Bohemian Rhapsody (2018)

Elevator Pitch: A young man of Indian heritage, soon to be Freddie Mercury, gets together with a band whose singer has left and together they write songs and suffering from lack of progress he persuades them to sell off their van to pay for a recording session where they make an album. The album goes stratospheric and they go on tour round the world. Freddie gets engaged to an attractive young woman, despite casting longing glances at men going into public toilets. They record Bohemian Rapsody, but EMI do not want to release it, and worse the band begin to fall apart.

Content: If you don’t like to see men kissing you might be offended, but otherwise there is a bit of drinking, and they should have had smoking, but they forgot. We see the band recording and performing, and as time passes falling out, since the members do not like Freddy’s PA, a gay man who takes the singer down the wrong path. He spends time at home with his cats and communicates with his now former girl friend by turning a desk light on and off. Then despite having broken up they get together and agree that in the future they will be nice to each other, and perform at The Live Aid concert.

A View: Inevitably this film is to be compared with Rocket Man and Yesterday, and I don’t think it is as good as either, but initially I didn’t know why. It was well thought of by the critics and Rami Malek won best Actor at the Oscars. I’d give a bit of a shout out to “Fangs Ltd” the prosthetic teeth supplier. It turns out that the plot was more or less complete fiction, except for the actual music, making this a watch for anyone who thinks that what I have said here must be complete rubbish.

Additional Info: And it is obvious from the money that I am alone in my view, since for a production cost of about $50 million, it has returned $900 million in worldwide sales.