Bohemian Rhapsody
And Africa never starved again.
I liked Bohemian Rhapsody. It is the gay biopic that Behind the Candelabra wished I wished it was – full of musical numbers, parents saying you have to get a straight job, a fall, a comeback and lots of hugs at the end. There are suits telling them ‘you can’t do that!’, and a straight-laced accountant who secretly likes their music. All hedonism kept off-screen PG, which makes it loom larger in the mind. Hardly a great film, but a kind one.
That’s it on the film. Because I probably wouldn’t have liked one tenth as much if I hadn’t seen it in LightVibes™. I’m glad I didn’t see 12 Years a Slave on LightVibes™ or I would have liked it. What is LightVibes™, you ask, besides an excuse to repeatedly type option 2 in the dark, over and over? It is the greatest gimmick since The – ‘Ladies and gentlemen, please do not panic! But SCREAM! Scream for your lives’ – Tingler (registered trademark we hadn’t invented the trademark™ joke back then).
Having got a preview of this at a screening of Venom, I knew that I would be seeing Bohemian Rhapsody – during the preview, lights strobe and shine in your face during some, nay, nearly all of the film. There are lights in the dining room scene, huge flashing banks during scene in a tiny club scene. Lightning? Even the hint of a cloudy sky? It’s seizure inducing strobes ‘Я’ us. By the end credits, they turned the spotlights onto the audience. It’s you, the viewer: you are the real hero!
But it’s the beginning that really got me, this time putting it at the end, against my usual tradition. Having the spotlights of the 20th Century Slug, with that music that still hasn’t changed, in sync with real spotlights that are shining on you, everyone, across the whole auditorium. It’s how you imagined the logo when you first saw it as a kid, like after Star Wars, or better still, that weird TV show that featured only Fox movie clips when we were too stupid to know what shilling was. It is the feeling that you really could make a movie. At this point, the following occurred: