I've had an insanely busy week, and about the only not-duty thing I managed to relax was watching Bohemian Rhapsody on Amazon Prime. My utterly unoriginal take is that the critics were right, this is a by-the-numbers rock star biopic, and the best thing it has going for it is Rami Malek's performance as Freddie Mercury and, of course, the soundtrack. What I found more interesting than the film itself are some of the meta elements, such as the fact that Dexter Fletcher, who took over from Bryan Singer, shot the (far more enjoyable and daring to be less by the number) Elton John biopic Rocketman practically the same year, which must have made for a bit of a headspin, since John Reid, who managed both Elton John and Queen for a while, is firmly slotted into the heartless villain manager/bad boyfriend role in Rocketman, while in Bohemian Raphsody, he's mostly an alright chap, with the role of villain manager/bad boyfriend (though a different type of bad boyfriend) given to Paul Prenter.

The other meta thing has local connotations. As Freddie Mercury lived in Munich for six years, you better believe people in my town of residence were upset at the depiction of said years as Freddie hitting rock bottom, cut off from his true friends and living with parasites in a series of joyless orgies. (BTW: re: joyless orgies - more about this later.) Cue several people taking up the gauntlet and delivering, among other things: A defiant book ("Mercury in Munich - His Best Years") which got published this year, by Nicola Bardola, about which you can read more here, a "Freddie Mercury in Munich Memorial Tour" you can take with on Peter Ambacher, who back then was better known as transvestite artist Miss Piggy, and gets interviewed here, and brief docus on our state tv, such as this one ("Freddie Mercury - excentric, with an awesome voice, queer - and citizen of Munich") (i.e. "ein Münchner"):



For good measure, the city of Munich has named a street after Freddie Mercury, too. (Has London yet?)

A bit more seriously, it's not all affronted Munich pride, one thing the various people quoted agree on is that Freddie Mercury had his first long term relationship with a man there, not with Paul Prenter but with Winfried "Winnie" Kirchberger, who ran a restaurant at the Sebastianseck, and that he also had a meaningful long term relationship with actress Barbara Valentin. Now there are only so many people you can put into a two hour movie, so I don't think leaving several out is a problem as such, but Bohemian Rhapsody does lay itself open to charges of chickening out/being borderline homophobic by choosing to put the one gay relationship that's treated narratively positively, the one with Jim Hutton, at the very end of the movie, as opposed to presenting the relationship with Mary Austin in detail throughout the film, and presenting all other same-sex relationships as either negative (the one with Paul Prenter) or as part of the joyless orgy montage. The "joyless" part is important, I think. For a compare and contrast, take Russell T Davies' recent It's a Sin, which also presents the exploding hedonism of the late 70s but does it in a way that both shows the appeal and doesn't exclude the emotional connections between friends made during said time. In both cases, a main character ends up with AIDS, but Bohemian Rhapsody presents the wild times leading up to it as something Our Hero experiences in a daze and without any signs of enjoying himself, not to mention that he's brought there by A Bad Influence. (Also, casual hetero sex on the part of the straight Queen band members is suspiciously not happening when they're on tour; they're honest married men, you know!) Now the earlier mentioned Peter Ambacher lost his life partner to AIDS, too. He's still not talking about those years in Munich with regret or blame.

In conclusion: I didn't miss anything when not watching this on the big screen but waiting until it hit the streaming services. Still, good to hear those songs again. And the Highlander fan in me regrets that they missed out working It's a kind of magic into the soundtrack. :)