Bohemian Rhapsody (2018)

Bohemian Rhapsody is not just for fans of rock star icons Freddie Mercury and Queen, but it mainly is. I can speak with some authority as someone who isn't one. I'm sure some of the dazzling scenes here were lost on me, but others were rousing and a lot of fun, and I always appreciated the '70s rock star ambience. Admittedly, I may have been too hard on Queen in the past because I thought the only thing they ever did that mattered was the novelty "Bohemian Rhapsody" (not coincidentally the name of this picture). The song is a lengthy, intricate, and wonderful pop confection and it's exciting to see it worked out here across scenes of studio recording. I do wish they had just let the whole song rip at some point, the whole six minutes in all its glory, but apparently there was no time for that in a movie that runs over two hours. A good part of the "Bohemian Rhapsody" excerpt we see was also decorated with a score-settling barrage of bad notices from critics in the '70s. Well, fair enough. Like many a star in the hardcore pop firmament—Mariah Carey, Billy Joel, Chicago, Olivia Newton-John, and Celine Dion are names that come to mind—Queen has long been something of a mystery to me outside of the top 40 (and often within it) and I have more often been on the side of the harsher judgments. But you can't deny the love of the people, not least because it's a recurring feature in this movie, CGI-enhanced or otherwise. Queen fans might make this movie a hit yet via sheer willpower. A certain strong suit is the biography of Freddie Mercury, born Farrokh Bulsara of Parsi descent in Zanzibar and raised in England, an interesting and complex story that was all new to me. Also recommending Bohemian Rhapsody is the performance of Rami Malek (Mr. Robot) as Mercury, bug-eyed and full of sparkling wonder with a looming overbite and sheer electric confidence. I liked Freddie Mercury during this movie more than I ever have, perhaps because it's the first time he's ever felt genuine, perhaps because it was still very hard during his lifetime to live openly as gay. But Malek might be effectively as charismatic as Mercury here. He certainly won me over. I also have to say I enjoyed the movie's versions of what I had previously written off as sports anthems ("We Will Rock You" and "We Are the Champions")—pretty good stuff, yeah. On the downside, the movie starts slow, loses its way in the middle, makes up shit for dishonest dramatic purposes, and is generally about 40 minutes too long, until finally reaching a heroic finish with a reenactment of the band's 20-minute set at Live Aid in 1985. That finish, and maybe an hour or so of Mercury's story, are good for anyone who cares about '70s rock. The rest is for Queen fans.

The French Powder Mystery (1930)

My experience with Ellery Queen mysteries has not ranged so broad, but I'm sure I've read one or two I liked pretty well. This is not one of them. It's only the second collaboration between the two Brooklyn cousins who traveled under the Ellery Queen pseudonym, Frederic Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee (also pseudonyms, but they really were cousins from Brooklyn), and it shows where their first priorities lay: constructing an intricate mystery, specifically, the "locked-room." It is essentially a novelization of a logic problem, a puzzle type for which I've never had much interest (or capability). It is filled with useless and pointless knowledge and uninteresting characters, who are uniformly if randomly "grinning," like lights on a Christmas tree, blinking on and off to indicate ... something? There is surprisingly little recognizable human behavior here—let alone police procedure, which matters when one of your main characters (the father of the amateur sleuth and our hero Ellery Queen) is a high-ranking police investigator. Dannay and Lee are plainly proud of what they have wrought here—their first effort, The Roman Hat Mystery, had been a big hit the year before. They issue a challenge to readers directly, just before the last chapter and infinitely tiresome Big Reveal, to make their guesses and/or forever hold their peace. At which point I might have been seen yawning. I did try my usual Perry Mason "n - 1" formula (the character I judge second-unlikeliest to have "dunit," admittedly not that accurate, because I am always completely lost in these things less than halfway along). But I was wrong. The culprit was a character who never meant anything to me in the least. In fact, that was true of most of the 30-odd characters (as found in a useless list at the front). Most of the rest I actively did not like, including especially Ellery Queen himself, who is a diaper-soiling version of Sherlock Holmes—a character I like, with human qualities. I've got another one of these so-called "nationality" mysteries by Queen to try (The Dutch Shoe Mystery) but I am proceeding with caution. As I say, I remember encountering both good and bad Ellery Queen books many years ago. If only I could remember the titles of the good ones, alas....

In case it's not at the library.

Peace Love Death Metal (2004)

I was drawn to the Eagles of Death Metal by the name, of course, which sets out to locate its sound at the intersection of "Peaceful Easy Feeling" and Celtic Frost. Who doesn't like that? But the deal was really sealed for me by the participation of Josh Homme, which brought me on board in the first place. Homme's other project, the Queens of the Stone Age, had won me over big-time with a great show in 2000 that made me a fan for life. Jesse Hughes, the other principal in EDM, has the presence to match up against the formidable QOTSA strains Homme brings and turn them in another direction entirely. You may not even be aware how well you already know this album yourself, as it managed to make itself something of a licensing paradise in the middle of last decade, used in television commercials for Ask.com, Budweiser, Comcast, Nissan, Payless ShoeSource, Pontiac, and Wendy's, as well as in movies (Grindhouse, Thank You for Smoking) and video games and more (thank you, Wikipedia). Through the welter of nicknames printed in the accompanying materials and spoken in the tracks—"the Devil," "J. Devil Huge," "Mr. Boogie Man," "Carlo von Sexron," "Baby Duck"—it's a lot of whipping-hard throbbing three-minute grooves crisscrossed with strange aching moments of balladry, 14 songs altogether in 42 minutes. In retrospect, not much "death metal" here after all, but lots of little surprises: Hughes's Al Wilson wannabe falsetto, the open spaces and textures of the rhythm section, which pound but paradoxically do so with a light touch. In many ways it's all there in the New Wave style inclination toward the one defining cover, in this case Stealers Wheel's "Stuck in the Middle," which they redub "Stuck in the Metal." Hughes also brings a lot of elfin energy to the enterprise, in his coy asides ("I am so lucky to be playing with this drummer right now!") and the furrowed-brow seriousness that seems to attend him. Formally it's just the two of them, but when they perform they make a point of rounding it up to the usual 2 guitars bass drums. For his part, Homme appears happy playing the supporting role for Hughes, whose personality rattles all through everything here. Homme's guitar is the glorious instrument he has always made of it, a beast poised for one's throat. Maybe better get those feet moving, pardner.

David Bowie, "Queen Bitch" (1971)

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David Bowie calls out Bob Dylan and Andy Warhol by name elsewhere on the 1971 Hunky Dory album, but on "Queen Bitch," buried in the middle of the vinyl LP side 2, he more circumspectly absorbs the anthemic Velvet Underground from "I'm Waiting for the Man" through "Sweet Jane," setting guitarist Mick Ronson loose to rampage. Forty years later it sounds like history being made. Ronson does not let us down: he is efficient, sassy, economical, and brilliant, from the stuffed-up textures of his chords to the way he makes them move to the ease with which he switches over and peals off riffs. This has always been the rockin'est track on what is otherwise essentially a folk-rock album, though one with the future unmistakably stitched into its DNA, busy carrying glam-rock to term, as we see now. "Queen Bitch" is the lark, the place to vent energy; it's also where everything collapsed and crystallized into a vision of sound that would echo through T. Rex, Mott the Hoople, Slade, and a few hundred more. The song appears to be there on the album simply for the pleasure and the kick of cutting loose and somehow it became the embodiment of everything, spidery and nimble, caustic and gossipy, high-pitched with a bottom that moves like cartoon zoo animals, reveling in its outré even as it signals its limits, shrugs its shoulders, plays on. It leaps fully formed and wants to take you for a dance. It doesn't care how you dress, it's going to laugh at the way you dress. You can move or you can stand still in awe of it. Up to you.

72. Queens of the Stone Age, "Feel Good Hit of the Summer" (2000)

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Including this song is more or less the direct result of witnessing a top-tier show from this pack of desert animals, which closed with it, as I recall, shortly before the lengthy encores began. Or maybe it was one of the encore selections—it's somewhat fuzzy now. The song is rated R, like the album from which it comes, for references to drug use, which are bracingly explicit: "Nicotine, valium, vicodin, marijuana, ecstasy, and alcohol / Cocaine" is the sum total of the lyric sheet. The two lines are repeated several times. Like the best of their stuff it attacks with a fuzzy bass and lock-solid rhythm section, with noisy guitars providing the propulsion as required (furiously pumping chords on a piano would not be unwelcome in this mess either, if that helps you picture it any better). I always liked the formula, but what I didn't realize until I saw them was how transcendent such racket could be, which I credit to the cement-tight grooves. They are stern masters indeed, and there is little for it but to loosen and flail. Good times, good times. For the intellectuals, it poses an interesting selection of mix-and-match highs, particularly when the various cultural baggage is taken into account. On the other hand, down in the trenches, the mixing and matching is not about the cultural baggage but about the highs, amirite? Looking over my list I suddenly notice that there are a fair number of drug songs appearing; this won't be the last by a wide margin. I'm not sure what this says or doesn't say about me. I will say I have sampled the named substances, sometimes in combination, but some not since the '70s, and a couple only since the '90s, so it seems a bit of an odd list in that way. But who is thinking about lists at a time like this?

Rated R (2000)

"Feel Good Hit of the Summer" The last time I saw a truly great show was Queens of the Stone Age on the last Saturday night of an October, touring on this. I met my friends late, or we all dribbled in. People were wearing masks and costumes. The opening band was OK. Waiting for the headliner, the floor steadily filling as people moved forward and jockeyed for position, I got into an argument with a friend who told me he was going to vote for George W. Bush. I couldn't even begin to imagine. After ten or fifteen minutes of it a mutual friend stepped in and judiciously endorsed Dubya's social security privatization scheme. Back then, Republicans still talked about "privatization" because it still tested well. First guy: Furthermore, Al Gore too socialist. My whole world turned upside down. The millennium -- it was here. Then the Queens came on and opened with "Nicotine, valium, vicodin, marijuana, ecstasy and alcohol"; the aroma of baking opened up around us on all sides with hippie-style sharing of wares. The roar emanating stageward pounded as seductive as it was bruising. All you had to do was feel it. Dancing desperately to the beguiling, insistent throb immediately became the order of the night. The joy felt visceral and deep-red, as if one had just survived a disaster, something in the desert. Something that came from the desert.

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