Oddly, I felt like actually showing the whole Live Aid performance detracted from the film. Woulda been neat if they closed with the opening shot of Freddie appearing before the massive crowd, then just let folks check the real performance on YouTube, where it’s lovingly rendered as is.

No, nor Highlander, sadly. I was hoping Thomas Jane could appear as Christopher Lambert.

Naturally. Who else but someone born in 1998 would love They Might Be Giants (formed 1982, commercial peak 1990), Radiohead (formed 1985, first album 1993), Belle & Sebastian (formed 1996), the Hold Steady (formed 2003),

They say people are most attached to the music they listened to when they were teenagers, but not…

I’m motivated to rock harder when the audience are ursine.

I’d like to imagine a scene where Brian May objects to doing the soundtrack because the script has Zarkov mention the Beatles. “Why not Queen?”

Welcome Back Otter, I love you! But we only have fourteen hours to save the Earth!

“Freddie, I love you but we only have 14 hours to write and produce this song!”

And written in rehearsal rooms that are the band-biop equivalent of the 90s NYC apartment. Real bands rehearse in a dimly-lit cinderblock warehouse space the size of a broom closet, stinking of cigarettes, bear, and piss, with scraps of discarded carpeting on the walls and am ancient sunn ((o)) mixer with two…

Songwriting in movies is always ridiculous. The songs invariably spring forth fully formed and note perfect. A Star is Born actually has one of the more egregious examples of the trope.

a lengthy scene where EMI executive Ray Foster (Mike Myers) explains in no uncertain terms that he will not allow such an overlong monstrosity to be released as a single

Good point. They’re the clear influence on The Darkness, but that’s such an homage/direct copy that it doesn’t count. No one’s really taken them as something to build on, although I suppose Paranoid Android is kind of a dark reflection of Bohemian Rhapsody.

My most important question is not answered in this review: Does the film cover the writing and recording of the Flash Gordon soundtrack?!

i wish i could figure out how to block “2345678.com” cause this is ridiculous

I believe he quit a different Mercury biopic because the producers wanted to focus mostly on how the band dealt with his death and regrouped.

If it couldn’t fit on one side of a 45, it couldn’t really be considered a “single.” Yeah, there a lots of songs that were released in edited versions so you could buy a song without buying an album, and if it’s long ENOUGH you’d put it on both sides (“American Pie” was a hugely popular “single” but it was annoying as …

HE SAID HE LOOKS JUST LIKE MERCURY!

It was a particularly bad case of someone being cut in half.

I’m not. I’m getting auto-redirected after opening an article.

If only more people had seen WALK HARD in theatres...

There’s a lot of boilerplate in this movie but I have no trouble believing record-exec types would not be on board with a six-minute single. I feel like that’s probably still the case now!