Buffy ,'Beneath You'
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.
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.
Patton. Not a biopic, more a dramatization of a historical figure.
Where does Shadowlands fit?
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.
(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!
Speaking of biopics - any word on The Aviator? (about Howard Hughes, starring that guy from Titanic.)
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.
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.
Has anybody heard advance word on National Treasure?
Because I could SO use a good fluffy adventure movie.
It has Sean Bean. I'll be there. I have no high hopes, but I have my Sean Bean love.
Yes. Sean Bean being evil; what more could I want? Illuminati, of course.