How do you prefer you biopics? Poll

What is more important to you? (if you can’t have both)
Name a good example of your choice.

Historical Accuracy – The film does not play loose with facts.
or
Style over Substance – The film is stylized for entertainment.

Can you name a film that has both?

Hot topic with the recent release of Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman. There seems to be a fair amount of people that would like to see better historical accuracy. Let’s see where it falls.

 

I would usually prefer historical accurate biopics. Although I loved Amadeus.

 

I am firmly in the style over accuracy camp. I am of the opinion that you can't have both - the biopic uncertainty principle. It is either good history or good drama but can't be both.
I would just as soon watch a straight documentary.

As an example I'll go with Amadeus (not that I know for sure that the film is not entirely accurate).
(A non-music example - Raging Bull did not suck.)

 

Assuming the film doesn't convey anything that is blatantly untrue, I prefer the movie be entertaining. I can always go do my own research if I want to learn the historical details.

Even though it is not a movie, I think Hamilton is a good example. I did read the book (well, some of it) after seeing the musical. I think everyone understands the musical is not going to be completely accurate, but for some reason we expect more from movies.

Amadeus is one of my favorite movies, but I think most people understand that is not historically accurate.

 

Prefer accuracy, but I want to be entertained as well

 

Can we also tag on the question: how do you pronounce 'biopic'?

Bi-AH-pic
or
BI-o-pic

 

The first pronunciation makes absolutely no sense to me, but I am hearing it more and more frequently lately. The first few times I heard someone say it that way, it genuinely took me a few minutes to figure out what they were talking about. It does sound like a medical term when pronounced like that.

"Bio" (short for biography) is always pronounced BUY-OH, so why wouldn't it be pronounced that way in "Biopic"?

 

Hamilton is an example I was not expecting. I had a very basic understanding of history when I saw it. So after I was checking out the actual history. Miranda has said he tried to stick with the facts as written in the book by Chernow. The question is - Is the book unbiased (I have not read the book).
I do (or have) read a lot of biographies and I prefer biographies, and documentaries for that matter, to be unbiased one way or the other.

 

Truth is stranger than fiction. Give it to me real or not at all.

 

Oh I'm with you all the way. It's a headscratcher that more and more people are pronouncing it the first way. It takes away all the meaning of the word and needlessly so.

Edit; Actually...maybe they're taking the weird pronunciation from the full word "biography" instead of the shortened 'bio'...?

 

bio-pic
bi-opic

 

Historical accuracy is preferred. But also with bad acting, ridiculous looking wigs and if possible stunt casting!

 

I like accuracy in general, but it seems like it is almost impossible to ever assemble a totally accurate timeline of events in any biopic. I do think that some people overanalyze and nitpick biopics to death regarding trivial minutia.

 

Musical bio-pics are such a mixed bag, with more disappointments than not -- I think I would vote for anything that does the subject justice.

For instance, I thought Don Cheadle's highly fictionalized biopic of Miles Davis was a gas. Was it accurate? Hell no. But what it DID do was NOT overlook what Miles did in the 70's, like any traditional movie about Miles would have done. Half that movie was made up, but a lot of the components of what happens in the movie was based on stuff that really did happen (at some point, or another). Miles really DID get shot in the hip through his Ferrari(?) car door -- but it happened back in 1969 (and not in the late 70's, like depicted in the movie). And Miles DID really record some stuff after 1975 (in 1978, iirc), on which Miles only played organ. I forget all the rest -- but as I was watching the movie, I think I must have counted 8-10 events/"facts" from the movie, which were presented out of order (or slightly time-shifted by 5-10 years), in service to the crazy "plot" in the film. I think I read that Cheadle said that he tried to make a movie ABOUT Miles, in which Miles would have liked to have acted in (and Miles did do a little acting, towards the end of his life).

Would an historically accurate Miles Davis biopic have been better? Who knows. Maybe yes, maybe no. I'm not defending every creative license Cheadle took with Miles' story -- but in no way am I convinced that we would have had a better movie if it had been true to the facts, and chronologically presented.

The movie better be true to the main character first. Not every "Style over Substance" biopic gets that right either (not by a long shot).

I would argue that Style doesn't always mean something Substantive isn't achieved. Certainly Style can get in the way of telling the story worth telling. But some stylish licenses can (in some cases) be taken, that actually might elevate some greater "truths" about the main character being presented.

For instance, I thought the Jimi Hendrix biopic with Andre 3000 was fantastically acted, but was a horrible story, and it didn't ring true for me at all. I doubt half of it was actually true, but the problem wasn't so much how much "truth" was in it, but the fact that it really didn't help anyone get into who Jimi Hendrix was, and what his motivations and struggles really were. Maybe such a movie could never be made. All I know is that despite a really fine performance by the lead actor, the actual movie was really ****e, if you ask me.

But the Brian Wilson and Johnny Cash biopics seemed considerably better (though admittedly, I wasn't anywhere near as steeped in their real stories).

 

If I want accuracy, I’ll watch a documentary.

Let’s face it, there’s no way to do one without fudging, skipping and combining events...so as long as the basic premise and character is accurate, I don’t mind the details being off.

 

Most of us love heroes, people we can look up to, people who inspire us. But we are all flawed human beings, nobody is perfect.
So one of the questions is always how to tell a story? What do the filmmakers want to show? Do they want to tell a whole life over the course of 2 hours or do they just want to tell a part of it? The story of a life cannot be told in 2 hours. What we are shown is a string of snapshots.

Another essential question might be how deep do you want to go? Do you want to tell a story that delivers insights maybe things that only the family and relatives of the person in question know? Do you want to show the motivation behind the actions of the main character, inner conflicts and different sides of a personality or do you want to keep it simple and glorifying?

****

I’ve seen two biopics in the past days that are good examples of different approaches.

“Becoming Astrid” tells the adolescence of Astrid Lindgren. Like the title suggests there is little of the fame and glory we all know about but the story that probably made her become the great children’s book author we so love. It is a small but very interesting part of a life that not many people knew.

The other biopic was the story of singer and actress “Dalida”. It began in Cairo where Dalida was born and it ended with her death. A lot of important and troubling moments in Dalida’s life are shown and many are being connected to lyrics of her songs. This is nicely done because there are so many songs and performances to enjoy. While we do get to know some of the reasons for her troubles in life there is just no time to go below the surface and explore some parts on a deeper level. A line from a song must do sometimes.

While I enjoyed both approaches I think that “Becoming Astrid” was better on exploring the motives of the character, her human qualities. Although she was clearly very talented, her having to suffer a lot as a young woman might have pushed her to use her talent like she did. She might have discovered her true calling that way.
“Dalida” was also well done and very emotional because of the tragic in her life alone but it lacked a bit the depth I found in “Becoming Astrid”. But then I got (more parts of) a life’s story in two hours.
Furthermore I read that the daughter of Astrid Lindgren would have rather liked a biopic telling the whole life “where one focused on what they accomplished in life, rather than a few years of the person's most intimate private life.”

****

I don’t like black-and-white approaches omitting important facts just to paint an immaculate picture. But what to tell and what to cast aside isn’t always an easy task either.

Thanks for your remarks. I also think that you cannot just generalize but rather examine each story individually. There are many approaches and a lot of written biographies are highly subjective as well. In the past there have been a lot of taboos that nowadays almost no one cares about anymore.

 

Historical accuracy. But you can have this with documentaries. Biopics always lack of accuracy here and there.

 

Accuracy. I usually end up rolling my eyes through most of these types of films. "Walk Hard:The Dewey Cox Story" should have buried the genre for good.

 

At least, in "24 Hour Party People", Tony admitted, "When you have a choice of telling the truth or the 'myth'..", then, went ahead and said to the camera that this scene may not be true... I smiled.

 

Given the choice between being entertaining or being accurate, I'm going to go with entertaining every time. With very rare exceptions, human lives aren't structured like a movie, and writers have to rearrange events in order to build a compelling narrative. Anyone who thinks otherwise really has to sit down and at a computer or typewriter and try making a compelling script out of the life of someone famous.

To paraphrase the great Mark Twain: "Truth is stranger than fiction because truth doesn't have to make sense."

 

There won't be a really good Jimi biopic until Janie Hendrix is no longer alive. You can't do a good movie without his music, and she controls the music.

 

I knew the inaccuracies of "Stan and Ollie" going in, all I wanted was the filmmaker to capture their essence for the world to see....which he did, spectacularly.

 

I don't know that I've ever seen an historically accurate biopic.

 

Historically accurate.

That said I won’t rip on style.

I think you can be historically accurate and still be entertaining.

 

Can you come up with one that was historically accurate? To the best of my knowledge, every biopic I've ever seen has changed the order of events, conflated events, composited characters, etc. The only ones I'm not sure about are the ones where I don't know enough about the subject to say what was changed.