How do you prefer you biopics? Poll

Discussion in 'Visual Arts' started by cgw, Jun 3, 2019.

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  1. Chris DeVoe

    Chris DeVoe RIP Vickie Mapes Williams (aka Equipoise)

    No, but both are equally positive.
     
  2. CraigBic

    CraigBic Forum Resident

    Location:
    New Zealand
    I guess it sort of depends on what you mean by historical accuracy. I think a movie should stick to the facts but you can't exactly expect things to happen exactly as they happened in real life. Often movies will become condensed and even characters will get condensed. For example in The Post, Bradley Whitford's character Arthur Parsons is a fictional character who is a composite of I guess you could say people at the paper who doubted her. A lot of movies will have composite characters who represent several people in a personals life. If you look at a movie like Steve Jobs, it's a highly stylized movie but based on some very solid facts. The portrayal of Wozniak is of a Woz who speaks to Steve in a way that the real Woz never would but the sentiments he pushes in the movie are based on real feelings Wozniak had even if they were directed at John Scully rather than Steve Jobs. Sometimes events will be shifted around as well but that doesn't mean the events themselves didn't happen.
     
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  3. Antmanbee

    Antmanbee Mental Toss Flycoon

    Location:
    Leicester, UK
    I'm not over keen on biopic generally, and there's been a spate of them in the last few years. I guess I'm not necessarily a stickler for historical accuracy, an aspiration, probably unrealisable, best left to documentaries. Is Capote or Infamous a biopic, or JFK, or Thirteen Days, or Finest Hour? Dunno, but they're fine films but depict an episode in time rather than portray a life. On the other hand, a lot of films that do aim to tell a life story fall a bit flat for me, unless they're depicting a historical figure from more distant history. Often, I've found, it's not so much the person themselves that are especially interesting, but the times they lived in, the context, of their lives, and all too frequently biopics opt for sentiment over substance, and conform to the 'great wo/man of history' fallacy. I guess at the end of the day it's still about short-term 'bums on seats'. Somehow, art still finds its way through that though, sometimes.
     
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  4. Jazzmonkie

    Jazzmonkie Forum Resident

    Location:
    Tempe, AZ
    I can no longer watch bio pics of people that were around in my lifetime. I would much prefer watching a documentary on the person. I can watch things like John Ford's "Young Mr. Lincoln" which are far removed from my life experience.
     
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  5. Dennis Metz

    Dennis Metz Born In A Motor City south of Detroit

    Location:
    Fonthill, Ontario
    Third option should be I prefer not to watch them:cheers:
     
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  6. Saintbert

    Saintbert Forum Resident

    Location:
    Helsinki
    It's "BI-o-pic" in most cases, but "bi-OH-pic" when used as an adjective, as in: "After the great success of Bohemian Rhapsody, Elton John goes biopic too."
     
  7. delmonaco

    delmonaco Forum Resident

    Location:
    Sofia, Bulgaria
    No mainstream movie based on real person or event can be accurate. For accuracy one have to dig deep in books.
     
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  8. audiomixer

    audiomixer As Bald As The Beatles

    Give me a well done documentary with actual footage.
     
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  9. malcolm reynolds

    malcolm reynolds Handsome, Humble, Genius

    Location:
    Oklahoma
    I prefer not watching them at all.
     
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  10. Dellarigg

    Dellarigg Forum Resident

    Raging Bull is the greatest biopic ever made, and one of the greatest films. It bends accuracy for the thematic good. Most biopics are a witless canter through the greatest hits of someone's life, but Scorsese found a narrower focus that made wider, universal, timeless points about self-destruction, sin, punishment, redemption, and masculinity. But comparing Scorsese to most Hollywood hacks is pretty unfair. The majority of them wouldn't know a theme if they were snorting coke off its buttocks.
     
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  11. Michael

    Michael I LOVE WIDE S-T-E-R-E-O!

    Historical Accuracy – The film does not play loose with facts. TOTALLY!
     
  12. Michael

    Michael I LOVE WIDE S-T-E-R-E-O!

    don't you ever want to see the story of a favorite movie that was influenced by true events?
     
  13. Michael

    Michael I LOVE WIDE S-T-E-R-E-O!

    I can't think of any that are 100%!
     
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  14. Vaughan

    Vaughan Forum Resident

    Location:
    Essex, UK
    Facts. If it's not factual, I won't watch.

    When it comes to musicians I'm mostly not interested. I skipped both the Freddie Mercury and Elton movies - I enjoy their music, but have no interest in seeing the movies. I'd rather read a good biography.
     
    Michael likes this.
  15. Michael

    Michael I LOVE WIDE S-T-E-R-E-O!

    I always check them out to see how much they twist the historical facts...quite amusing sometimes!
     
  16. fabre

    fabre Forum Resident

    Location:
    Germany
    I can relate to that statement but the question remains what is “historical accuracy” exactly? What does it mean (for you and for others)?How much do you really know about the person in question?

    I was thinking about that earlier in this thread.
    There are the facts that are unalterable, like a date. For example, a Formula 1 race took place on a certain day.
    Then there are the people and how they are portrayed. We mostly don’t know what’s true or fiction because we know only so much about famous people. Scandals and/or big events, all the public is allowed to know or what the public is being fed.

    Pictures of Hollywood movies are usually polished up to the point where it is too glossy. Then the movie might feel artificial.

    The best thing is when the people portrayed can comment on a film or even have been involved with a movie. At the same time they could have made a deal to have a certain degree of control of what and how something is portrayed.

    Here is a nice example of "Rush", a movie which is based on the rivalry between Niki Lauda and James Hunt.

    “When I saw it the first time I was impressed. There was no Hollywood changes or things changed a little bit Hollywood-like. It is very accurate. And this really surprised me very positively.”
    -Niki Lauda
    Rush True Story vs Movie - Real Niki Lauda Crash, Real James Hunt
     
  17. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    It depends.

    I have had a couple of ideas for historical biographical pictures (I've talked about the one I had for years on Roy Orbison, and another one on Morris Levy of Roulette Records), and in my particular case, I think you have to make it absolutely, rigidly true, or at least as realistic as you can make it. That means the cars, props, hairstyles, costumes, locations, everything has to look exactly the way it did, historically, and you can't diverge from real-life events as they happened.

    Where I think you can wander a little bit is in recreating conversations where there's nobody alive who was actually present, so you have to reconstruct the dialogue and hope you present an accurate version of the way the characters thought and spoke. And I'd also demand that anything that happened chronological, like a specific song at a specific time, would be absolutely accurate -- not close, but exact.

    If it's a roman a clef, like Dreamgirls, then I think you have the room to play games with the facts because it's not really Diana Ross -- it's "Deena Jones," and it's not really Berry Gordy -- it's "Curtis Taylor." Now, you have the freedom to be fast and loose and invent new situations that are inspired by real-life events, but then go off into total fiction. The Artist is another case where they took a non-existent silent movie star (inspired by a dozen real ones) and told a story that felt fairly real, even though it was very much invented.

    I don't have a problem with the recent Freddy Mercury or Elton John movies, because I understand up front it's just "a version" of the story, just a Hollywood retelling of the facts. As I've been reminded many times by producers and directors, "hey, kid, we're not making a documentary here -- this is entertainment." I do get very antsy when documentaries start altering the subtle details just to force the audience in a certain direction.
     
  18. Michael

    Michael I LOVE WIDE S-T-E-R-E-O!

    what it means to me? not adding fictitious parts that never occurred...that's one of them. there is a wealth of information out there that can help a fact check....
     
  19. Why can't it be both? I think "Ray", the Ray Charles biopic with Jamie Foxx was a fine example of an entertaining film that was pretty historically accurate as far as I know. No movie "based on true events" is going to be 100% accurate, but I appreciate the ones that at least try to be.
     
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  20. Fastnbulbous

    Fastnbulbous Doubleplus Ungood

    Location:
    Washington DC USA
    I have no problem with truncating timelines and selective anecdotes in biopics, which they all do else the film would run 6 hours. But the actor has to convey the essence of the character. A good example is Gary Oldman's portrayal of Churchill. A bad example is The King's Speech which only scratched the surface of George VI's character and misrepresented his attitude toward Germany.
     
  21. Hadean75

    Hadean75 Forum Moonlighter

    Historical Accuracy – The film does not play loose with facts.

    I PREFER the movie to be historically accurate, but I will admit that some of my favorite "biopic" type movies are not necessarily that---they fall more into the
    Style over Substance category.
     
  22. Larry Mc

    Larry Mc Forum Dude

    *
    Historical Accuracy – The film does not play loose with facts.
     
  23. Scooterpiety

    Scooterpiety Ars Gratia Artis

    Location:
    Oregon
    I can understand having to alter some facts in order to make a more interesting or entertaining film. What really annoys me is when little details are changed either by accident or on purpose.
    A recent example is the film "Florence Foster Jenkins". There is a scene where Arturo Toscanini visits Mrs. Jenkins to beg for money to put on a concert and presents her with his latest recording - A COLUMBIA(!!) record of he conducting the NBC Symphony Orchestra accompanying Lily Pons!
    As a Toscanini fan, this really bothered me. Toscanini would never have had to ask for money for anything. His own personal wealth and the resources of RCA make the idea completely absurd.
    He likely had heard of Mrs. Jenkins, but he would have had no tolerance of her terrible singing.
    Toscanini's name was indelibly linked with RCA/NBC- why the writers or whomever had him make a Columbia recording makes no sense. Also, Toscanini never worked with Lily Pons.
    This is the kind of thing in movie biographies that really irritates me. People can't do a little basic research about what they write about?
     
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  24. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    A pal of mine in the late 1970s was one of the consultants for the John Carpenter Elvis NBC mini-series (with Kurt Russell staring as the King), and after it aired, I turned to him and said, "hey! You got the TV cameras wrong: you guys used color TV cameras with zoom lenses for the 1956 Ed Sullivan Show appearance. They should've been B&W RCA cameras with turret lenses." And he winced and said, "we've already gotten hundreds of letters on the fact that in the scene where Elvis brings his mother into Graceland, you can see dozens of gold records on the wall... but most of them have the 1970s RCA logo." So people do notice this stuff.
     
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  25. greelywinger

    greelywinger Osmondia

    Location:
    Dayton, Ohio USA
    Historical accuracy.
    Prefer to watch a good documentary.

    Darryl
     
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