'Bohemian Rhapsody' movie reviews & impressions

Imagine working in an office together for 40 plus years. They have their roles and 'get' each other's quirks.

Haven’t seen the new film yet , but everybody should check out the low budget somebody to love film that’s out on YouTube, a very gritty film but some brilliant acting by the guy that plays Freddie and at least they cover live aid to the end unlike making up a load of bollocks that Queen ended in ‘85. I can see were SBCohen was going and why he was pissed off with Queens version of events

Link?

Ages since I've been here. Just saw BR. My friend in work got it right on the nose when he said, "you might see it differently to the average movie goer/Queen GH fan cos you know the story". He was so right. Ps... I didn't care about them messing with factual history.

I disliked the first half but disliked the second half less. First half was a mess, it had no continuity, it was just a bunch of little scenes with poor dialogue, with a bunch of tit bits for proper Queen fans. I can only guess it might have been confusing to non-Queen fans tbh.

Second half when Freddie went off the rails could have been done better and should have been the main focus of the movie if it had more flesh to it.

The bits with Paul Prenter and Jim Hutton were really poorly written. Choosing Prenter as a bad guy was a good call, but they could have done way more to show how he effected Freddie and the band relationship wise.

Jim Hutton basically became his lover the morning of Live Aid... met his parents and then watched them in concert proud of his brave new partner lol.

This movie was saved by the Live Aid sequence which was tremendous to watch and so well edited with the swooping angles of the crowd and had me for the first time with a lump in my throat.

This movie majorly came across as Brian and Roger saying... "WE EXISTED IN QUEEN TOO (oh, and so did John)". Came across as borderline childish at times the scenes where they basically want the viewers to know... "I wrote that".

From a story arch POV the whole Freddie being outed theme is rather dated and most younger (or older) viewers will not see the bigger implications of Freddie being gay back then so one of the film's major plot points would have fallen flat.

Thank you Vision...Nov 2nd was something I looked forward to...I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'm skipping this movie/mess...another mess That Involves Brian and Roger...Have they done anything right since Freddie's death? and people have the nerve to Question what Freddie meant to that band. Instead they nag about one album that flopped in 1985....made up for it 3 years later with the great Barcelona...almost 30 years of crap since Mercury died. 30 years of crap...30 years of crap! excuse me while I put on Barcelona...wizard and VH could go listen to Lambert and Cosmo Rocks...

Only one word: ARTRISTRY. This is Freddie. "Bohemian rhapsody"is the exact antithesis of artristry.

@mike hunt When it comes to archive releases, some products were designed well (like Live At The Rainbow Box)

Amazing how Freddie was so truly nothing (when Freddie said it it was humility but Brian and Roger make it as if literal) without the band that two years after his flop solo album he did another. "Barcelona" was/is magnificent- as good as a Queen album. And his confidence in going solo must not have been too frail for him to take on such a risky endeavor- singing with a famed Opera great!

As Vision said this was Brian and Roger's way of making sure Joe Public knows they were just as important as Freddie and it's Freddie's fault whenever they hit a low point. Look I love the band Queen and love Brian and Roger's contributions. Heck I'm a vegan/animal rights activist so of the four lads I should have a bias for Brian since he's the only one who seems to care about animals other than just cats- but Brian is so easy to read- his motives so obvious- so simple to figure out- and he's made such histrionic and moronic comments over the years (like saying their shows with Lamberace are on the same level as their days with Freddie and other ridiculous praise of Adam in hopes of convincing us with such crap. Everything Brian does is just as great and he makes sure he tells us). He's clearly jealous and his defensiveness and eagerness to sell us his fantasies of them still being Queen (despite giving lip service tot he contrary) and/or great have tarnished him in my view. Still love Queen but I guess I'm just more of a Freddie Mercury fan in the end. Freddie's star always has and always will shine brighter than the other three. Instead of being resentful they should be thankful they had a Freddie Mercury.

YAFF, listen, I'm not going to read until the end of your elaborate statement, but basically one doesn't even have to see the movie to see what happened there. Brian's attitude is childish at best and we were made to think he was the clever one... Ha! I hope he enjoyed reading the reviews, just a shame many people who don't know Queen will actually look at it as some sort of a genuine point of reference.

What I know is Freddie was no wimp or some misguided, naive, troubled soul who could be manipulated into any kind of lifestyle by P.P or anyone else.
Hope this is not how he is painted in the movie, but some reviews give the indication that this is exactly what is happening.

Remembering 90's, when i was in my teen years, had Queen's music, videos blasting at my home constantly and my grandmother's reactions.

She loved Freddie and at the end of each video or concert her smiling face would become sour and she'd go something along the lines : "What a Guy! Why couldn't he settle down with a nice girl and live a happy life" and than she'd mutter something derogatory about whores who caused this. She thought Freddie was a womanizer. lol She was old school..we didn't have the heart to brake it down to her. lol

In any case, this movie seems to be making my old school grandma's case.

most brutal review I've seen

https://consequenceofsound.net/2018/10/film-review-bohemian-rhapsody/

Lots of people I know are giving this excellent reviews, the average movie goer is obviously loving the movie.

[QUOTE] [b]YAFFF wrote:[/b]

most brutal review I've seen

https://consequenceofsound.net/2018/10/film-review-bohemian-rhapsody/[/QUOTE]

Oh damn, that doesn't bode well.
They made him boring, insecure, weak and lame? :D
Still gonna go and see it...but i must say that i'm less enthused than i was before.

This is very well writen too ...


'The cartoon unreality of Bohemian Rhapsody reveals how Queen see themselves ...'

"I was born with four additional incisors. More space in my mouth means more range.” One wonders if this is how Freddie Mercury really persuaded the band that would become Queen to take him on as lead singer. In Bohemian Rhapsody it does the job, in one of several short scenes of mega-exposition, the best of which comes close to the end, when Freddie tells the band he has Aids, gets a boyfriend, comes out to his parents and plays Live Aid on what appears to be the same afternoon. Teeth figure a lot in the movie– the actor playing Freddie, Rami Malek, carried a set of falsies around for many months to get into character, and Roger Taylor, the script makes clear twice, was studying dentistry when they all met. Brian, of course, was doing astrophysics: “I guess that makes you the clever one,” says Freddie. “I guess so,” says Brian, one of the film’s producers.

Brian May’s speaking voice (he is played by Gwilym Lee) is so shockingly accurate, I thought he was dubbed with the real thing – and he could be, for who knows what sonic trickery Roger and Brian, the executive music producers, got up to in the studio: Malek’s singing is blended with Freddie’s in parts, and with a Canadian singer called Marc Martel. I just left the film, and my head is still spinning. Its script is an alchemy of the bizarre and the banal. There are some physical impressions so accurate they give you chills. There is some deeply dodgy poetic licence. And there is, predictably, very good use of music. The greatest challenge of any rock biopic, and the reason so many of them fail, is getting the rights to the songs. If the band make the film that’s not a problem. But leave a rock band as private and controlling as Queen to tell their own story and you have another problem entirely. Bohemian Rhapsody lost spangly directors and stars along the way, and at one point looked like it would never be made. Sacha Baron Cohen, who was once down to play a very tall Freddie, was later described by Brian May as an arse.

Bohemian Rhapsody is such a big deal that the 20th Century Fox fanfare at the start has been re-recorded by Brian on guitar. It has been deeply, madly anticipated and judging by the first reviews, it appears to be a flop. But, like looking at a self-portrait by a famous artist, the film reveals something of how Queen see themselves – this is a group who wrote their songs not for personal reasons but with tens of thousands of people in mind; who talk of brand rather than band these days, and refer to their music as “part of the wallpaper of life”.

Growing up highly attached to Queen, my brother and I worked out our adolescent anxiety via regular Queen dreams, where the members would be just “wrong” for some reason – too fat, perhaps, or unpleasant, or performing poorly on stage. The cartoon unreality of Bohemian Rhapsody will feel, to many fans, like being trapped in a Queen nightmare, but I’m convinced the unreality is entirely deliberate – some kind of continued diversion, perhaps, away from the truth. Roger Taylor, also a producer, is happy to have given himself a characterisation so dumb that he doesn’t know who Galileo is, writes songs the rest of the band think are crap, thinks Freddie’s moustache makes him “even gayer” and reacts to his Aids news with a laddish “you’re a legend”. In real life, his relationship with Mercury was touchy-feely close – but who cares, in a film where the band take the backseat to the product. “The only thing more extraordinary than their music is his story” says the tagline, of Freddie: in one mega-exposition, Freddie’s stern father Bomi Bulsara tells the entire band the story of Parsee persecution at the hands of Muslims in Persia, around a stiff Sunday lunch. “Really? That’s terrible,” says Brian May, in the same sincere manner you get him talking about asteroids in real life, at on stage events in the Science Museum.

Against this odd script, Rami Malek draws his portrayal of Freddie with energy and tenderness: the relationship with his lifelong friend and one-time fiancee Mary Austin is particularly sweet, capturing the love a gay man, who is not yet sure he is gay, and a girl can feel for one another: their early chemistry is found in shared clothing, closeness and the desire to protect. Malik’s bug-eyes take a while to get used to, but his funny voice – colonially clipped, crackly, toothsome – is something of an achievement, as is his light-footed, ballet dancer skip: he looks a lot like Freddie from the back. There is a touching scene where he flits around his new Notting Hill mansion explaining to Roger Taylor that each of his cats will have its own room. The scene is ruined when Taylor says he can’t stay for dinner because he has to get back to the wife and kids: it’s so entirely stupid – and one of the strange moments where the film suggests that Freddie’s gayness (about which the band have always been protective in interviews) was an alienating force pulling him away from the band.

It wasn’t until recent years that Queen decided to tell the story of Paul Prenter, Mercury’s personal manager, and his corrupting influence. In 1987, Prenter went to the Sun with stories of Mercury’s sexual exploits, revealing that two of his lovers had died of Aids. In Bohemian Rhapsody the relationship with Prenter – a clear-eyed, soft-spoken, un-aging Irishman who hangs around from 1975 onwards with no clear motive – becomes the crucible within which Mercury is destroyed. Prenter is seen seducing him away from Mary Austin, tempting him into promiscuity in the Munich gay scene, getting him into disco music (he's therefore directly responsible for Queen’s critically loathed Hot Space album…), engineering solo album contracts and even – astonishingly – blocking calls from Bob Geldof inviting Freddie to play at Live Aid. There is a recreation of a TV interview in which Prenter refers to Freddie as “a frightened little Paki afraid to be alone”. I’m still looking for that online.

The film has had criticism for whitewashing Mercury’s private life, but I didn’t feel there was much whitewashing going on here. Aside from the tragedy of his illness, did things really go so wrong for Freddie Mercury? The Prenter stuff lends it a bitter tone, disempowering the singer and turning him into a coked-up, lonely lapdog. It also allows for several big liberties to be taken with the Queen story. The film claims that Freddie’s solo aspirations alone nearly broke the band (in fact, they'd all done solo work at the same time). Most bizarrely, in one scene he literally begs for his job back, and for the chance to play Live Aid in 1985. “I’ve been an idiot and I deserve your fury,” Freddie says. “What’s it going to take for you all to forgive me?” When they hastily pull together their performance, they claim not to have played live in “years” because of Freddie’s antic behaviour. In fact, in January that year, they’d played their biggest ever concert, to an estimated 350,000 people in Rio De Janiro.

Mercury officially told the band he had Aids over a quiet dinner in Montreux in 1989. In the film, it happens during the Live Aid rehearsal in 1985 (his diagnosis actually came in 1987). The point, dramatically, is to add heft to the band’s most famous concert footage - the film ends with a long, rather impressive recreation of their Live Aid set. But did it need the dodgy rewrite – a terminally ill Freddie with his tail between his legs – to remind the audience how good they were at Live Aid? Perhaps it just felt important for Queen, who nowadays like to say that their career has two phases, Freddie and post-Freddie. When the credits roll with real footage of the band, everyone at my screening stayed in their seats, as though relieved to watch the real, familiar Freddie face and hear the music in pindrop Dolby surround sound. Most of th

... Most of them will have gone off, Spotified and Youtubed the band, and that’s exactly the point of the enterprise."

- Kate Mossman

(Source: https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/film/2018/10/cartoon-unreality-bohemian-rhapsody-reveals-how-queen-see-themselves)