Bohemian Rhapsody (Bryan Singer / Dexter Fletcher)

[transmogrifier]

It's better than The Lion King at least.

[Dukefrukem]

It's better than The Lion King at least.

Dude, there is NOTHING that exists on this planet that is animated better than the Lion King.

[MadMan]

It's better than The Lion King at least.

Hell nah.

[Neclord]

This thread is a fucking rollercoaster

[Henry Gale]

A definitive ranking:

1. Queen's catalogue
2. The Little Mermaid
3. The Lion King
4. Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
5. The average Bryan Singer movie, particularly those with the letter "X" in their title
6. Straight Outta Compton
7. A Quiet Place (A good movie!)
8. The rest of the music biopics mentioned (Though really, who knows what I'd think of Ray and Walk The Line now)

n/a: This movie. I just ain't seen it.

[Dukefrukem]

The The Little Mermaid can't be better than the Lion King because The Little Mermaid story doesn't make any sense.

[Spinal]

Animated films I have seen from 1994 ranked:

1. Pom Poko
2. The Lion King

That is all.

[Irish]

"A Hard Day's Night," "Tommy," and "Truth or Dare" are world's better than any recent equivalents. (Maybe they're not pure biopics but then they're probably more honest about the bands and the music than most films labeling themselves as such.)

Also: I've read through the thread twice and I still don't understand how you all jumped from Queen to "The Little Mermaid" without breaking stride.

[Henry Gale]

"A Hard Day's Night," "Tommy," and "Truth or Dare" are world's better than any recent equivalents. (Maybe they're not pure biopics but then they're probably more honest about the bands and the music than most films labeling themselves as such.)

I agree, which is kind of why, despite it's apparent outrage and him now no longer being with us to have any guiding hand in it, I'm more interested (if morbidly) in this week's news about whatever this Prince jukebox musical movie may be over something that's trying to be THE STORY OF PRINCE: SQUEEZED INTO TWO HOURS.

The core music will still be great even if the movie around it isn't (similar to, say, Across The Universe, where I think some of the versions are really inspired and make the clunkiness of its surroundings more worthwhile), and a potentially bad movie with Prince music is still one I'd rather see than a bad movie without that.

There is also the grey area with biopic movies like Bohemian Rhapsody and especially Straight Outta Compton where the surviving group members' involvement seems more like a tailoring of their own self-mythology, largely choosing the story they most want to leave of themselves (now no longer making new music and more set on preserving the integrity of an estate or merchandising and streaming numbers) over the one that's best or most truthful. But at the same time after someone's passing you'll potentially have the family/estate refusing life rights or key music rights (like that Andre 3000 movie where he played Hendrix, but Hendrix never played Hendrix songs) so perhaps the genre is largely a fruitless, lose-lose endeavour.

That may be why my favourite artist-driven, musical films tend to be when the artist largely loses themselves and their real-world image to ingnite an album of theirs with the visual medium (The Wall, Purple Rain, Yellow Submarine, your aforementioned Tommy) or even in some cases still doing that while also abstractly telling a story that deconstructs themselves amongst it all (All That Jazz, The Monkees' Head, Kanye's Runaway, Lemonade.... obviously Spice World).

Also: I've read through the thread twice and I still don't understand how you all jumped from Queen to "The Little Mermaid" without breaking stride.

Ahaha.. Obviously the list was only semi-serious, as it feels impossible to actually want to compare such radically different things (I considered calling it "A definitive that everyone will agree with and not arguw further"), but the general sentiments are true, which is that I think Queen's music is better than most things, and that The Little Mermaid is better than most movies.

[Grouchy]

The Little Mermaid was never one of my favorite Disney flicks while growing up. The Lion King is an absolute classic and a childhood landmark.

[Peng]

Maybe it's because I'm not much of a music guy -- although my father is an avid one so I heard enough Queens growing up to get some contact high from these songs -- but the Live Aid sequence, though the high point of the film, feels like not enough compensation for other biopic bullshit we have to endure up to that point. And even then, it's undercut by distracting crowd CGI and some truly lame cutaways from Malek's fun physical performance, with the worst being Mike Myers' lonesome callback shot. Malek is almost downright bad during the first third, where he seems as distracted by those enormous fake teeth as many of us. He gets better as the film goes along, but doesn't come fully into his own until the final look, where he deepens a bit all the way to that committed Live Aid performance.

The controversies around Bohemian Rhapsody and Green Book feel like they have developed in tandem, and now that I saw both, it's striking how similarly confused the films are about integral part of their subjects (sexuality, race), and how that seems born out of who get to tell the stories (other band members here, white counterpart there). Even without knowing anything beforehand about who has story input, I am amazed at how sanctimonious some other band members brazenly comes off as here, especially Brian May, compared to Freddie Mercury the main troublemaker. The scene where they are at a party, offered drugs from Mercury, but turn it down because it's "late" and they need to get home with their wives is such a hilarious "sure, jan" moment of unnecessary retroactive insistence that I'm completely taken out of the film. The film veers like this between trite biopic mode and misguided characterization so much that its choppy filmmaking might be under-talked about, but there must be special mention to those unbelievably tacky Microsoft Word text effect, which is used not once but twice for location montages. Shit's embarrassing, man. 4/10

[Morris Schæffer]

Well, I guess I found this completely not boring and even rousing by the end. Perhaps it doesn't quite dig deep enough into Mercury's life, but it works as a celebration of the band and the music I think.
Rami Malek is great and to think I first saw him as a bit part terrorist in 24.

This is a better best picture nominee than Black Panther.

[Peng]

Of the nominees, I found it the worst while Black Panther's the best.

[Grouchy]

So far I've only seen the nominees that start with a "B" and I'd rank them:

1. Black Panther
2. BlackKKlansman
3. Bohemian Rhapsody

The Spike Lee joint loses some points with me for sugar-coating the real life story too much but it's still a very good movie.

[Ivan Drago]

I'm really regretting giving this the mildest of yays because it keeps getting worse the more I think about it. Can I change my vote, or should I see it again just to be fair?

[

Show Spoiler

Please don't make me watch it again.

]

[Ezee E]

This is close to terrible. Shocked that even the general public is apparently liking it. It takes two hours to get to the Live Aid performance which works, but it's such a repeat of previous movies, and the teeth are so distracting that it's almost caricature.

Seeing this thread turn from discussion of the movie to The Little Mermaid makes sense, because there's nothing really to discuss here.

[Mal]

I don't care for The Lion King

[Dukefrukem]

I don't care for The Lion King

[transmogrifier]

I don't care for The Lion King

You’re my kind of people. Most overrated animated film by a long way.

[Skitch]

You’re my kind of people. Most overrated animated film by a long way.

Oh, I'm soooo on this island with you fine chaps. Fuck that movie.

[Rico]

I saw it. It sucked. Between this, Ray, Straight Outta Compton, Walk the Line, and I Saw the Light, I've determined that the music biopic is my least favorite kind of film. Love and Mercy is an outlier and the structure is a great help.

I kinda dug The Runaways biopic, but mostly because of Michael Shannon's supporting role.

[Dukefrukem]

Watching this I can't help think what Sasha Baren Cohen would have done with it.

[Morris Schæffer]

Watching this I can't help think what Sasha Baren Cohen would have done with it.

I think he may have fitted Mercury's physiognomy more than Malek who looks a bit like a bug.

[Philip J. Fry]

[Dukefrukem]

I saw several people tweet about that scene and I honestly, even after watching this video, don't even think it's that bad.

When I think of bad editing I think of this