Top Ten Queen Moments on Film

Having just learned that Sacha Baron Cohen backed out of playing Freddie Mercury in a biopic film, I felt the need to look back at cinema and cherry pick my favorite uses of Queen music from films.

With that I give you Top Ten Queen Moments on Film.

10: Iron Man 2 - "Another One Bites The Dust" (Remix)
It wasn't the greatest of sequels.   But there is a brief moment where Iron Man faces off with his best friend, wearing the War Machine suit and Queen kicks up in the background.  Blink and you might miss it.

9: Ella Enchanted - "Somebody To Love"
Before she waif-ted away to nearly nothing in order to tackle Les Miserables and earn herself an Oscar, Anne Hathaway sung her tiny lungs out as Ella Frel in Ella Enchanted.  I've never seen the movie, but the clip does her singing some justice.  It doesn't do much justice for Freddie Mercury's voice, though.  I guess it's a cute movie, and I needed it to make up ten entries... so. 

8:  A Knight’s Tale – "We Will Rock You"
2001 brought Heath Ledger to a new level of fame, prior to being in another “Knight” film.  The late actor took on the role of William Thatcher, a lowly squire looking to change his stars.  To do that, he assumes the identity of a knight in order to compete in tournaments and win the heart of the Shannyn Sossamon.   In his first tournament, disguised as his dead master, Lord Ector, he rocks the joust. 

In the opening credits, the peasants in the gallery chant and cheer, something that would probably be ancestral to today’s stadium behaviors.  How fitting that Queen provides the ever popular and hardly unknown “Stomp, Stomp, Clap” beat to their chants.

7: Iron Eagle - "One Vision"
 "This ain't no game, I'm telling ya!"  Anytime you can get a hardened Air Force colonel to loosen up and listen to some Queen, you've done something good.   The poor man's Top Gun gave us a true 80s version of a hot shot pilot.   One that bombs unidentifiable Middle Eastern targets while adjusting the equalizer on his Walkman. It's not Maverick, or even Gooseman for that matter, but Iron Eagle had something that Top Gun didn't, 80s plausible film logic.  While Top Gun showed a more, loosely put, realistic view of how Naval Fighter Pilots train, Iron Eagle gave us the tale of how a kid on an Air Force base could pull off a secret rescue mission, complete with two fighter jets and a shit load of ammunition.  

While the government tries to hunt down a NSA whistle blower in today's world, the 80s sees a kid that breaks every foreign policy rule in the book get admitted to flight school. 
 

  

6:  Grosse Point Blank – "Under Pressure"

We never truly leave high school.  That is never more true than when we return home for a reunion.  Stoic loner and contract killer, Martin Blank comes home again as his present and past collides in a high school gym.   Faced with the feeling of angst towards killing bad people for money, he has a moment staring into the wide eyes of a classmate’s son.  The universe smacks him upside the head as his life hurtles towards epiphany, complete with the David Bowie/Queen collaboration, Under Pressure. 
 

5: Shaun of the Dead - "Don't Stop Me Now"
"Why is Queen still on?" 
Cause it's flipping awesome.   The zom-com that bent the genre on it's nibbled ear had a memorable scene where a record collection was dissected in order to determine which works were salvageable and which could be made into wax weapons of mass distortion.  But later at The Winchester was where the magic happened, randomly, that is as this ditty came on the jukebox as our heroes fight to keep out the dead.    
  
YOUTUBE WON'T LET ME EMBED SO, CLICKY THE LINKY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrluARJUCUg    


4: Flash Gordon – "THE WHOLE SOUNDTRACK"

By today’s standards, this movie might would have ruined comic book adaptations.  But, there is something nostalgic and kitsch about the lack of good special effects and… well, script.   Part of it could be Max Von Sydow as Ming or Brian Blessed as Vultan or Pre James Bond Timothy Dalton as Barin.  Or… it could be Queen’s kick ass soundtrack.  I’ll let you decide. 
  

3: Highlander - "THE WHOLE SOUNDTRACK"  
I'm not sure if the movie beget a love of Queen's music and swordplay in nerds or if the creators of the movie acknowledged a tie-in between the type of music Queen made and nerds love of swords and epic stories.   In any case, who wants to live forever, right?  If only they would have stopped at the first film, they could have stopped a lifetime of vitriol among their fan base.  At least they had a few years before the Internet was born... but the series made up for some of that. 
 

2: Revenge of the Nerds – "We Are the Champions"

"No one's really gonna be free until nerd persecution ends."  Truer words were never spoken, but history has a way of changing and nerds rule these days.  But there was a time, back in the 80s when nerds were outcasts and the meek.  It was a simpler time when panty raids and CCV streams of sorority houses weren’t considered remotely creepy or illegal.  It was a time when you could simply win any battle with a well choreographed light and sound show, complete with a spiky haired Timothy Busfield rocking the violin.   But when the jocks of Alpha Beta take out their vengeance by destroying the house of Lambda Lambda Lamdba, the only way to end the war is with a passionate speech about embracing your inner nerd.  It also helps when you have Queen underscoring your monologue.   I wanted to make this number one, I did.  But while ROTN has that great Queen moment, number one goes meta by acknowledging what we already know.
 

1:  Wayne’s World – "Bohemian Rhapsody"

Good call, right?  

The 1992 movie introduced Queen to a generation of fans that never heard their older siblings’ records.  Flash Gordon introduced me to Queen, but this film introduced me to "Bohemian Rhapsody".  

It seems a bit too easy to go with "Bohemian Rhapsody" at number one, but admit it.  You still bang your head at the guitar solo, right?  Though, these days, it hurts to give it a full effort.  I may have to spew into a paper cup.    
 

Got any favorite Queen moments in movies? Let me know in the comments!

Iconic

Twenty years ago, this Saturday, an album debuted that, for lack of a better term, turned the music industry on its ear. Nevermind, from Nirvana, was chronologically the second album but it was the first to gain the attention of a mainstream audience.

I was 16 when Nevermind hit the scene and, quite frankly, apart from thinking it was kind of catchy, I didn’t give it much more thought. I was more impressed with Weird Al Yankovic’s parody “Smells Like Nirvana” eight months later.

Two years after Weird Al parodied “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, the sorrowful, but perhaps inevitable happened. In the span of only three studio albums, Nirvana left an indelible mark on the recording industry, kicked off a new style of music and left fans befuddled and bewildered when the lead singer, Kurt Cobain, took a shotgun and ended his life.

I was a Freshman in college. I was struggling through my second semester in a new, urban school setting, and I was pissed off at the world. I wasn’t pissed that my favorite singer killed himself. I was pissed that the everyday, casual teenager felt the need to dress like a grunge groupie. For an alternative music genre, distinct in its desire to be different from everybody else, there was a lot of conformity. There were a lot of people wandering around the frozen quads of Pitt wearing flannel shirts tied around their waist. Even at the age of 19, I was developing that “Get off my lawn” mentality because where I was from, born in raised in Fayette Nam, PA, you wore your flannel for warmth and comfort, not for show. So, as everyone reminisces and waxes about the impact of Nevermind, I will remember how stupid people looked, trying to light a cigarette in 20 degree weather, shivering, while trying to look like they were Grunge.

Perhaps it was fate that Cobain killed himself.  Perhaps it was undeniable destiny that, for someone who redefined Generation X from the 80s and "I Want My MTV" eras to the "The world sucks and we're all not going to be your sheep." era, should not live long enough to be played out and bastardized in the pop culture media of the RIAA machine.  Nirvana could not be envisioned as the poster boy for the likes of TRL.  They would not be.  Cobain's resistance to fame was that more indicative of fame's desire to have him.  He was going to be a star in spite of himself and maybe that is what killed him more.  

Denis Leary joked that someone should have walked up to Elvis and shot him in the head at an early age instead of leaving us with the lasting vision of him dead and bloated on a toilet.    The Cobain legacy played out exactly as he would have hated it, in the courts fighting over who gets more ownership of his existence, Nirvana or Courtney Love.   His only way of existing was to cease to exist.  Could you imagine Cobain being relegated to countless greatest hits albums, selling out an image to maintain relevance? 

Spanning the last 50 years, look at those who died before their fame truly became bigger than the artist.  Jimmy Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, and the latest addition Amy Winehouse, though her inclusion is in question because of the freshness of her death.  Time will tell whether she becomes more famous, now.
On a similar yet different note, two months after Nevermind was released, the music industry lost an even more iconic symbol. On November 24, 1991, Freddie Mercury lost his battle with AIDS, dying from pneumonia.  Queen was/is a band who, as my co-worker put it, should be considered one of the greatest rock bands ever, that still perform, but never got their due.

Now, my generation is probably more closely related to Kurt’s impact rather than Freddie’s. However, I am prone to go beyond my generation’s predefined areas of influence and pop culture observance. Granted, I had never heard “Bohemian Rhapsody” until it appeared in Wayne’s World in 1992. And yes, I still bang my head at the appropriate time when it comes on in the car. But, I knew of Queen’s music before. I had seen Flash Gordon and heard some of News of the World and The Game, growing up.

To me, Freddie Mercury’s death was a greater loss to music. This is not to diminish Kurt Cobain in any way. Kurt’s impact was in the writing. Freddie’s was more overall based on his vocals and delivery. Mercury had such a stage presence and musicality. His looks were, in a way, unconventional, much like Cobain’s. And even though, they were vastly different in their styles and contributions, their influential paths were following the same direction.

Possessing over a four-octave vocal range and writing such iconic songs as “Bohemian Rhapsody”, “Somebody To Love”, “Killer Queen” and “We are the Champions”, Mercury brought a style of rock that had not been present in the 70s. There was a showmanship to his stage presence, flamboyant costumes, but those chops were unmistakable as Brian May’s Red Special guitar sound. They played operatic tunes, mixed with straight rock. They pulled influences from ragtime and blues. They had some disco and even gospel touches to their songs. Queen became a stadium rock staple culminating in one of the most memorable performances at Wembley Stadium’s Live Aid concert in 1985.

I still listen to Queen in my music shuffling. I assembled my own greatest hits compilation and from time to time, I’ll cue it up. It even includes Flash’s Theme. But I was reminded of how Mercury sounded and how much those vocals sent shivers down my spine when I saw a video of a Canadian Christian Rock singer band covering “Somebody to Love”.

Marc Martel has a bit of a resemblance to Freddie Mercury but his vocals are sometimes so close to Mercury’s that I had to really watch and see if this was lip synching or really his voice.  The main video of him singing, “Somebody to Love” could have been synced.  It could have been faked.  Just looking at t, who knows?  However, digging deeper, I found a live video of him singing “Bohemian Rhapsody” with a church group.  Amazing.