Radio A ma

Rating: 4/10 (5 February 2020)

"Radio Gaga", the lead single and track from Queen's 1984 album "The Works" peaked at #16 on the Billboard Hot 100. Although "Body Language"(#11) and "Under Pressure"(#29) both charted, the album "Hot Space" was not critically well-received. "I Want to Break Free", the follow-up single to "Radio Ga Ga", despite being mid-tempo ear candy to the rest of the world, the exceedingly radio-friendly song, written by bassist John Deacon, stalled at #45, the last time Queen, fronted by the late Freddie Mercury, ever came close to further cultivating their status as American radio mainstays and stateside hitmakers. The music video which accompanied "I Want to Break Free" made them non-grata to disc jockeys and more importantly, MTV, alike. The music industry preferred the lead singer's personal politics to remain latent. Ironically, it was drummer Roger Taylor's idea that the whole band go drag for the fateful video shoot, a parody of "Coronation Street", a BBC soap opera, but MTV gave "I Want to Break Free" little support, effectively turning this highly-successful London band into dinosaurs, a nostalgia act that could coast all the way to the bank, getting by with playing all their old hits from yesteryear. But on the other side of the Atlantic, Queen's popularity never wavered. "Bohemian Rhapsody", directed by Bryan Singer, ends prematurely with their legendary Live Aid performance at Wembley, as if Freddy Mercury(Raim Malek), diagnosed with the HIV virus, died shortly after the world was fed in 1985. The show, however, went on for another six years. Longtime Queen fans will be distracted by the filmmaker's decision to play fast and loose with the timeline, like a Brian May guitar solo. Dramatizing the relative malaise of late-period Queen("A Kind of Magic" and "The Miracle") would have been difficult, but surely, time compression could have made allowances for their final recording sessions that resulted in the formation of "Innuendo", the band's swan song. Rock me, Farrokh Bulsara still had six more years of being a "virtuoso" and "rock idol" left in the tank. Why stop him now?
On a daily basis, Tom Hulce practiced the piano upwards to five or six hours, prep work that he diligently maintained in preparation for his career-making role as 18th century Viennese superstar Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in Milos Forman's 1984 adaptation of the Paul Shaffer play "Amadeus". That's really him playing "Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor" upside down on his back. More than once, "Bohemian Rhapsody" alludes to the 1985 Academy Award winner for Best Picture, by positioning Freddie Mercury as man of prodigious talent with a god-given ability for musical transcendence. "Somebody to Love" from "A Day in the Races"(1976), anyone? And very close behind: "Bohemian Rhapsody", a six-plus-minute quasi-opera which would become the centerpiece of Queen's fourth album "A Night at the Opera", makes an aural cameo when pre-fame Freddie, sharing a modest flat with Mary Austin(Lucy Boynton), his girlfriend, plays the opening notes in their bed, just like Mozart, upside down at a costume party, a flamboyant party, the same bacchanal ones that Mercury would someday throw in his mansion. It's possible, sure, that Mercury started work, as a germ of an idea, on the film's namesake prior to being signed, but since the filmmaker uses his artistic license to manipulate chronological time for maximum dramatic effect, we have our doubts. "Bohemian Rhapsody" has a musical maturity that is leaps and bounds ahead of "Keep Yourself Alive" and "Doing All Right"(both from their s/t debut), songs that predate Queen and the addition of bassist John Deacon(Joseph Mazzello), when May and Roger Taylor(Ben Hardy) were still playing dive pubs as Smile. Sounding not unlike William Miller(Patrick Fugit), just before he crosses over from fan to player, in Cameron Crowe's "Almost Famous", Freddie, a groupie, more or less, ingratiates himself to Brian and Roger, when after a gig, he approaches them in the parking lot, flattering his future bandmates by knowing their names and something about Smile. He replaces Tim Staffel(Jack Roth), who just quit. This part of the story checks out. What doesn't check out is that they'd play "Fat Bottomed Girls"(which wouldn't appear until 1978's "Jazz") on their first American tour, and suggesting that the disco-fueled "Another One Bites the Dust" appeared on "Hot Space"(1982) instead of "The Game"(1980), their best-selling album. Most egregious of all is the complete fabrication of Queen walking out on EMI, based on the flimsy and ludicrous premise that Ray Foster(Michael Myers), the label's head honcho, wanted to release "You're My Best Friend" instead of "Bohemian Rhapsody" as the lead single. Mercury, the genius, treats the fictional executive like a mediocrity: Antonio Salieri to his Mozart.
"Amadeus" got it wrong, too. Antonio Salieri(F. Murray Abraham), the court composer for Emperor Joseph II(Jeffrey Jones) was far from the patron saint of mediocrity that Milos Forman makes him out to be. The penultimate sequence in "Amadeus" is bogus. Salieri transcribes Mozart's "Requiem" as the great composer notably grows increasingly sick from overwork, burning the midnight oil until his fire goes out at first dawn's early rise. That's not the truth. As Penny Lane(Kate Hudson) would say: "Isn't it funny? The truth just sounds different." Mozart and Salieri weren't friends, but they certainly weren't rivals either. The truth about Freddie Mercury was that he lived with AIDS for two years prior to finishing work on "Innuendo" in November '90. "Bohemian Rhapsody" misses out on the inherent drama and pathos of Mercury singing, possibly for the last time, "The Show Must Go On", the band's seventh and last single from their fourteenth and final album.
The show did go on after Live Aid, but for whatever reason, "Bohemian Rhapsody" ends with a false happy ending, a real bum note.