‘Dishonest’ Films

are there any that are most accurate?

 

I loved that movie but most def was not true other that he was in jail!...I knew someone who was incarcerated with him...supposedly he admitted it to this person...I believe him.

 

at this stage of the game...it doesn't matter anymore..; )

 

what's with MMT?

 

NEVER, but it was more tolerable back in the day...

 

the ass kicking scene with Bruce Lee was aggravating and total BS...

 

The Doors (1991) was my first thought.

 

It sure wasn't La Bamba! Or The Buddy Holly Story (etc)....

 

I think it is.
I believed it was the truth when I saw it as a kid.

 

it was so annoying! Val did a good job...but the the premise was horrible...

 

Oh, then it might be an honest film, one I might like. I've never seen it.

 

What about 'Argo'... the Ben Affleck film about the smuggling of American diplomats out of Iran in 1980?

The role of the Canadian embassy (and particularly the ambassador Ken Taylor) was so downplayed in the movie to the point of being a minor footnote to the story... where as in real life, they were kind of integral to the whole "caper", as it was later called... with the word Canadian in front of it.

I know the film was more about the actual escape... rather than the hiding of the diplomats for six months... but you didn't have one without the other. It came across as a bit of convenient Hollywood revisionism... just sayin'.

 

"In Cold Blood" is another example of an early "true crime" film that distorted reality. When the book was first released, Truman Capote got a lot of credit for doing thousands of hours of research and creating an authentic nonfiction novel (one of the first examples of the true crime genre). However, it was later revealed that many of his scenes were exaggerated (if not fabricated), and it was pretty clear that he attempted to "soften" the personality of one of the killers, portraying him as a confused patsy who was led astray by the other killer.

 

It was till they were all killed in Return of the King. You must have missed the end of the film!

 

I think The Telegraph may have been embellishing the truth in the same manner as Hollywood does. I know nothing about this man and have not seen the film but objected to the negative "ugly" and "homosexuality" so did a Wikipedia search
Ugly - So what, I am too!
Homosexual - So what?
Incompetent - He won the Iron Cross and was promoted to Captain for...... his incompetence?
Nazi Spy - He worked in intelligence for the Germans (no mention of Nazi)

 

On Stone and JFK...the best thing about that ridiculous fantasy was the Seinfeld episode with Keith Hernandez spoofing the film. Comedy gold.

The biggest joke concerning that ‘conspiracy’ was always the narrative that one person couldn’t get three shots off that quick from the building at the moving car. Then finally it may have been 20/20 or some such program...a sharpshooter went up into the actual building and the exact situation was recreated and guess what ....bang bang bang he hit the target no problem. Yet fools to this day will say “well you can’t get three shots off that quick”

Kind of like the high res photos that are taken right here right now from the earth of the moon and you can SEE the lunar modular base, the rover and the tracks from the rover....but we still faked the moon landing.

My other two sense. Braveheart is one of my all time favorites and I know it’s inaccurate but it still works as a great film because it shows what medieval warfare and life was like 700 years ago. Historians and film makes can’t get stuff right from 5 years ago let alone 700...the purpose of films like that is primarily entertainment after all.

I have a bigger problem with flat out con men making documentaries and passing them off as fact.

 

How so?

 

I get that movies based on true events have to up the drama a little bit. But, I don't like it when they embellish events that you can see or listen to yourself.

The first movie that popped into my head was the Johnny Cash biopic "I Walk The Line". I wasn't into Johnny's music when the movie came out. I liked the movie and I did like the music, so I decided to dig into his career.
The scene when he recorded the Folsom Prison album is exactly what comes to mind as useless embellishing. The movie made the recording of the album seem so dangerous and wild! Johnny was breaking glasses and had the prisoners right on the edge of rioting, according to the movie. That was the first J.C. album I bought expecting some of that excitement. Yes, it's a great album but it went nothing like the movie made it out to be. Heck, he even had a line about serving everything in tin cups (Maybe that was San Quentin?). Anyone who's been in prison or visited someone in prison knows there aren't going to be any glass like that in prison.

Anyway, why make an event that was recorded, and available for everyone to hear, seem like it was so much crazier than it was? Movie drama, I know, but I don't like it in cases like this one.

 

Tucker - A Man And His Dream

They did quite a lot of research on this movie and still got quite a bit wrong. Tucker did a lot of exaggerating to get pre-sales going, which got him into hot water with the SEC. The movie portrayed these investigation to be triggered by "the big three" car companies, which is laughable as there were dozens of car companies at the time (Kaiser, Nash, Packard, Studebaker, and Willys were larger manufacturers, there are too many small ones to mention) One more wouldn't have been a blip on their radar. What the movie didn't mention is that the SEC was cracking down on pump-and-dump scams that were popular during re-industrialization and rebuilding after WWII, and Tucker was behaving quite a bit like a pump-and-dump scam.

 

From the title on down the film is presented as a story of the filmmakers’ detective work and rediscovering a figure who’d disappeared into complete obscurity after his first two albums stiffed. It ignores that he had a fairly active career in Australia and New Zealand, where he toured in the ‘70s and early ‘80s and apparently scored a platinum album. This is a pretty huge omission.

 

Editing is part of the process to achieving a point of view.

 

I think Capote was attracted to Perry Smith, but he did make it clear that Smith did much of the actual killing, and possibly all of it. And he gave a fair amount of space to the Clutter family. After reading the book I found the film very objectionable, it was so concerned with telling us that capital punishment is a Bad Thing that it barely showed the victims and the horrific ordeal they went through.

 

Nicely done...

 

I watched the movie again recently then read up to bring myself back up to speed. Yes, This was not a good representation of any facts. Coppola was talking only about himself.

 

I know a lot of people get upset on that scene. It does "dent" the legend of Bruce Lee a bit.
I never took the film as dishonest because it always let's you in that it is fantasy. A parallel would be Scorcese's Aviator which stretches facts around a man's life but really Scorcese is embellishing a time period within a story. We know the main characters are compilations and distillations of other people and Tarantino is careful to let you know he is making stuff up. I think if you are a teenager the story doesn't distort any real facts because there are no real facts beyond the subject the movie pivots around. And if you are old enough, come on it's Tarantino! He's making stuff up!