Word: biopics
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...would he settle for a Malcolm-like niche in movie history: the radical prophet who achieved his stature posthumously. Lee would rather be a top- grossing auteur now than a biopic subject later. Perhaps that is why his movie is so stately, reverent and academic, so suitable for the Oscars with which Hollywood rewards high-minded mediocrity. Some other director will have to find a way to merge the danger of a brilliant, racist orator with the seismic jolt of energized filmmaking. That picture will be worth skipping school...
...never quite works for Buddy Young Jr. (Billy Crystal) in the prodigiously funny biopic Mr. Saturday Night. A Jewish kid with a talent to amuse, Buddy lusts for those irreconcilable opposites: to be loved and to be himself. To be all-American and 100% kosher. Buddy begins by facing a Catskills audience so primed for Yiddish comedy that when he says, "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen," a guy in the front row keens, "Oy! English!" He ends in Florida, nearly a half-century later, doing the same routines for an invalid army of the Jewish sun set. In between...
Their conclusion is entirely in keeping with the remarkable -- and in its way quite daring -- temper of the rest of their movie, which is both antiheroic and antiepic, and thus a departure from the generally undistinguished tradition of the sports biopic. It may be a departure from the expectations of modern moviegoers too. For one thing, they prefer more . relevant subjects than old-time baseball heroes, however legendary. For another, they like their true stories to be slathered over with false sentiment -- the human spirit triumphant in unlikely but inspirational ways...
HENRY & JUNE. X was never like this. The first movie rated NC-17 (no children under 17) is as pretty as a French postcard but much less erotic. Philip Kaufman's biopic of authors Henry Miller and Anais Nin wanders through Paris boudoirs of the 1930s and finds smoke, not steam...
Well, they sure could have called it Weird. After all, the main characters in this bonkers biopic are two people John Belushi never met during his brief, explosive life: Bob Woodward, the actor's biographer, and John Belushi dead. You have to cherish the daredevil idiocy of a movie whose climax is a parody of Woodward's legendary deathbed chat with CIA director William Casey. The journalist visits the hotel room where Belushi took his fatal overdose and hallucinates an interview with the dying star. "Breathe for me, Woodward!" the samurai comic cries. And it's hard to hate...