70 FILM REVIEWS 71 NEW THIS MONTH 72 MOVIES 74 TV SHOWS Entertainment 76 AUDIO/RADIO © 2018 20TH CENTURY FOX. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY Feb 2019_GPE_06.indd 69 16/01/2019 12:23 PM FILM REVIEWS WANT HELP WITH WHAT TO WATCH THIS MONTH? FILMMAKER AND DIRECTOR KAM RASLAN MAKES THE CASE FOR THESE MOVIES. the restless energy, perfectionist drive and pioneers imagined a future of unlimited loneliness of Mercury with great poignancy. potential where computers could be owned But it is when portraying the stage by anyone, and fi lmmakers like Steven performances of Mercury that Malek truly Spielberg created epic yet personal fantasies delivers a doppelganger reminder of the like E.T. and Close Encounters Of The Third Kind late great singer. By a quirk of production where aliens visited us with good intentions. scheduling, Malek’s fi rst day of fi lming had to The future was going to be good. And yet be the rendition of Queen’s performance at somewhere along the way, the imagined the Live Aid concert in Wembley Stadium in future became bleak and dystopian. There’s 1985. Talk about being dropped in at the deep no fun with jet packs and flying cars, but goingplacesmagazine.com end, because Mercury’s performance that day instead it’s the barbarism of Maze Runner and is widely regarded as one of the fi nest-ever The Hunger Games. live acts! With Ready Player One, director Steven Freddie Mercury experienced rock and roll’s Spielberg has imagined a world that is, yes, BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY highs and great lows. He was a gay man at a dystopian but with his customary touches of | The musical biopic is a diffi cult thing to pull time when it had to be a guarded secret. He redemption and optimism. The future can be 70 off . A movie about the British rock band Queen refused to allow his demise from AIDS defi ne good again, if it’s switched off on Tuesdays | February 2019 and its lead singer Freddie Mercury needs to what he had been, and the movie respects and Thursdays – watch the movie and that’ll be sympathetic, even mythologising, to satisfy that wish. Bohemian Rhapsody is as poignant, make sense. the die-hard fans, critical enough to satisfy exultant, Scaramouche and Fandango as the the fence-sitters (me), and it must present song itself. Based on Ernest Cline’s best-selling novel, the the music as entirely fresh and relevant for fi lm is set in 2045 in a world that has been a young audience that has never even heard overwhelmed by a virtual reality game called of Queen. I’m not a huge fan of Queen, but Oasis. People no longer want to face their Bohemian Rhapsody, just like Mercury’s awful realities, and instead, they live inside remarkable voice, hits all the right notes. an exciting virtual reality where they can do anything and be anyone. The game’s eccentric If you’re flying into London, then your luggage inventor and his company have become the might be handled by a future Freddie Mercury, richest in the world, but now he has died and because that’s where we fi rst meet him in bequeathed the whole thing to anyone who the movie, as a Heathrow baggage handler. can solve three riddles inside Oasis. In steps A poor boy from a not-entirely-poor Farsi our young and innocent hero. family originally from Zanzibar, in 1970 the then-Farrokh Bulsara meets a failing band Ready Player One is a thrill-ride mix of Charlie – then called Smile – and transforms it into And The Chocolate Factory, Tron and the Queen and himself into Freddie Mercury. ancient legend of King Arthur’s search for the With Mercury’s electric and larger-than-life Holy Grail (our hero’s Oasis avatar is Parzifal, personality and stage performances, the band the knight who eventually found the grail). quickly fi nds solid success before rising to READY PLAYER ONE Along the way there are dozens of 1980s pop stratospheric global heights with the release Many of the people who imagined and culture references to things like The Shining, of its epic song Bohemian Rhapsody, which invented our future came of age in the Duran Duran and The Breakfast Club. Our despite being over 40 years old is the most- long-ago 1970s and 1980s, a time of big hair, future can be good again, if we go back to streamed song from the 20th century at 1.6 dial telephones and vinyl records (kids, ask the future. billion streams. your grandparents what’s a telephone). Their imaginations fuelled by the optimistic sci-fi of Rami Malek must win an Oscar for his Walt Disney and Saturday morning kid’s TV portrayal of Mercury. (Editor's note: Oscars shows like Flash Gordon In The 21st Century, Bohemian Rhapsody and Ready Player One are playing onboard. Check your in-flight entertainment 2019 will take place on 24 Feb). He captures the likes of Steve Jobs and the Silicon Valley system for channel information. Feb 2019_GPE_06.indd 70 16/01/2019 12:23 PM NEW THIS MONTH HOLLYWOOD BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY CAN YOU EVER THE NUTCRACKER AND THE RAMI MALEK, LUCY BOYNTON, GWILYM LEE FORGIVE ME? FOUR REALMS PG-13 / / 134 mins / Biography, Drama, Music / E, E+ MELISSA MCCARTHY, RICHARD E. GRANT, DOLLY WELLS MACKENZIE FOY, KEIRA KNIGHTLEY, MORGAN FREEMAN R / / 106 mins / Biography, Comedy, Crime / E, E+, C+ PG / 99 mins / Adventure, Family, Fantasy / E, E+, C+ The biopic of legendary rock band Queen and its lead singer Freddie Mercury begins Celebrity biographer Lee Israel makes Clara requires a key that will unlock a box with Mercury’s tempestuous journey as an her living profiling the likes of Katharine holding a priceless gift from her late mother. outcast immigrant struggling to find his Hepburn, Tallulah Bankhead and Estée She journeys into a mysterious parallel place in the rock music industry. It chronicles Lauder. When Lee is no longer able to get world where she meets a soldier named the years of the group up until their 1985 published because she has fallen out of step Philip, a group of mice and the regents that performance at the Live Aid concert at with current tastes, she struggles financially preside over three realms. Clara and Philip Wembley Stadium. and suffers from writer’s block and must enter a fourth realm to search for the alcoholism. She ends up turning her art into key and restore harmony to the a form of deception to make ends meet. unstable worlds. | February 2019 71 BEST OF MALAYSIAN CHINESE KOREAN HINDI | goingplacesmagazine.com GOL & GINCU 2 逆流大叔 / MEN ON THE 너의 결혼식 / ON YOUR PAD MAN UMMI NAZEERA, DIANA DANIELLE, SHAFIQ DRAGON WEDDING DAY AKSHAY KUMAR, RADHIKA APTE, KYLE, SAZZY FALAK, SHARIFAH ARMANI SONAM KAPOOR FRANCIS NG, KENNY WONG, PARK BO YOUNG, KIM YOUNG KWANG PG-13 / / 160 mins / Comedy, Drama / E+ PG-13 / 106 mins / Comedy, Drama / E+ POON CHAN LEUNG PG-13 / / 110 mins / Romance / E+ PG-13 / / 100 mins / Comedy, Sports / E+ Lakshmi Prasad is a newly-wed Zak and Yaya are two university Woo Yeon is a high school welder from a rural village in India students who, despite sharing A group of employees dealing student who has never excelled who is determined to create low- the same first name, are polar with mid-life crises begrudgingly at anything in life. This changes cost sanitary pads for women. opposites in personality. They join the company’s dragon boat when he meets new transfer His intentions cause a stir, which both get into a fight at school team, hoping that doing so will student Seung Hee and falls in leads him to embarrassing and are penalised to perform keep them from being laid off. love with her. A series of events situations that compel his wife community work at a teenage Under the leadership of no- forces Seung Hee to leave to leave him. His focus and girls’ home. They pick coaching nonsense coach Dorothy, they and the pair lose contact. Fast perseverance finally pay off when the girls’ futsal team, thinking it learn not just how to really race forward 10 years later, Woo Yeon he is successful in inventing a would be an easy task, but they in the competition but to also receives a wedding invitation machine that produces sanitary are quickly proven wrong. confront the problems they face from Seung Hee. in their lives. napkins for women. RATINGS: R Restricted. Not suitable for audiences under 17 years of age. LANGUAGES: G / U General audience. Suitable for all ages. NR Not rated by the Motion Picture Association of America. A Arabic / D Danish / E English / ES Spanish / F French / G German / PG Parental guidance recommended. Some content may not H Hindi / I Italian / IN Indonesian / J Japanese / K Korean / Contains scenes or language that may be disturbing or be suitable for children. M Mandarin / ML Malay / T Tamil / TA Tagalog offensive. Viewer discretion is advised. PG-13 Parental guidance strongly recommended. Some content may be inappropriate for children under 13 years of age. Programmes with Malaysian content. SUBTITLES: 15 Suitable for audiences aged 15 years and above. Award-winning movies/programmes. A+ Arabic / C+ Chinese / E+ English / J+ Japanese / M+ Malay Feb 2019_GPE_06.indd 71 16/01/2019 12:23 PM MOVIES LATEST FAVOURITES THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG PG-13 / / 161 mins / Adventure, Fantasy / E, J, K, E+, C+ WALK THE LINE PG-13 / / 136 mins / Biography, Drama, Music / E, J, K, C+ PLANET OF THE APES New BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY CRAZY RICH ASIANS THE DARKEST MINDS THE BUTTERFLY TREE PG-13 / / 119 mins / Action, Adventure, RAMI MALEK, LUCY BOYNTON, CONSTANCE WU, HENRY GOLDING, AMANDLA STENBERG, MANDY MELISSA GEORGE, EWEN LESLIE, Sci-Fi / E, J, K, C+ GWILYM LEE MICHELLE YEOH, GEMMA CHAN MOORE, GWENDOLINE CHRISTIE ED OXENBOULD, SOPHIE LOWE PG-13 / / 134 mins / Biography,