biopic, clearly a Hollywood movie based on Queen. I agree that if you are looking to learn about Queen (as I was) or know about them and want to see the true story told, it is woefully incomplete. But as a commercial vehicle to play and re popularize their music with a pay off of 20 minutes of great concert entertainment it worked.
 
Great movie, not an accurate or chonologic account of actual events. More West Wing than All the Presidents Men.
 
Dogdeacon said:
But as a commercial vehicle to play and re popularize their music with a pay off of 20 minutes of great concert entertainment it worked.
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That is clearly what Brian May was aiming for.
 
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