The highly anticipated Freddie Mercury biopic has lost its obvious star after Sacha Baron Cohen reportedly quit the film over a dispute with Queen's remaining band members.
And so it begins: A hologram of Freddie Mercury will reportedly perform alongside his former bandmates when Queen takes the stage next Monday for a special show commemorating the 10th anniversary of the hit jukebox musical We Will Rock You.
On the one hand, you have Fox's The X Factor, an atrocious, over-hyped reality show that seeks to lavish $5 million on a nobody's recording career, yet can't seem to properly mike its own judges. On the other, you have The Queen Extravaganza, a lesser-known talent search that will offer "shit hot vocalists and musicians" the opportunity to tour with a massive, Cirque de Soleil-esque Queen tribute show. By way of talent, X Factor has thusfar provided us with, uh, this. Extravaganza, on the other hand, has already minted one guaranteed winner, in this startlingly accurate Freddie Mercury sound-alike. His name is Marc Martel, and he's the singer for a Christian rock group from Saskatchewan called downhere. Freddie would probably have taken a perverse pleasure in that fact. [via Reddit]
Way up in Wasilla, where the men are men and the moose are meat, members of the high school symphonic jazz choir were excitedly rehearsing for the upcoming graduation ceremony, where they'd be performing an epic rendition of Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody." Then they were told by Principal Dwight Probasco (that's his staff directory page) that the song had been pulled from the program. "Why?" they wondered, having put months of effort into the big number. Probasco explained it was because he'd received a complaint from a parent. You see Freddie Mercury, the vocalist who had sung the original version of the song, was gay.
