Heath Will Rock You

Media Moment: A Knight’s Tale
Queen Related: Contains We Will Rock You and We Are the Champions

After watching this film on TV again last night, I must say that the late Heath Ledger does a great job as the daring knight who’s out to kick some jousting ass. However, I believe it’s Paul Bettany’s portrayal of the saucy Geoffrey Chaucer that makes the movie memorable.

American director, Brian Helgelund, tried a similar approach as Australian director, Baz Luhrmann, in Moulin Rouge, in that they contemporized a period piece by giving it a modern soundtrack. By and large Helgelund pulls it off nicely although in a much different way than Lurhmann. I’d be curious to know who came up with the funky soundtrack idea first?

On second thought, who cares? What sticks in the craw of most old-school Queen fans about this movie is that it features WATC sung by Robbie Williams which kickstarted the Williams-as-Freddie debate.

I don’t know that much about Robbie Williams but I got the impression at the time that he wanted to fast track his own career by jumping the queue of whatever potential Queen vocalists there were (if any) without having achieved “street cred” of his own.

I guess if that were the criteria for joining Queen, Paul Rodgers does make the cut. But throwing Adam Lambert into the Queen mix, though, as the media speculated, seems akin to taking him right from off street with no experience at all. Then that would make Robbie Williams a seasoned veteran.