Comments on: Watching my life go by

By: JLIAG

JLIAG — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 20:26:53 +0000

I think one good thing comes of the biopic, people may actually go out & seek out the true story or more info on the person whether it be Richard Nixon or Jim Morrison. And that's always a good thing.I've done it myself.

By: RHS

RHS — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 15:39:48 +0000

Welllll... I was being a bit facetious about the cleft palate-- I never actually said that to anybody, I just thought it during extreme close-ups. My issue has less to do with physical peculiarities (or lack thereof) than with the trap that biopics fall into of treating someone's life as a series of recognizable milestones. Lives are more than that, of course, and no one knows this better than the famous. I shudder to think of my own life given the biopic treatment and laid out from tragedy to tragedy, missing all those great days when nothing of note happened but which had more to do with molding my personality than the death of my sister, the demise of my first marriage, etc. I don't think finding an uncanny look-alike to fill J.R. Cash's shoes in Walk the Line would have made the story seem any more true to life.

By: JasonLeeIsAGod

JasonLeeIsAGod — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 03:00:09 +0000

Thank goodness I'm not the only one that couldn't get past Johnny Cash's cleft palate (or harelip as some fogeys & less PC folks used to call it).Is it too much to ask that when they cast someone as Johnny Cash that they'd cast someone that actually looked & sounded like Cash?Honestly, things like that can ruin a flick for me sometimes too. I spent the whole movie thinking it was Joaquin not Cash & I don't think that was what the filmmakers had intended.

By: MDR

MDR — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 20:49:44 +0000

Richard, I know how you feel (and I think we're about the same age). It used to really bother me when I watched an historical biography that I knew to be false (because the events occurred during my life). As I started watching TCM, I became aware that it's always been that way, that creative license has always trumped accuracy (in Hollywood) for entertainment purposes (e.g. when I watched Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940), I noticed that screenwriter Robert Sherwood significantly altered Lincoln's "House Divided" speech). What I didn't realize until fairly recently, however, is that documentaries are works of fiction also. I used to think that the category was for films which were about real-life events, that they were factual, well researched and objective, until I realized that oftentimes the opposite is true. What's really scary is that too many people believe what they see "at the movies" because they're ignorant and too lazy (or apathetic) to learn the truth.