I tried to make the headline question a little more forgiving than some kind of J. Jonah Jameson SPIDER-MAN, THREAT OR MENACE? headline...

Just wondering how people feel about biopics, by that I mean the form itself. A friend and I were talking and he expressed the feeling that biopics tend to be inherently unsatisfying (especially, in his case, for figures involved in the some of the arts or philosophies) for a number of reasons - the feeling that the subject is "real, but the film has to fake anyway to attempt to tell a story"; the idea that some of what made someone famous is an ineffable quality which tends to get watered down in films to "watching them create" (admittedly, if the subject is a performer of some kind, this is easier to pull off) or "watching them participate in some great historical, or non-historical-but-pregnant-with-meaning moment", both of which remind you too much of being an observer in a theater, and also the whole ending problem ("go out on a high note" or "sudden death a'comin!" - usually accompanied with some prescient "oh yeah, how'd he die again?" moment at mid-movie from the viewer).

I wasn't sure if I agreed although I do agree with him that, in particular, when "thinkers" (philosophers, mathematicians, some writers) are the subject, the challenge almost seems insurmountable.

Following that, I happened to see POLLACK for the first time with Ed Harris and was left kinda, eh, not bad but it really did make me wonder about the whole subject all over again.

So, Mobians one and all, biopic yea or nay (or would you rather have The Looter running around, huh, stealing all your stuff with his crazy lifting balloons? Where's Parker!)? Love it, hate it, think it works most of the time, less of the time, specialized sub-genre that has to be appreciated on its own terms? For the record, I liked CAPOTE and the ending of CHAPLIN was very moving...

And any suggestions for one's unmade? I'm still waiting for the inevitable Miles Davis biopic, just to see if the ultra-dramatic, crash-and-burn end-of-the-70's "Pangea" moment that leads into "cocaine-addled isolation in New York apartment" moment rivals it's fictional doppelganger from MO BETTER BLUES.

Anyone?

I thought for sure this post would prove to have resulted from you taking in WALK HARD: THE DEWEY COX STORY (as I did yesterday), which is hit or miss (mostly hit) in mass market comedy terms, but an absolute bulls-eye as a Mad Magazine-style parody of biopics.

For my part, I have little affection for the middle-brow, slightly impersonal entries (WALK THE LINE, RAY, WHAT'S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT), aside from a case by case appreciation for the performances, but give me a bats**t mutant like Oliver Stone's THE DOORS, and I'm happier than ol' Jimbo hangin' out a hotel room window.

Ha, you should see BEYOND THE DOORS, in which Texas schlockhound Larry Buchanan presents Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison and posits that their deaths were actually engineered by the United States government, because Nixon and Hoover feared they would convince America's youth to vote Democrat in the next election.

Biopics are ultimately wastes of time as biographies, since little in them is strictly accurate, so what's the point? They can be entertaining, if taken as drama or a character study, in which case the filmmakers ought to just make a movie about a fictional subject.

Biopics tend to be ordinary movies. Not bad or outstanding either. The best ones tend to show a person making a decision, having a life experience or defining one’s point of view. Yet even that can be degraded to an “origin of…” type of procedure. I know that RAY, WALK THE LINE, PRIVATE PARTS INTERRUPTED MELODY are good movies but I can live without them. If you don’t like the music (or the craft, the subject etc.) than you won’t like the movie. If you already like the subject a movie will not likely change or enlighten your mind. Great movies are surprising and biopics rarely surprise us. However there are exceptions, note that these movies are tied to events that are as shrouded in myth as they are in fact.

GODS AND MONSTERS

PATTON

YOUNG MR. LINCOLN

SID AND NANCY

Ken Russell’s VALENTINO

p.s.

Oh yeah, THE DOORS. That has more to do with Oliver Stone than Jim Morrison thus I can live without it.

My test for biopics is "would this still be an interesting movie if nobody knew who the guy or gal was?". I genuinely don't understand why anyone, for instance, would pay hard-earned money to see either WALK THE LINE or RAY, given that what's important about both men's lives can be best appreciated by buying (or downloading or whatever you crazy kids are doing nowadays) the relevant music.

CAPOTE is another good example. Leave aside for a moment the performances, which everyone tells me are brilliant. I just can't get interested in how In Cold Blood was written. I think ultimately it's a non-issue, actually, intrinsically a non-interesting story.

There often seems to be an ulterior motive to biopics, too. I haven't seen it, so am not qualified to ultimately judge, but my limited impressions based on what I saw and what I know was that the Kinsey movie (whatever it was called) was mainly made to beat flyover country about the head, neck and shoulders, for instance. It's easy to draft a life into an argument, and I think a lot of attempts are like that.

Biopics I would watch? I don't know if I'll actually see it, but I understand say THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY -- that actually meets my test above. And I would love to see a good biopic of somebody like Shackleton or Amundsen -- you know, an explorer or somebody who actually lived a "cinematic" life.

doug

You're also missing some really interesting editing rhythms. That's. about. it.

I believe a problem with most biopics is that they attempt to cover too much ground. Lives are long, and a life is not structured like a story. It's possible to summarize the high points of a human's existence in two hours, but you'll end up with the biographical equivalent of a greatest hits album, not a plot with developing conflicts and resolution. When trying to cram in or breeze through a list of accomplishments and failures, biopics rarely have time to consider what these events "mean" - mean for the life, for the story, for the audience - beyond merely "yeah, so this happened, then this and this, then she died."

Great biopics in my estimation have either 1) had a coherent thesis, and something to say about their subjects' life (MALCOLM X, I'M NOT THERE) or 2) focus their scope to tell a limited-timeframe story focusing on an event or a relationship (ED WOOD, SWOON, THE STRAIGHT STORY).

How much of the person's life needs to be covered in a movie before it can be categorized as a "biopic"?

Ten or so years ago, I read a lot about the Alamo and then spent time in libraries trying to find material about Jim Bowie. I couldn't find an actual bio of him, only articles in obscure journals here and there and two novels about him, The Iron Mistress, by Paul Wellman, and Tempered Blade, by Monte Barrett, one of which was made into a movie and the other of which was the basis for the Jim Bowie TV series in the 1950s, which I watched when I was a kid. All this was triggered by movies I'd seen about the Alamo and Bowie, including the film version of THE IRON MISTRESS, none of which are actual biopics. My point is that movies about historical subjects and famous people are often very useful in getting viewers to go to the library to find out more about the actual events/people.

When Bob Rafelson's IN THE MOUNTAINS OF THE MOON (1990) came out, about explorer Richard Burton's historic search for the source of the Nile, it coincided with the release of a new bio of Burton by an author named Mervyn Rice. When Edward Rothstein interviewed Rice in The New York Times, the author expressed some surprise that his book had placed in the top ten of the NYTimes Best Seller List. It wasn't much of a stretch for me to surmise that the movie inspired enough people to go out and buy a book on Burton and hence get the newest, most accessible one, that by Rice, and these sales were enough to propel the book's numbers to place it on the list. The movie wasn't a hit, but even if 5% of its customers went out and bought the book, that means enough sales to make it a best-seller. Yet neither Rothstein nor Rice made a mention of the movie. In protest, I bought another book on Burton.

I'm a big fan of movies about artists. LUST FOR LIFE (1956), about Vincent Van Gogh, is probably my favorite biopic ever. It captures the artist's passion, his overriding need to paint, a need that is more important to him than eating, breathing, sleeping. His affection for and arguments with another passionate painter, Gauguin (Anthony Quinn), provide the dramatic meat of the movie. Vincent needs a soulmate, someone who understands his passion, and he thinks he's found one in Gauguin, only to essentially be rejected--with disastrous results. And then we see the paintings--lots and lots of them, the real ones--in color and Cinemascope, underscored by Mikos Rozsa's beautiful music. And we meet a whole slew of other artists, the Impressionists, and we're plunged into a place and time when art history was being made. It makes you excited about the art. And then, after seeing the movie, one can go to a museum (at least here in New York) and actually see the real paintings.

Even when movies about artists aren't that good, I still find enough material in them to fascinate me. Anthony Hopkins' portrayal of Picasso as a driven artist in SURVIVING PICASSO made that film worth seeing. (And let's not forget Joss Ackland as Matisse.) BASQUIAT and POLLOCK are both flawed, but have enough good stuff to make them worth seeing. For me an artist at work is a biographical activity that can be quite cinematic.

I have a soft spot for Larry Cohen's THE PRIVATE FILES OF J. EDGAR HOOVER (1977), which takes 50 crucial years of American political history and crams them into a B-movie pulp fiction alternate universe history with cameos by FDR, Walter Winchell, McCarthy, JFK, RFK, MLK, LBJ, etc. Again with music by Rozsa. It botches its portrait of Hoover, erring too much on the side of sympathetic and not even scratching the surface of his corruption and dementia, but then, of course, we learned a lot more about Hoover after the movie came out.

Music biopics are always tough to do. I can't offhand think of a single one that inspired me to go out and listen to the subject's music, whether composer (Gershwin), songwriter (Cole Porter), or singer (Billie Holliday). Granted, I've listened to plenty of music by these examples but was inspired to do so by other things, e.g. actual musicals like AN AMERICAN IN PARIS. Chuck Jones' 7-minute cartoon, WHAT'S OPERA DOC? got me to watch "The Ring Cycle" on PBS, not any biopic about Wagner. The one music biopic I have the most affection for is probably Hal Ashby's BOUND FOR GLORY (1976), but that was more about the social history of the Depression than about Woody Guthrie's music. But I haven't seen it since it came out. As for Elvis, I'd rather see an Elvis movie than a biopic about him. In some strange way, Elvis' filmography actually constitutes an ongoing biopic.

Movie star biopics are even tougher territory to plow through. The star doing the impersonation almost never captures the qualities that made the subject a star in the first place. If I had to single out one for praise, it would be CHAPLIN (1994). It's not a particularly good movie, but Downey's performance saves it and makes it worth seeing. The rest of the cast is inadequate and the direction is lackluster, given the richness of the subject, but I doubt I'll see another movie about Chaplin in my lifetime and there really should be at least one, given his importance to film history as, IMHO, the most important seminal figure in the development of the cinema as a popular art form. So I’ll take Attenborough’s CHAPLIN and I’m glad I saw it on the big screen.

P.S. I was just reminded of GOODFELLAS, probably one of the greatest biopics ever and probably not often considered as one. Far better, for me, than Scorsese's earlier biopic, RAGING BULL, which I developed major problems with after reading the book on which it's based.

Hate biopics. So dull and middle-brow. Capote is a perfect example. In Cold Blood was both a terrific book and a very good movie. Capote is an interesting man. The biopic felt utterly pointless.

Where I draw the line between films like Goodfellas and Capote, however, is semi-incoherent but I think of it in terms of whether the focus of the film is on impersonating the famous individual and telling their story versus telling an interesting story which happens to have the individual as a protagonist. Goodfellas is a good example, because nobody cares about Henry Hill per se, they care about the events. Capote deals with interesting events, but because In Cold Blood handles the interesting part, it had to deal with the less interesting, ancillary aspects of the story - i.e. Capote's involvement - and focuses on Capote instead of the events. Bertolucci's Last Emperor and Patton were each about half-and-half, and thus about half-satisfying.

I kind of hate the generic bio-pic conventions and tend to avoid them as a result. One movie that manages to fleetly dodge said conventions while still immaculately communicating both the sense and sweep of the subject's life is 32 SHORT FILMS ABOUT GLENN GOULD, possibly my favorite bio-pic and certainly one of the least representative of the genre.

THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI is a great biopic. Who would'a thought one guy could be a racecar driver, surgeon, physicist and rock star??

Eh, he's no Colin McKenzie...

It's amazing how I can sit down to a single, feature length film and feel like I have a magical, voyeuristic look into the life of Clifford Irving. As I watch the movie, there he is, incriminating himself with his own words. This movie invites me to take a deeper look at him, to scrutinize his most seemingly mundane behaviors and comments and to not only think about his motivations (unknowable as they are), but to think about the larger picture of forgery and fraud and what would motivate anyone to pursue it. And the film in question does so while reminding me that the film I'm watching isn't exactly a reliable or unbiased witness.

That film is F FOR FAKE.

I can watch F FOR FAKE again and again and again and find new facets of it to obsess over. You can even choose with repeat viewings which aspects of it fascinate you the most. If you're disinterested in Clifford Irving, there's always Elmyr de Hory and his strangely seductive lifestyle. Or Orson Welles who, in a strange way, the film may in fact really be about. Or what about Howard Hughes? F FOR FAKE makes Hughes seem even more mysterious by assuring us that we really know less about him than we think since most accounts of his later life are most likely false.

So, I find Clifford Irving to be an interesting character, but when THE HOAX came out earlier this year, I had no desire to see it. Why would I go out to watch Richard Gere pretend to be Clifford Irving when I could sit down and watch an artfully constructed "documentary" in which I can watch the real Irving speak for himself?

On the other hand, one of my all-time favorite movies is LAWRENCE OF ARABIA. It's three and a half hours of sheer cinematic bliss to me and I can watch it again and again. But why bother? That's not T.E. Lawrence! That's Peter O'Toole pretending to be Lawrence! Well, the answer is simple. I watch it time and again, because it entertains and moves me.

David Lean's film is art masquerading as memory. The viewer is expected to enter into an unspoken agreement with the artists: I know this isn't real, but for the next few hours, I'm going to pretend that it is.

Both sides of that agreement are important to remember. A biopic is ALWAYS fiction. The difference between a biopic and a film containing documentary footage is that a biopic is always comprised of scenes and events that never happened. Even if a biopic is faithful to the facts (whatever that means), you can be certain that the events it is dramatizing were different from what you are seeing.

James Berardinelli describes LAWRENCE OF ARABIA as portraying the "almost Shakespearean rise and fall of his character." For me, there's no almost about it. LAWRENCE OF ARABIA is the cinematic equivalent of Shakespeare. The intensity with which Lawrence demands a bed for Farraj in Cairo is the type of delivery I would expect from a fiery Shakespearean performance.

So, LAWRENCE OF ARABIA is great art. Is it great history? Absolutely not! It's probably a more dubious recreation of history than PEARL HARBOR. If you're watching a performance of "Julius Ceasar," you don't stop to think that this is how it really went down. Instead, you get sucked into the drama of it. It's a damn fine play.

And yet, I don't like biopics very much. For whatever reason, I find it harder to suspend disbelief. I think it's partially because I suspect that a lot of people DO take these films at face value and assume that there's a documentary quality to them.

How many people do you suppose perceive THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST as a documentary? After all, it's subtitled and it's about Jesus and it was made by filmmakers who professed their reverence for the material so that must be what it was really like.. Forget that the film is highly stylized with at least three "fake scares" and that the acting has a kind of Hollywood quality to it.

That's an excellent example of why I'm not quick to embrace films like that. To be fair, I'm sure that it's the dream of most artists that the audience take their fiction seriously enough to believe in it, but I have this sneaking suspicion that there are an alarming number of people out there who really do have a hard time discerning between reality and what they see on t.v., movie screens and the internet. Even those who would feign sophistication (myself included) do allow our perceptions to be shaped by what we see in the media.

And those of us who are movie buffs sure do take in a lot of media.

I'm not a fan as a rule, but there are exceptions to the rule.

First off, what I normally dislike about the form: the life of a representative great man (or woman) as employed for inspirational purposes (often glossed with a veneer of pseudo-didacticsm: to wit, the specialized subject matter treated-classical composition, physics- is usually as bogus in its presentation as the facts of the life). The implication is that Edison or Pasteur or Johnny Cash is just like us, but tried harder: you can too. Better yet if you have a debilitating addiction to overcome with the helping love of a good mate, or a discovery the world isn't ready for yet (a good mate one's sole supporter). Plot structure is unvarying from biopic to biopic, making this the most conventional of movie formats I can think of.

Apart from the fun of seeing cameos by Hollywood stars pretending to be Toulousse Lautrec or Liberace, there is no fun for me.

The genre was briefly refreshed decades ago by Country and Western-inflected subjects: Loretta Lynn (COALMINER'S DAUGHTER), racecar driver Shirley Muldowney (HEART LIKE A WHEEL), and Elvis (the rare subject whose life is inherently fascinating and cinematic: credit John Carpenter and Kurt Russell for extra added expert evocation). This boomlet, alas, spawned its own raft of cliches done to death since then, witness WALK THE LINE, the sum derivative of all those films just mentioned.

Sometimes a new angle on a subject can add something of interest. Consider HEART BEAT (1980), which treated the triangle of Jack Kerouac, and Neal and Carolyn Cassady (derived from the latter's memoir). I found the film ultimately dissatisfying, but the treatment of beat subterraneans stcking out even while trying to fit in amidst 50's squares was not something I'd ever seen put on screen, and Nick Nolte was Neal Cassady personified. Another perspective from the woman behind the great man is the extremely unconventional CHRONICLE OF ANNA MAGDALENA BACH by Straub and Huillet.

Biographical or autobiographical vignette is an adjacent genre I have more patience for: AGATHA (as in Christie), and QUARTET (a lightly fictionalized episode from the life of author Jean Rhys) are worth a look. Same goes for CHRIST STOPPED AT EBOLI (from Primo Levi's wartime experiences), and Dreyer's masterpiece, PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC.

Un-inspirational Anti-biopic can be fruitful too. Note RAGING BULL, the portrait of a shmo.

Then there's Ken Russell. Love him or hate him, his take on biopic is entertaining and tonic at least in principle; taking bio-film fakery as a starting point and a given, he's done alternately deft and grotesque stylized sketches of narcissistic great stars hung up on their legends...

Like any genre from westerns to kid's cartoons to porn, it all depends on the creators & their handling of the story. Even the conventions of the biopic genre can work in its favor if a filmmaker uses them to thwart audience expectations. I think if the work draws you into the world of its subject and does a good job of expressing what made his or her life of note, it's done its job. But to say 'biofilms are no good' (not that anyone here has said exactly that) is like saying 'Sci-fi's no good.'

What Lance said. (It's so much easier to wait for someone to say what I want to say than say it myself. :) )

Generally speaking I prefer historical films over biopics, but obviously they cross over. KHARTOUM, for example, has a wonderful miniature of William Gladstone contributed by Ralph Richardson. And (like THE QUEEN) MRS. BROWN dramatizes a period of Queen Victoria's life, with finely drawn portraits by Judi Dench, Billy Connolly, and Antony Sher (a terrific Disraeli).

Come to think of it, cradle-to-grave biopics, or ones that follow the subject through the decades, like CHAPLIN, are a rarity anymore. Films like THE QUEEN*, WALK THE LINE, and CAPOTE are more the norm. All that period recreation adds up on the budget, and no one wants to put the actors in froggy old age makeup.

(*Combined with THE DEAL, which HBO has been showing, and a proposed third film, THE QUEEN is more part of an ongoing Tony Blair biopic than one of HRH.)