Nanowrimo 2018 - day 12

Daily word count:   1,623 ** [according to 4theWords, 1,744 according to Nano and 2,122 on Scrivener… I give up…]

Total word count:  22,385

I’m still just stringing together scenes with dialogue. Bad plotter, AM.

I’m above the line and some of that free-writing may be useful later. I guess?

So the movie we saw Sunday night was Bohemian Rhapsody… and I’ll admit I was in the minority; I didn’t like it. It took me a little while to think over why.

They did their homework on setting up scenes to match reality, the actors looked eerily like their counter-parts, there were a few funny scenes, Photoshop and special effects were good.

But the editing was odd, and some lines were excruciatingly bad and I’m sure the current band members retconned a lot of their own history. I know it was a Franken-movie with multiple changes of actors, directors etc. but… I thought it somehow made the story dirge-like and sad. Who was that moustache wearing Irish Yoko Ono?

‘It was a movie,’ my friend said. I know what she meant, it wasn’t a documentary, but I’d still like it to comply with some decent story rules.

And from a story point of view, it was a very odd decision to mash all the final moments into one morning in time. They basically said he was diagnosed with AIDS, found the guy he’d been trying to trace, took him to tea with his parents, announced he was in love, then headed off to do Live Aid, and at the concert they tried to shoe horn Mary into the middle of his triumph, break one million pounds in charity donations, and embrace new love IN ONE DAY. And you can’t tell me his parents had never seen him perform before that day! Is that what they were trying to imply?

It irked me. My friend said all she could hear was me shuffling in my seat and making annoyed noises. I cry at greeting card commercials and these scenes did not make me shed a tear.

I really feel that it could have been so much better.

It basically just erased, or fast forwarded, his final love story and that was the one I wanted to see; Freddie and Jim. I felt cheated of the happy in Freddie’s ending.

I also missed picking Mike Myers as the record producer who rejected them… that’s some kind of nod to Wayne’s World, who of course have the iconic head banging Bohemian Rhapsody scene and probably contributed to a lot of younger people hearing the song. Especially resonant as Myers fought the movie producers to cough up the cash for the rights to the song. It was that song and no other.

We pick our battles, like the band did in the movie.

And we are remembered for them.