ESCAPE FROM REALITY

MOVIE
Bohemian Rhapsody
Rami Malek, Lucy Boynton
Review Ray Chan

Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?
    Viewers will have to make up their own minds about this biopic on Freddie Mercury, which promises a retelling of the life of the Queen frontman, but strangely delivers a healthy dose of false news as it does so.
    We meet Rami Malek, fitted with rabbity prosthetic buck teeth, as Farrokh Bulsara unloading luggage from planes. Within minutes he has upset his staunch Zanzibari family with his penchant for the night life, charmed his way into a struggling band of blokes with little personality, accidentally snapped his mic stand in half and thereby creating his trademark singing posture, named himself after a Roman god, and taken a slightly soporific girlfriend Mary Austin (Lucy Boynton) who will conclude he’s not heterosexual in the slightest, well before he does.
    The rise of the band is depicted with the same dizzying speed, as the newly coronated Queen starts to gain fame with its brand of glitzy, glamour rock. 
    The story takes an odd liberty with the facts when it reveals the group's first break was in the US, where among the songs it would play in live shows would be the cheeky Fat-Bottomed Girls, in reality a hit long after Queen had already been established as a bona fide star act.
    All in all, the band’s incandescent moments are duly brought out, from the operatic trills invoking Galileo and Bismillah, to the bassy throb of Another One Bites the Dust. But along the way, as Freddie and companions bitch and bicker and rock and roll, the general malaise in the way cliches are thrown in and character stereotypes are portrayed leads to a sense of indifference as to what might be turning up next.
    Michael Myer plays a nice part, looking like a dishevelled Jeff Lynne and is almost unrecognisable. He gives himself away with a classic one-liner, so watch out for it. There's also a moment when the screen swims with print, highlighting various cities and countries that the band played in as their fame spreads throughout the globe. Guess which Australian city is the only one that gets a mention.
    The movie tends to romp along inconsistently, spending too much time on inconsequential events and far too little on the issues of real interest.  Mercury’s complicated sexuality is left almost entirely off-screen and the rest of the band are merely musicians with mullets who have no charisma. 
    Almost the entire first half of the movie is dedicated to his love story with Austin, but his relationships with eventual life partner Jim Hutton (Aaron McCusker) is basically a footnote.
    On other hand, Mercury's first proper gay lover, roadie Paul Prenter, is given far more screen time, and he essentially ends up as the movie's villain.
    The most flagrant bit of inaccuracy strikes Mercury down with AIDS two years before he was actually infected, simply to enable the script to position the band’s triumph at Live Aid as his resurrection. We Are The Champions indeed.
    The Wembley set, performed faithfully and in its full glory, is set up as a redemptive climax from the start of the movie, and to be fair, Malek pulls off an impressive facsimile of  pouts, yells, cheeky banter and calisthenic struts. It's clearly the highlight  of the movie and could make up for any of its shortcomings if the viewer is generous.
    By the way, did you know that every band member composed at least one of the group's anthem songs? While Mercury wrote the band's magnum opus and the equally grandiose Somebody To Love, bass guitarist John Deacon contributed Another One Bites the Dust and I Want To Break Free, drummer Roger Taylor was primarily responsible for Radio Ga Ga  and A Kind Of Magic, while lead guitarist Brian May came up with We Will Rock You and the searing Hammer To Fall. Eventually, the band decided that all compositions, no matter who wrote them, would be jointly credited to all four members, a fact the movie did get correct.
    Freddie Mercury was certainly one of the first out-and-proud gay artists who attained mass popularity, and his story deserves to be told truthfully and told well. Queen's music lives on to this day, and merits discovery by a younger audience who never even heard of the Beatles. This movie might achieve the second part, if not the first.

#bohemianrhapsody

CHECK IN FOR A GOOD TIME AT THE EL ROYALE

MOVIE
Bad Times at the El Royale
Jeff Bridges, Cynthia Erivo, Dakota Johnson, Jon Hamm, Chris Hemsworth
Director: Drew Goddard
Review Ray Chan

If you don’t know Drew Goddard, you’ll surely know of his works such as TV’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Lost, and the eerie The Cabin in the Woods, which looked at events from a deconstructionist perspective, an approach he takes to another level in his second movie, the noir Bad Times at the El Royale.
    It gathers a group of strangers in the lavish motel which straddles the California/Nevada border, once home to the stars but now, in the late 60s, fallen on hard times.
    The front desk is unoccupied when guests start turning up: Laramie Seymour Sullivan (Jon Hamm), a travelling salesman; Darlene Sweet (Cynthia Erivo), a young black aspiring singer; Father Daniel Flynn (Jeff Bridges), an avuncular yet addled Indiana priest; and a wordly-wise mystery woman in sunglasses (Dakota Johnson). A young clerk, Miles (Lewis Pullman), eventually emerges from the maintenance closet and rooms are duly assigned.
    Once that setting is established, the viewer is enticed by the promise of good times at the Bad Times, as each person, much like in most accomplished mystery offerings, has something to hide. The rooms are all surreptitiously monitored via one-way mirrors, which provides Goddard the means of presenting the backstory of each occupant.
    The movie is broken into chapters, each named for a room number (or maintenance closet), and often ending with a surprise reveal about the guests.  The plot keeps on thickening, with new details and possibilities arriving at a frantic pace.
    The way everyone’s stories mingle and merge while redolent songs play in the background evokes memories of Tarantino offerings that twist and turn and tell tales from different perspectives which have to be pastiched together to make sense. But this film is one that’s more interested in telling an entertaining story than in being mysteriously aloof. Goddard gives much screen time to each character, thereby keeping the audience in suspense as to who the main protagonist is.
    The story takes a turn when Chris Hemsworth, playing a cult leader, arrives on the scene. He plays a solid enough role, but his accent, drifting between Australian, English and forced American, can prove to be irritating, particularly as his enunciation has often left much to be desired.
    Bridges, Jones and Pullman are the outstanding actors here, pulling off their roles with passion, panache and pulchitrude. But despite their performances, and the potential shown in the first half hour, there’s a slightly disappointing end to the movie, likely because there is no central theme to link the disparate threads, while others may feel the conclusion is unsatisfactory as it appears to let the bad guys win.
    Ultimately, while the audience may be kept on the edge of their seats expecting the twisted journey to reach a memorable destination, they may feel that as it turns out, the trip to the El Royale itself was the main focus all along.

#BadTimesAtTheElRoyale