No, it wouldn't. Aside from anything else, the star of Amadeus is arguably Salieri.
Book: Where's the doctor? Not back yet?
Zoe: (beat) We don't make him hurry for the little stuff. He'll be along.
Book: He could hurry... a little.
'Safe'
Buffista Movies 3: Panned and Scanned
A place to talk about movies--Old and new, good and bad, high art and high cheese. It's the place to place your kittens on the award winners, gossip about upcoming fims and discuss DVD releases and extras. Spoiler policy: White font all plot-related discussion until a movie's been in wide release two weeks, and keep the major HSQ in white font until two weeks after the video/DVD release.
Jim - Nov 08, 2004 5:51:22 am PST #5507 of 10001
Ficht nicht mit Der Raketemensch!
Jessica - Nov 08, 2004 5:53:55 am PST #5508 of 10001
And then Ortus came and said "It's Ortin' time" and they all Orted off into the sunset
I think that's just the nature of a biopic -- you can't really have a good character study of any kind without a strong performance from the character you're studying.
Jim - Nov 08, 2004 5:55:08 am PST #5509 of 10001
Ficht nicht mit Der Raketemensch!
What Jessica said. The only exception I can think of is that Meryl Streep Susan Orleans biopic.
Jessica - Nov 08, 2004 5:56:49 am PST #5510 of 10001
And then Ortus came and said "It's Ortin' time" and they all Orted off into the sunset
The only exception I can think of is that Meryl Streep Susan Orleans biopic.
Adaptation? That wasn't really a biopic, unless you mean it was a biopic of Charlie Kaufman. Except for the name and the fact that she wrote The Orchid Thief, everything about the Susan Orleans character was entirely fictional.
Betsy HP - Nov 08, 2004 6:24:26 am PST #5511 of 10001
If I only had a brain...
Patton. Not a biopic, more a dramatization of a historical figure.
Where does Shadowlands fit?
Scrappy - Nov 08, 2004 6:27:21 am PST #5512 of 10001
Life moves pretty fast. You don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.
I think it's because fictional films are structured so each incident and character contributes to the forward momentum of the story. Biopics are based on life, where one damn thing happens after another--a good biopic picks and chooses among those incidents to shape it's story, but it's never going to have the dramatic cohesiveness a totally fictional story will.
BTW, saw Sideways last night. Loved it like crazy.
Nutty - Nov 08, 2004 6:30:29 am PST #5513 of 10001
"Mister Spock is on his fanny, sir. Reports heavy damage."
(Personally I found A Beautiful Mind quite boring, because it flirted with portraying the terrifying hyperconnective logic of active schizophrenia, and then skated away into Twue Wuv. Bleah.)
I suspect that biographical films are much more interesting when they're about a specific time period or topic -- Anne of the Thousand Days, the fact that Lawrence of Arabia doesn't talk at all about the parts of his life when he isn't in Arabia -- because then the film doesn't have to ramble through a life and then, at the end, manufacture a point to it all.
I think book biographies are easier to stomach, rambling along chronologically without having a point, and film documentaries are similar. But a biography with actors, perforce, applies the rules of fiction to a nonfictional source, and seems to benefit most often from turning its source into something more approaching fiction than not.
ETA: Weird x-post with the expert Robin!
tommyrot - Nov 08, 2004 6:30:40 am PST #5514 of 10001
Sir, it's not an offence to let your cat eat your bacon. Okay? And we don't arrest cats, I'm very sorry.
Speaking of biopics - any word on The Aviator? (about Howard Hughes, starring that guy from Titanic.)
Vonnie K - Nov 08, 2004 6:36:13 am PST #5515 of 10001
Kiss me, my girl, before I'm sick.
Amadeus with a so-so Wolfie would have been a terrible movie.
I love the movie, but didn't think Tom Hulce was that great in the role. Mostly, I was just drunk on the visuals and the music, and I thought Mozart's characterization remained rather opaque--which might have been a point, because like Jim said, one can definitely make an argument that it was Salieri's story.
Where does Shadowlands fit?
Hmm. I would think a biopic would have to concentrate on the *work* of the person that made him/her famous to a degree. And show the evolution of its subject from obscurity to fame. Shadowlands doesn't fit either of those criteria.
Mr. Broom - Nov 08, 2004 7:26:41 am PST #5516 of 10001
"When I look at people that I would like to feel have been a mentor or an inspiring kind of archetype of what I'd love to see my career eventually be mentioned as a footnote for in the same paragraph, it would be, like, Bowie." ~Trent Reznor
Patton. Not a biopic, more a dramatization of a historical figure. Where does Shadowlands fit?What Vonnie said. I'd say that Shadowlands is a dramatization, like Patton. It makes a few conjectures about the personal life of C.S. Lewis for the purpose of its narrative, trying to sort of fit it into the basic framework of what's known about his life. My mother's something of a fan of Lewis, so I got quite a bit of this stuff as a kid.