okay… has anyone noticed that all films seems to be based on REAL life… at least if it wants an award…
Lately we’ve had The Queen (Mirran as HM and Sheen as Blair)..Ray (Foxx as Ray Charles).. Last King of Scotland (Whittaker as Idi Admin).. Dub-Uh (Brolin as George W Bush)..need I say more? Have you looked at what is out right now?….Sheens at it again playing David Frost in Frost V Nixon… Sean Penn’s being Harvey Milk in Milk… Benico del Toro is doing Che Guevara.. it’s bio pic after bio-pic lately and worst stilll… and everyone is screaming OSCAR!
Not that any of these films don’t deserve the acclaim… I for one can’t wait to see Milk… BUT… wouldn’t it be lovely if writers wrote stories, actors acted them and a whole made up world was captured on film?
I think the thing that is most frightening is this bio-pic trend now has the likes of faded action hereo Jean Claude Van Damme starring in abio-pic about himself.. come 30th January we will be treated to JCVD.. a french bio-pic about how the actor became washed up! Worse still the papers are full of reviews about what a great actor Van Damme is in this movie… hold up…JCVD is playing JCVD in a movie called JVCD… can anyone spot what I can… WHERE is the acting???
Or am I missing something? Maybe I don’t understand movies. Which would be a huge pity as I love them some much.
I fell in love with Movies when BBC just kept on showing films cause they couldn’t fill the schedule. I got emersed in some cracking stories.. a runaway heiress falls in love with a reporter who is chasing her across America (It happened one night) A Zany girl causes a zoology professor to lose a dinosaur bone and a pet leopard all in one evening (Bringing up baby) a dowdy housewife gets the boot from her hubby so works her way up to become the owner of a chain of resturants (Mildred Pierce) Arab Princess gets out of marriage to Nomad prince by claiming the omens predict a swift death of her 1st husband (Road to Morrocco)… okay some of that may be down to some amazing movie stars (Claudette Colbert, Clark Gable, Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Joan Crawford, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour)… but these actors were greatly assisted by the fact that great writers sat down thought up a plot, and wrote something down for them to perform. The charecters had to be INVENTED, by the skill of the writers imagination and the performance the actor gave. Movies for me should be about invention. That’s what I fell in love with.
But that love affair now seems tarnished. All we get thse days are true-life movies where actors just pretend to be someone in the public eye. Seems all a bit second rate to me – i wonder when the hollywood writers strike was on HOW it effected anything… go to the movies now it’s like watching impersonations… just re-enact something that ACTUALLY happened and copy the manorisms of the people who did it.
I want fantasy from my movies… I want to escape into another world for 90 minutes. Although bio-pics have been a feature of the big screen since its inception I’m not all that sure that the big screen is the now right place to examine our current world… TV does that so much better. For example wasn’t Frost V Nixon televised in the FIRST place?
With the silver screen, I want a story that I don’t know the ending of… I want to be engaged by the action on the screen instead of thinking.. "Oooh she never walked like that".
Come on …a little imagination please… we have good writers out there . Doesn’t any one want to make up a story anymore? Doesn’t any one want to dig into the human condition and write about it? Doesn’t any body want to read those words and act it out? Maybe that’s the problem… maybe no one wants to do that anymore.
Well I’m taking no excuses….even animated features have to have writers…Ratatouille was written by Brad Bird and he got nominated for an oscar. I’d just like a fresh story please. I’m a little in need of some entertainment and i think the cinemas SHOULD be the place to get some.
That’s it really… just a little whinge… can we stop the bio-pics now!
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