Consistent with many of the most successful biopics about the greatest of American songwriters/bands (i.e., Walk the Line, Ray, Love & Mercy, La Bamba, What’s Love Got to Do With It, 8 Mile, Great Balls of Fire, Straight Outta Compton, Bohemian Rhapsody) in the last 30 years comes Oliver Stone’s (Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July) distant, unsteady, and unapologetic story of Jim Morrison and his band in the 1991 movie The Doors. Liked more by audiences than critics, the Val Kilmer (Top Gun, Heat) led movie takes us through the formation of the band in the early 1960s to Morrison’s mysterious 1971 death in a Paris bathtub at the age of 27. One of the founding members of the infamous 27 Club, Morrison was an energizing performer whose limit-pushing love of drugs and alcohol led to his early death.
Category Archives: Based on a True Story
The Front Runner (2018)
An upstart politician is seen with a woman who is not his wife. A scandal ensues. Would-be presidential candidate resigns amidst the controversy. Just because a story happens doesn’t mean you must make a movie about it. At best, Jason Reitman’s (Up in the Air, Young Adult) Gary Hart biopic should have been a straight-to-cable drop. But really, a 60-minute documentary on The History Channel or something would have sufficed. That’s not to say The Front Runner was a bad movie. Because it wasn’t, but it wasn’t a movie we needed. Reitman, a fantastic yet underrated director fresh off the incredibly impressive Tully with also such films as Juno and Thank You For Smoking among his credits, had no business involving himself with a movie that, no matter what he did, wasn’t going to register with the critics or with the audiences because:
- Even though it is a 30-year story at the time of its release, it is one everyone knows.
- It’s a story that we, as a society, tried to make into some huge deal, whereas 30 years later, we realize that a politician cheating on his wife is something that hardly bats an eye.
- It’s a story that raises some issues related to morality and tries to be a little preachy in a day and age when none of us are interested in hearing and seeing preachy, especially from a story that is trying to be relevant in today’s society but does feel 30 years old.
Operation Finale (2018)
Operation Finale, a film that chronicles the 1961 top-secret raid to capture the notorious Adolf Eichmann, the highest-ranking living Nazi official from World War II, is probably the best movie of 2018 that you’ll never hear about. Under-publicized and just a little north of neutral on Rotten Tomatoes’ aggregate film rating site, Operation Finale was released during a period (late August) when quieter movies don’t do so well at the box office. Plus, this movie doesn’t have an A-list headliner. While it is true that Oscar Isaac (Ex Machina, A Most Violent Year), who, in 2018, is one of our finest working actors, is not quite a household name. At least not yet. Sure, he plays the recognizable Poe Dameron in the latest Star Wars trilogy (episodes VII, VIII, IX), but a respectable actor must be more than that. And Isaac is in the actor circles but isn’t well-known enough to the public. And while he stars opposite a widely respectable actor in Ben Kingsley (House of Sand and Fog, Gandhi), his elder counterpart’s best years are far behind him. At 74, who knows how much longer his career will continue? If this is Kingsley’s final role, it’s a good one.
Continue reading Operation Finale (2018)
Vice (2018)
Adam McKay’s (The Big Short, Anchorman – The Legend Of Ron Burgundy) Vice almost suffered from a trailer depicting a movie resembling a spoof. With The Killers’ hit song Who’s The Man playing in the background and a nearly unrecognizable Christian Bale (Hostiles, American Hustle) almost dancing to the beat in between intermittent lines of him hyping himself up or talking about how he’s going to break all the rules when he becomes Vice President of the United States, McKay’s latest movie plays more like the Will Ferrell/Zach Galifianakis underrated comedy The Campaign that it does a biopic in the realm of Nixon, Lincoln, or Thirteen Days. Its nomination category at this year’s Golden Globe Awards was “Comedy.” But while Vice is constantly entertaining and is filmed in a way that, at times, feels like a mockumentary, it is very much a drama that you’ll sometimes feel guilty laughing at, even purposely designed humorous moments.
Welcome to Marwen (2018)
Meh. I hide decent hope for Robert Zemeckis’s (Cast Away, Allied) Welcome to Marwen. Parts of the trailer looked corny, but so did parts of his trailer (as well as the movie) for Forrest Gump, the Oscar winner for Best Picture in 1994. Zemeckis has also succeeded with unique films such as Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Death Becomes Her, The Polar Express, and more. Combined with the exceptional talent possessed by Steve Carell (Beautiful Boy, The Way Way Back), there was a legitimate chance that the pair could make this odd story work.