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Big balls of fire.
Photo: Orion Photos
I went to see Bohemian Rhapsody the day of the opening, against the advice of my critical friends, whose warnings of "mediocre!" had all been confused as a falsetto choir "Galileo". It's nothing but repairable fluff, they said. This is not an unlikely mess but far from transcendent, a superficial exercise to which is added only a particularly successful concert sequence and the performance of Rami Malek performed by Freddie Mercury – which deserves far better than any other recap of the old rock heading of biopic rock, fall and redemption. If Malek really attacks an Oscar, it's because he perseveres in front of the disconcerting and cumbersome heaviness of the film, as surely as he worked around these huge prostheses. My friends warned me that the movie looked like a group of occasions that amazed the corporate Christmas party.
I went anyway. Not because I'm a big fan of Queen. I certainly as Queen, I would be the first to admit that my knowledge is mainly limited to the big hits of the radio (so about 150 songs). I am aware of Freddie Mercury's tremendous idiosyncratic talent as a songwriter and director, as well as its lasting symbolic significance, as Malek points out in Mercury, the other unsuited in the depths of the room he gave so much courage to – but if I speak honestly, to me these guys were Lou Reed, David Bowie and Kurt Cobain. I did not really invest personally, which allowed me, I'm sure, to get rid of these early criticisms and move on. Bohemian Rhapsody without worrying that I am angry at his numerous omissions and inaccuracies, his confusion about chronology, or how he gives PG-13 a disinfected appearance to Mercury's private life. I did not go in spite of these events, but because of them, because "the mediocre musical biopic" is one of my favorite micro-genres of movie, just above with "blatant Goodfellas ripoff "and" films on the blocking of the author ".
I like the particular shock of huge ambitions and inherently disabling flaws, of how incredibly respectful and incredibly insulting they can be for their subjects. I especially like watching a movie that teases you with the idea that you thought you know the story and then you start in a story so predictable that Walking hard forever ruined more than a decade ago. I do not know why. I can not get enough.
It is possible that I am just conditioned this way. After all, "mediocre" seems to be the default for movies about musicians. There have certainly been exceptions: Ray and Walk on the linefor example (although it may be said that they have greatly benefited from the popularization of the formulas that everyone has tried to imitate – or to escape). Sid and Nancy and 24 hours of festive people (Although I would say that these two were more related to the scenes and their global philosophies, and to people really fucking). Todd Haynes's I am not here and Velvet gold (although they are less "biopics" than febrile dreams). I love and / or love all these movies. But I'm also always going to stop and watch Popular, resolutely resolving the life of Biggie Smalls, every time I pass the thread of my life. Ditto for one of dozens of "Movies That Rock" quality movies that VH1 produced in the late 90s and early in the year. (I have a particular affection for Too Legit: The Story of MC Hammer, where Romany Malco reveals the unexpected pathos of the video "Pumps and a Bump".) As I grew up, my burning crush on Winona Ryder meant that I would be constantly reliving Big balls of fire, where Dennis Quaid plays Jerry Lee Lewis as a kind of manic Daffy Duck and fucking cousin. My teenage room boasted a poster for Oliver Stone The doors, a ridiculous movie that I still love and that I will defend wholeheartedly for the way it faithfully reflects the monstrous and authoritarian and mythical pretense of Doors fans like me. Like with Bohemian RhapsodyAll of these movies can leave you with an understanding of their subjects inferior to the one you would have to fly over on Wikipedia. But for me, their charms are as undeniable as they are ineffable, even though I'm trying to erase them now.
This is probably very easy to explain: they are not very good films that try to be very difficult – they try desperately to be worthy of their subjects, but they come short, which makes them fundamentally entertaining. I do not need to enter the various hierarchies of superiority at play here, but there is a special joy to watch a movie star trying to be a rock star who ends up embarrassing them. I'm not particularly proud of this, but it pleases my little insignificant lizard brain. In the same way, watching a famous character play a famous character, recreate events that the story told us happened, but are just too meaningful to look totally real. There is no way to stage a scene "John meets Yoko" that is not as fictional as a wax museum, for example. (Although it certainly did not stop them from trying.)
In these moments, the mediocre biopic of music tends to look into skidding, often building entire scenes around nothing more than a famous rock star shaking hands with another historical figure. while pronouncing his full name aloud. And finally, there is the purest pleasure of this word that the critics like to launch as a lamentable eulogy: "observable". Is there anything more "observable" than a biopic of someone we already know? There is just something so pleasantly soothing to see these rhythms play, like feeding an old favorite TV show. Oooh, that's the episode where Biggie meets Tupac! I love the way their bow unfolds! (And as a secondary note to Ryan Murphy: I would look forward to a series of anthologies in which each episode was dedicated to a musician, whose story was reduced to the most salient and sensational elements. )
But I think the main reason I'm attracted to the mediocre music biopic is that I know from personal experience that most of today's bands are incredibly boring. Over the past 25 years, I've spent a lot of time with musicians – interviewing, dating, even playing, recording and touring in certain bands. And I can tell you with confidence that, for example, 95% of them would be dreadful movie subjects. Being a musician is a monotonous process focused on waiting: waiting to go to the concert, waiting for the sound control, waiting for the moment to play, waiting to start making money. Even the documentaries of the most legendary groups in history, your Stones and your Beatles, are largely dominated by scenes where someone is laying a tambourine while someone else is watching, the expression of their faces suggesting that they prefer him vaguely to a desk job. Of course, there are the highs on stage and the occasional splinters of glamor behind the scenes. There are drug fights with your group mates and even sudden and tragic deaths, all of which can create moments of real narrative tension. But it's mostly overdubs and cigarette breaks, and discussions about where to have lunch.
The mediocre musical biopic, however, reduces everything to a manageable, melodramatic size. This preserves the illusion. This gives you a hugely successful package filled with extravagant lip synchronization, interspersed with ridiculously fast trajectories and Shakespeare in lovestyle, a nod to the future that even the most casual fans can appreciate. (If your only knowledge of the queen goes through Wayne's Worldthen Bohemian Rhapsody to you.) And to his credit, Bohemian Rhapsody engages in the reality of the creative process more than some, by staging scenes where the band goes methodically in lyrical falsettos, for example, or in another where John Deacon (Joe Mazzello) discovers for the first time the bassline strutting from "Another One". Bites the Dust "while the group puts aside its quarrels, briefly united by its undeniable attraction. Maybe it did not happen exactly like that, but it still reflects how the disparate members of Queen do not really belong, but are still miraculously welded into songs – and emphasize the point with much more elegance than any scenes where someone a straight one says it.
Nevertheless, in the end, we know much more about the lower part of Deacon than Deacon himself – or any of the other members of Queen, by the way, aside from their state of nervousness at Mercury. Or, in fact, anything that does not correspond directly to the musical sequences of the film's jukebox or to the simplified narrative of Mercury's struggles against sexuality and its terrible loneliness. "These are the intermediate moments," sighs Mercury, Malek's male. "I find them intolerable." The film agrees, accelerating through these valleys as if it were fast forwarding a Queen's tape. The biggest tubes. In defiance of all that is not one of these great moments, the film itself is reduced to a hollow and mediocre size.
Again, if you are personally invested in the story of Queen or Freddie Mercury, you may be taken aback by the way it collapses and confuses or even misrepresents the thing – not to mention the way he totally ignores much of his story for five years. life in the end there. But in reality, each biopic struggles to find meaning in storytelling in the messy complexities of a life, and every biopicist, in particular, is forced to transform the primarily internal, often tedious, process of creation into a task that never is not boring. On the screen. I think the biopic of the musician is the hardest. After all, there is no subject as big as life, as incredibly personal to many, as the musician. You go up naturally in these movies with your guard, protecting what their music and themselves mean, so sure that the movie will not do it justice – sure no matter how good an actor's performance, they will never to become their. Who could ever? Malek is phenomenal, but it's not Freddie Mercury. It is not even he who sings!
And in these preconceived notions, the mediocre musical biopic gives you reason, and in its way, it is a relief. It gives you cheap highs and maybe cheaper laughter, but it reminds you how special the subject was – and it will remain so. This leaves a margin, a margin of maneuver so that the truth remains elusive and so that the myth continues. And if you're like me, you like it for that.
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