Movie Review #75…
Rocketman. Dexter Fletcher, dir. Many posts ago, I reviewed Bohemian Rhapsody. Rocketman is a very different biopic. The titles of each movie correspond to two famous songs, but that’s where the similarities end. Rocketman focuses on Elton John’s singer/pianist’s life just a bit beyond when he checked into a rehab center to save himself because he was abusing liquor and drugs…and ultimately to find himself.
The movie is a bit slow in parts, but it has its moments. I especially liked the part where Elton John (well portrayed by Taron Egerton, who actually sings) reports to the head mistress of the Royal Academy of Music. When he enters, she’s playing Mozart’s “Turkish Rondo” (Sonata Number 11 in A Major) and stops when she sees the future student enter the room. He brought no music with him, so she asks him to play anything. He sits down and plays to exactly the same spot where she stopped. He couldn’t play any further because he’d just memorized what she’d played!
The title song and many others are well sung and played, often couched within dream sequences or flashbacks with choreographed dancing, making this more like a musical than Bohemian Rhapsody. I’m still trying to decide if that works for me. Same for the group therapy session leading to the flashbacks—much of the movie stems from Elton’s self-analysis in those sessions.
Of course, Elton is one hell of a singer as well as a good piano man. His long association with lyricist Bernie Taupin (ably portrayed by Jamie Bell, with an excellent supporting actor’s performance) has motivated his song-writing. His wild initial success brought fame and fortune, not love, though. His long spiral down leading to that time in rehab is hard to watch. One complaint I have is that rough patch that could have killed him is the focus here, not the time after rehab where he did finally find love, and he has been sober for about thirty years.
His biggest failure in love was with the manager who seduced him, seeing a rising star he could get rich with. I’d like to focus on another failure, though. Like Freddy Mercury, Elton is gay; you can make your own conclusions about the reasons watching the movie (which had Elton’s approval, I’m told). But he tried a heterosexual marriage with another singer Renate Blauel, ably portrayed in the movie by Celine Schoenmaker—I’d like to see more of her. I hadn’t known about that aspect of Elton’s life.
The gay sex scenes aren’t the first ones in major movies as some reviewers claim (consider Brokeback Mountain, for example), but they’re just part of Elton’s story told in this movie, maybe justifying its R-rating. As such, Rocketman won’t have the success of Bohemian Rhapsody, which Hollywood sanitized to PG-13, thus trivializing Freddy Mercury’s similar struggles as a gay man.
[As an aside, I saw this in an AMC theater with those mechanically reclining chairs. When they first rolled out these chairs, I said to myself, “They’d better maintain them.” Well, I’m prescient. I was trapped at the end of the movie and had to struggle to get out of the chair! Just a warning for theater-goers.]
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Comments are always welcome!
Rogue Planet. Sci-fi books are generally “evergreen” books, at least the ones involving the future of human beings in our galaxy—they never get old. This is one of mine. If you read A.B. Carolan’s Mind Games, you’ve learned how difficult it is for ITUIP (“Interstellar Trade Union of Independent Planets”) to control the colonization of new worlds and bring them into the trade union. Eden is such a world, forced back into virtual savagery after one tribe takes over and establishes a brutal theocracy. It’s up to the son of the deposed king to do something about that. Hard sci-fi with Game-of-Thrones fantasy elements, action, suspense, and intrigue await this novel’s reader. Available on Amazon in both ebook and print format, and in ebook format on Smashwords and all its affiliated retailers (iBooks, B&N, Kobo, etc.).
Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
