If you make a big-budget disaster movie, it might as well be based on a true story. I’m over the huge blockbuster disaster movies like The Day After Tomorrow, Poseidon, Independence Day, The Core, Volcano, Into the Storm, Armageddon (which I really like), San Andreas (which I also kind of liked), Dante’s Peak…the list goes on and on. The point of these movies, and so many others, is to make a big buck. Forget about the plausibility; most of these movies are utterly ridiculous. The hero(es) always overcomes the most extreme circumstances and, often, ends up saving the world. Now, while the 2010 disaster caused the worst offshore oil spill in United States history and made British Petroleum (BP) the most villainous company on the face of the planet at the time, the story of Deepwater Horizon does take some liberties along the way. While the unfortunate events on that night of April 10th certainly did happen, the events on that rig felt very much like James Cameron’s Titanic after the ship hit the iceberg.
Category Archives: Based on a True Story
Snowden (2016)
I did not see 2015’s Citzenfour documentary about Edward Snowden. Had I, I might not have appreciated Oliver Stone’s (Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July) biopic as much as I did. Part of the reason I was such a big fan of Snowden was that I knew very little about it before my viewing. I knew of Wikileaks and learned much from the news but didn’t pay. Snowden went from your everyday no-name to one of the most controversial figures of this century. If you think this movie will be completely neutral, you don’t know Oliver Stone very well. Heck, this was the same man who directed JFK.
Sully (2016)
Two days after seeing the best lead actress performance I saw so far in 2016 (Alicia Vikander – The Light Between Oceans), I saw the best performance by a lead actor so far this year in Tom Hanks’s (Forrest Gump, Captain Phillips) portrayal of Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger in Clint Eastwood’s (American Sniper, Mystic River) Sully. While 2016 has been a massive letdown for movies through its first eight months, Sully, at least, gives promise that you are guaranteed one fantastic film and hope that there will be many, many more as Oscar season approaches (Manchester by the Sea, La La Land, Fences, Nocturnal Animals, Loving, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk to name a few). 2016 has proven and will continue to confirm that it is a year like no other since I began this blog back in 2010. Through its release date (September 9), Sully is, hands down, the best movie of 2016 and the only one that I feel 100% confident will stay in my top 10 after seeing all of the big films of 2016.
Free State of Jones (2016)
With his scraggly beard, yellow teeth, foreboding scowl, and deliberate limp, Matthew McConaughey’s (Amistad, A Time to Kill) portrayal of Newt Knight, a poor white farmer who led an extraordinary rebellion during the Civil War, is a far cry from the same man who was pigeonholing his career a decade earlier by playing the same character over and over in hit or miss romantic comedies like How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Failure to Launch, The Wedding Planner, Fool’s Gold, and The Ghosts of Girlfriends Past to name a few. McConaughey reinvented himself three or four years ago and re-established himself as a dramatic leading man with the likes of The Lincoln Lawyer, Interstellar, HBO’s True Detective, Killer Joe, Mud, and Dallas Buyer’s Club, for which he won Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role at the 2014 Academy Awards ceremony. While he’s had his misses recently (has anyone even heard of 2016’s The Sea of Trees?), he has continued to have the ability to pick and choose his movies, and, unlike his string of romantic comedies, he continues to branch himself out further and further.
Man on the Moon (1999)
Though we primarily know him for his slapstick comedy (The Cable Guy, The Mask, Dumb and Dumber, Ace Venture: Pet Detective), Jim Carrey has proved on numerous occasions that he can do very well what many other people in his genre cannot…he can give riveting and believable performances in both light-hearted and heavy dramas. He’s done it with The Truman Show (where he was spectacular and deserving of an Oscar nomination) as well as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. And he does it with 1999’s Man on the Man that, with respect to The Truman Show, is his finest performance as an actor in any genre. Carrey’s biopic of Andy Kaufman is a movie that I’ve had on my list to see for years, but one that I never felt “in the mood” for. It’s not that I expected to be disappointed by it (with just a 63% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, I knew this movie would be hit or miss for me). Instead, I just knew that it would be a different kind of movie and that, like many Jim Carrey movies, I’d have to be prepared for anything. I liked The Truman Show a lot and appreciated Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. But I’m not a Jim Carrey fan by any means. I don’t think he’s that funny at all. If he retired tomorrow and never acted again, I would be perfectly okay with that. With that said, I did enjoy Man on the Moon, and Carrey was the perfect person to portray Andy Kaufman. This was the role that Carrey was born to play. Regardless if you are a fan of his or not, I think this is a movie that everyone should see because you’ll learn so much about Kaufman. And if you’re like me, you probably have heard his name a lot but know very little about him.
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