Director: Um … haha … yeah well
Screenplay: Anthony McCarten
Yes, it’s Female Monarch, the movie slash biopic slash Live Aid performance reenactment, starring Rami Malek and Rami Malek’s prosthetic teeth. It’s a karaoke music video montage, Queen’s Greatest Hits loosely strung together with a couple of talky bits sandwiched between the singles.
The feeling it evokes is not-quite-nostalgia, as I don’t really remember Live Aid all that well, nor was I especially interested in Queen, but it’s more nostalgia for nostalgia, a feeling I’ve missed out by not being there, in the moment. It also evokes a feeling of why-the-hell-did-I-just-watch-this, given the depth is about as deep as the melody for “We Will Rock You” and the only thing that really stuck out were Freddie’s incisors.
It’s a fairly by-the-numbers rock bio, charting a familiar course of rise to fame, descent into debauchery, last-minute eucatastrophe standing-in-the-pouring-rain moment, redemption in front of a live global audience of nearly two billion. There isn’t much insight, and since most of the members of Queen save front man Freddie Mercury are still with us and probably need placating if the movie was to secure song rights, it definitely plays softball with the challenges the group faced. It’s just thing happens, song, a different thing happens, song, Freddie comes out as gay, song happens, another song happens, Live Aid happens, roll credits.
The movie plays fast and loose with historical accuracy in the name of creating this cookie-cutter drama, inventing a break-up that never happened and moving Freddie’s AIDS diagnosis several years forward so that his “I’ve got to go and leave you all behind” lines from the song “Bohemian Rhapsody” at Live Aid carry greater weight.
I’m not joking about the Live Aid thing. The last 15 minutes of the movie is essentially a shot-for-shot reenactment of Queen’s 1985 Wembley performance. Which is available on YouTube for the princely sum of zero dollars, so frankly, why not just watch that?
It’s also a very narrowly-focused movie, with Queen apparently existing in a musical vacuum broken only in the last act by name-dropping everyone else who was at Live Aid (= everyone, basically). There is, for example, no mention of their collaboration with David Bowie on “Under Pressure”, whose first two bars give all 90s guys like me the shakes whenever we hear them on the radio—we know it could go one of two ways. You’re either in for a treat, or on a one-way elevator ride to audio hell.
So, distressing lack of Bowie. I ask for your thoughts and prayers during this difficult and Bowie-less time.
I believe that at times like these, it is traditional to leave a scathing Rotten Tomatoes review and then create a series of increasingly incoherent rants on YouTube, but I figured I’d put my thoughts out in the most impactful way possible. Cough.
The feeling it evokes is not-quite-nostalgia, as I don’t really remember Live Aid all that well, nor was I especially interested in Queen, but it’s more nostalgia for nostalgia, a feeling I’ve missed out by not being there, in the moment. It also evokes a feeling of why-the-hell-did-I-just-watch-this, given the depth is about as deep as the melody for “We Will Rock You” and the only thing that really stuck out were Freddie’s incisors.
It’s a fairly by-the-numbers rock bio, charting a familiar course of rise to fame, descent into debauchery, last-minute eucatastrophe standing-in-the-pouring-rain moment, redemption in front of a live global audience of nearly two billion. There isn’t much insight, and since most of the members of Queen save front man Freddie Mercury are still with us and probably need placating if the movie was to secure song rights, it definitely plays softball with the challenges the group faced. It’s just thing happens, song, a different thing happens, song, Freddie comes out as gay, song happens, another song happens, Live Aid happens, roll credits.
The movie plays fast and loose with historical accuracy in the name of creating this cookie-cutter drama, inventing a break-up that never happened and moving Freddie’s AIDS diagnosis several years forward so that his “I’ve got to go and leave you all behind” lines from the song “Bohemian Rhapsody” at Live Aid carry greater weight.
I’m not joking about the Live Aid thing. The last 15 minutes of the movie is essentially a shot-for-shot reenactment of Queen’s 1985 Wembley performance. Which is available on YouTube for the princely sum of zero dollars, so frankly, why not just watch that?
It’s also a very narrowly-focused movie, with Queen apparently existing in a musical vacuum broken only in the last act by name-dropping everyone else who was at Live Aid (= everyone, basically). There is, for example, no mention of their collaboration with David Bowie on “Under Pressure”, whose first two bars give all 90s guys like me the shakes whenever we hear them on the radio—we know it could go one of two ways. You’re either in for a treat, or on a one-way elevator ride to audio hell.
So, distressing lack of Bowie. I ask for your thoughts and prayers during this difficult and Bowie-less time.
I believe that at times like these, it is traditional to leave a scathing Rotten Tomatoes review and then create a series of increasingly incoherent rants on YouTube, but I figured I’d put my thoughts out in the most impactful way possible. Cough.
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