So, here's my rant about biopics centered around creative figures.
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If not, what are we going to make biopics about?
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A lot of music movies these days have been biopics.
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Following that are a few political biopics, and some Beatles love.
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Harriet Tubman lived the kind of life Hollywood biopics dream of.
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Music legends have increasingly found themselves the subjects of high-profile biopics.
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Here are some recent biopics that didn't stick to the whole truth.
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Q: What do you make of the way Bollywood makes its biopics?
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They're both biopics about queer musicians who rose to fame in the 1970s.
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If it has faults they are no worse than those of most biopics.
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Mary Queen of Scots, unlike most historical biopics, has a notably diverse cast.
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Late 2016 and 2017 see a veritable flood of boxing biopics and features.
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Biopics are one of our favorite ways to get lost in a story.
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We reward them with offerings: biopics and TED Talks and, most importantly, money.
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"[Biopics] can be one of the most powerful forms of propaganda," he said.
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Biopics, too, can leave something to be desired in their handling of difficult themes.
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The central figure of many of biopics, like Bohemian Rhapsody — Freddie Mercury is dead.
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The Oscars usually prefer biopics of artists, athletes, and war heroes — not business leaders.
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While telling and informative, these biopics are usually fun glimpses into the subject's life.
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But there's also the usual collection of thrillers, biopics, satires and straight-ahead dramas.
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For Black viewers, the voyeurism inherent in watching biopics is self-reflective in some ways.
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Notorious, the Biggie biopic, was bad in the way that really bad biopics are bad.
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Because biopics are so dangerous, I think, and I have enjoyed very few of them.
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People have taken over the #BoldCastingDecision and are creating their own casts for future biopics.
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Yet both of the movies cited above are good examples of Hollywood biopics that don't stink.
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You love all things nerdy, from binging Doctor Who to researching the historical accuracy of biopics.
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Chad Boseman is already the reigning king of biopics after playing Jackie Robinson and James Brown.
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Of course the part carried enormous risk; bad biopics invite a particularly gleeful type of schadenfreude.
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Biopics as different as Ed Wood and The Damned United have chronicled public failure, showing how even
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From Focus Features, the movie is the first of several planned biopics about Owens to hit theaters.
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What do you think the key appeal is of biopics like Rocketman or, for example, Bohemian Rhapsody?
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Even when their work was declassified, formal recognition and bad Hollywood biopics didn't come until decades later.
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We are too easily lulled into complacency by pretentious prestige television, Oscar-thirsty biopics and presold franchises.
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W.M. — Film: A Quiet Passion I'll confess that I am biased both for and against literary biopics.
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There's a reason so many rocker biopics follow the same trajectory; it's a mythology rooted in fact.
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Biopics can often skirt around the oft-unpalatable textures of narcissism, or instances of violence or abuse.
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Personally, I find the most motivational movies to be biopics or those loosely based on real-life people.
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This film is very different to the recent biopics of Freddie Mercury ("Bohemian Rhapsody") and Elton John ("Rocketman").
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How might the triumphant nature of biopics gloss over some of the details that we need not forget?
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But out of all the biopics and miniseries, there's one queen that is often left out: Queen Anne.
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Q: Bollywood is known for embellishing its biopics, adding lots of drama and incidents that didn't really happen.
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The man behind the two biggest biopics of the last year has his sights set on another legend.
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People have said to me, "Oh, we should do a movie about Dave Brubeck," but biopics are tough.
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Biopics are never entirely historically accurate, nor should they necessarily be held to the same standards as nonfiction works.
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Netflix has some pretty dope titles, from documentaries to biopics, that offer compelling takes on the African-American experience.
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Hollywood has come a long way since the days when biopics only told the stories of older white men.
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I think that template is often a big part of the initial interest in musical biopics like this one.
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He went onto name political figures who have been subjects of biopics and the end result of the productions.
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Since 2010, there have been over 225 biopics released worldwide and that's only including films with clickable Wikipedia links.
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The network will be releasing biopics for Latin music stars like Selena Quintanilla, Luis Miguel, Nicky Jam and José José.
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The film looks deceptively conventional, in that it's designed, shot, and structured like any number of other biopics you've seen.
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In the past, diverse casting has been reserved for low-budget indie films and Oscar-aspiring period pieces and biopics.
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There are plenty of decent sports dramas, biopics, and family films, but the list of great sports comedies is short.
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Irrespective of any expected stumbling blocks, the Hollywood machine has continued to market biopics as glossy, money-making, blockbuster productions.
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He offers very little insight in his biopics, and comes off politically neutral, which has its own insidious political implications.
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Like most musical biopics, "Bohemian Rhapsody," which focuses on Mercury's thrilling rise and partial fall, is a little of both.
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Some biopics go for sweeping and exhaustive, trying to cram an entire life into a tidy two hours or so.
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Even among the ranks of artist biopics, which are almost never as daring as their subjects, this film is timid.
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Musical biopics have been stale for years, or at least since whenever Walk Hard came out and eviscerated the entire genre.
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Consider The Social Network, The Imitation Game, or any of the world's surplus of Steve Jobs biopics, which perfected this narrative.
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It is a curiously low-key affair, shorn of the air-punching moments that constitute most music biopics' bread and butter.
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And it's especially important to the movie, in a way that isn't always true for musician biopics or movies about bands.
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And biopics try to prove a point—they begin to preach, and that is totally not what Tom would have wanted.
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The accuracy may be dubious, but biopics are more like allegories anyway, A. O. Scott wrote in The New York Times.
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The film is almost startlingly bereft of the bombastic "for your consideration" scenes we have come to expect from historical biopics.
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Mackie, who is poised to play Jesse Owens and Johnnie Cochran in upcoming biopics, is represented by UTA and Inspire Entertainment.
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In 2015, FiveThirtyEight reported that the ratio of male to female biopics "has consistently been around 3 to 1" since 1933.
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Biopics also benefit from linear storytelling: characters are introduced, obstacles set up, the story climaxes and falls, providing a sense of resolution.
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"The problem very often with biopics is getting past, 'Oh, they're doing a very good imitation of these people,&apos" she explained.
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Biopics can be a nasty business, and Stone routinely throws himself into historical narratives and the messy negotiation between fact and fiction.
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For example, artist Oliver Wasow's Picturing Science involves groups of themed images from online sources, including scientist biopics and remote wildlife photography.
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Media is the closest humans have come to achieving immortality, with biopics and documentaries that can and often do outlive their subjects.
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With "Bohemian Rhapsody" potentially winning big at Sunday night's Oscars, it's no surprise that two new trailers for musical biopics just dropped.
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With Bohemian Rhapsody receiving five Academy Award nominations and grossing over $800 million worldwide, music biopics are about to have a moment.
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Unfortunately, the Librarian of Congress did not grant exemptions for narrative filmmakers—those who create non-documentary films like biopics, art films, etc.
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One trait that jazz biopics, white or black, have shared historically is the marginalization of black women as wives, lovers and actual artists.
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"I was annoyed by the fact that she appeared in rock biopics only in relation to men she had moments with," Nicchiarelli says.
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But accuracy is irrelevant when it comes to self-created biopics, where a successful dramatization serves a more cemented, more tightly-controlled brand.
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The early reviews are truly golden: "'Blaze' is more affecting than most other live-hard/die-ugly music biopics," wrote The Hollywood Reporter.
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The November movie schedule is crowded with pleasures: There's a tiny indie, several huge franchise blockbusters, documentaries, comedies, biopics, and a lot more.
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Well, unlike other subjects of musical biopics, the Rocketman himself is still alive — and was very much involved in the making of the movie.
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The movie, starring Taron Egerton as the music icon, is apparently going to be more fantastical than other biopics, per the movie's star himself.
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Black biopics, which illuminate the private and public lives of Black celebrities, typically fall into the latter category — and Black people respond with love.
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Many recent biopics have focused on one meaningful point in their subjects' past, using it as a lens to explain everything in that person's.
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Years of inspirational biopics taught us that one's dream job is the only one that really matters, regardless of whether it pays your bills.
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Mr. Churkin, a former child actor who had starred in three films, two of them biopics about Lenin, was widely considered a masterly diplomat.
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"Judy" differs from most biopics in that it focuses on a small time period rather than offering a sweeping panorama of the heroine's career.
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Over time, "based on a true story" has become a movie-marketing cliché, shorthand for quality in a world full of award-hungry biopics.
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I do things you do in all historical biopics, where I condense time and locations, and there are some composite characters and stuff like that.
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In biopics such as "The Blue Note" (1991) and "Impromptu" (1991), she exists to reflect the genius of Frédéric Chopin, her lover, back at him.
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Yet documentaries and biopics of comedians have struggled to get the balance right between private pain and the joy these individuals bring to the public.
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As authors' lives go, Tolkien's was eventful, and the connections between his biography and work aren't as tenuous as they are in so many biopics.
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We watch biopics to learn something more about who [insert famous person] was, a character study of someone we already probably know a lot about.
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In general, Drunk History takes time to tell stories that, had they featured straight white men, would have been no-brainers for biopics long ago.
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From biopics to historical dramas, the short video shows a side-by-side visualization comparing how history really went down versus how Hollywood depicted it.
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Last year, there were whispers about how Oscar winners Emma Stone and Alicia Vikander were both in talks to play Agatha Christie in two separate biopics.
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As literary biopics go, though, it's well above average, dramatizing the much-studied parallels between the life of Mary Shelley (Elle Fanning) and her Frankenstein monster.
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Historical biopics, animated films, and family-focused blockbusters are all on the docket, all of which are competing for eyeballs at the end of the year.
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It might not be the kind of end that fuels Oscar-baiting biopics, but it's one that will have a lasting legacy in the fight world.
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"Halt and Catch Fire" paints a realistic picture of flawed characters and shows us, too, that the innovators are not always rewarded with fame and Hollywood biopics.
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As in most artists' biopics, all sorts of themes and images from the aspiring novelist's best-known work are there to be spotted in his formative years.
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These biopics, deeply rooted in anguish as they may be, still become beloved Black classics, or at the very least, viral moments because of our shared history.
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Miles Ahead, a new film by Don Cheadle about the jazz legend, honors that philosophy by discarding the cradle-to-grave structure that so often plagues biopics.
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I wanted the clues to be independent of the films and their subjects, but since many of the theme movies were biopics, I couldn't pull it off.
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Come for the earnest skewering of cliches portrayed in biopics like Ray, stay for Paul Rudd, Jack Black, Justin Long, and Jason Schwartzman as the India-era Beatles.
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A representative for the family told The Hollywood Reporter they had not screened "Tolkien," and added they had been approached about biopics in the past without granting approval.
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From big-time movie stars tackling gritty roles to biopics of fascinating geniuses to new takes on humanity's big issues, there will certainly be a lot to watch.
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Many words have been written about the problems that are seemingly endemic to biopics, and even more about the myriad inaccuracies in "based on a true story" movies.
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LOS ANGELES - Actor Ethan Hawke takes on the role of famed jazz musician Chet Baker in "Born to be Blue", one of several music biopics released this year.
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Amateurs in Space is a reminder that, just like Hollywood biopics, documentaries don't necessarily excavate the depths of their characters, and instead condense human lives into easily consumable storylines.
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A web series, called "Modi: Journey of a Common Man", has also been banned, along with "Lakshmi's NTR" and "Udyama Simham", two biopics of founders of regional political parties.
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But there is also another reason that all eyes were on BET for this feature presentation, and it has a lot to do with nature of Black biopics themselves.
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He worked with Anton Corbijn and Werner Herzog in biopics Life and Queen of the Desert, neither of them particularly good, but both indicative of good taste in directors.
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New biopics and documentaries about this period are rarely surfacing new facts; they are presenting a way of feeling about the events and the lives caught up in them.
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The film generally manages to better toe the line between the kind of overly broad sentimentality required of all biopics and the specificity of John's story as a gay man.
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So many biopics about women, dead or alive, are often eschewed by their subjects (or the families of subjects) if they're not being told the family or the subject themselves.
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His best known works tell someone else's story, from adaptations of Hair (a Broadway music) and Amadeus (a stage play) to biopics about Hustler founder Larry Flynt (The People vs.
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Biopics, costume dramas, dramatizations of significant (or obscure) events — these are among the dominant non-superhero, "serious" movies of our time, and this festival's recent history is full of them.
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She continued to speak well of him after he died and long into her own life, perhaps because people are far more complex than biopics like this one can admit.
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Almodóvar so dislikes what he calls los biopics that he joked to me that he'd inserted a clause into his will prohibiting anyone from making a movie about his life.
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"Bohemian Rhapsody is bad in the way a lot of biopics are bad: it's superficial, it avoids complexity, and the narrative has a connect-the-dots quality," Sheila O'Malley of RogerEbert.
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Cheesy biopics are not where we go for realism, but let's give credit to the hardworking casting agents who must have spent countless hours auditioning red-headed actors and Markle doppelgängers.
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Nearly half a century after her death by suicide on air, there are not one but two biopics about an otherwise little-known news anchor named Christine Chubbuck out this year.
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The films' combined success has not only given the industry a much-needed impetus in terms of commercials, but also dismissed all existing notions about sports biopics not working in India.
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Most presidential biopics—like Spielberg's Lincoln, HBO's Truman and Rob Reiner's upcoming LBJ—are firmly set during their subject's respective Presidencies, long after the men in question are dead and buried.
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But despite its flaws, Miles Ahead is an energetic work boasting a fine central performance, and it's a refreshing departure from the linear, moribund template that often dooms biopics to mediocrity.
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Granted, these days they seem to come around like clockwork, but even by the standards of 2014, when back-to-back biopics were dueling for filmgoers, this autumn is particularly notable.
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It's simply the nature of biopics, from Julian Schnabel's "Basquiat" to Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's Gerhard Richter-inspired "Never Look Away," that they buy into the "great man" theory of art.
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More importantly, though, the Drunk History version of the Hamilton story continues with the musical's tradition of casting people who wouldn't usually get a shot to be in biopics about white people.
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This latter requirement means that celebrity life stories are great script fodder, and the channel has churned out (mostly unauthorized) biopics about Aaliyah, Whitney Houston, Toni Braxton, and uh, the Craigslist Killer.
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It feels more like an adaption of a Wikipedia article — with dialogue written by an artificial intelligence that was trained by watching rock biopics — than like a tribute to its subject's brilliance.
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As we've seen in Judy and in other biopics of the late legend, Lorna was just a tween when she found herself having dealing with her mother's dependence on pills and alcohol.
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There will surely be more forms of entertainment media that delve into JUUL—scripted television shows, biopics, human-interest-style podcasts—given its rapid rise into the very fabric of youth lifestyles.
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I've watched enough biopics to feel I possess some of the eccentricities—issues with shirt tags and sock seams and eye contact, repetitive food habits—that are the mark of singular achievers.
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The goal, Teyssier says, is for the guest to feel like an actor in a theatrical production: the natural outgrowth of an age in which vacations are presented like biopics on social media.
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While Harriet does succumb to some of the pitfalls associated with biopics, through its insistence on highlighting the socioeconomic and regional differences that existed among Black people at that time, it also transcends them.
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Why they might not: Prestige-season biopics are risky business since they're so often formulaic uplift-machines that are designed to shove the audience's emotions through preordained motions of sadness, anger, and renewed hope.
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Jones does a good job of capturing Ginsberg's poise and determination, but her best scenes are opposite Hammer, who brings a steady, supportive performance usually reserved for "the wife" in biopics about powerful men.
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The controversy plays into broader discussions about diversity in Hollywood and the tendency to "whitewash" biopics, especially when they involve people of color, by casting actors who conform to white and European beauty standards.
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After 1960, the few jazz biopics that came to screen largely featured the stories of African-American artists: "Lady Sings the Blues" (1972), about Billie Holiday, and Clint Eastwood's "Bird" (1988), about Charlie Parker.
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Some traffickers finance their own biopics: When Edgar Valdez Villarreal, known as La Barbie, was arrested in 2010, he told the police that he had given producers $200,000 to make a movie about him.
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But in a world saturated with formulaic biopics, it's refreshing to see someone try to do something new with the genre—even if it winds up being an exhilarating failed experiment in the end.
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Despite its occasional flaws, Inspiration from Japan demonstrates how van Gogh's varied work mostly defies the long-standing banalities that have cropped up around his image as reiterated by some biographies and sentimental biopics.
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The so-called twin film phenomenon isn't terribly rare — examples include the Truman Capote biopics "Capote" (2005) and "Infamous" (2006) and the romantic comedies "No Strings Attached" and "Friends with Benefits," both from 2011.
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Better yet, if you're disinterested entirely, as I was, and perplexed by the cultural fascination (in recent years, there have been four novels based on her life, and three major biopics are in the works).
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From Memorial Day to Labor Day, this summer's slate includes arty horror, big-budget comic book movies, sequels, heartfelt biopics, and — maybe unexpectedly — movies about snake-handlers, Uber drivers, and Bruce Springsteen-obsessed young people.
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Read These Stories Next: Why Now Is The Right Time For A Judy Garland Biopic Roxanne, Roxanne Isn't The Hip-Hop Herstory We Want, It's The One We Need The 31 Best Biopics Of All Time
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However, there is a special case to be made for more biopics about Black women, especially whose who work in entertainment, where women of color are still too often relegated to the background or are afterthoughts.
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Now, focusing on the years between 1949 and 1952, the country's greatest film-maker, Andrzej Wajda, has told the visionary art theorist's story in "Afterimage", one of a new crop of biopics dealing with great artists.
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Here's one: Not long ago, the 43-year-old American actor received a call with an offer to appear in "Ip Man 3," the third in a series of biopics about Bruce Lee's martial-arts master.
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Fox made or contemplated biopics of New Left heroes (Che Guevara and Malcolm X) and adaptations of problematic literary adaptations ("Myra Breckinridge," and "The Confessions of Nat Turner"), as well as Mr. Meyer's X-rated comedies.
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Sure, there are still the Oscar-bait biopics (Ford v Ferrari), and the buzzy book adaptations (The Goldfinch), not to mention the requisite homegrown content (opening-night film Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band).
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While Curie's life as a scientific pioneer in early twentieth century France was not very much like the three African-American mathematicians of Hidden Figures, nor the polymath Alan Turing, you wouldn't know that from their biopics.
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In bringing their story to the screen, director Amma Asante (Belle) faithfully follows the familiar arc of countless historical biopics before her: the noble struggle, the seemingly insurmountable setbacks, the string-swelling triumph in the last reel.
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These winning biopics—three on musicians ("Searching for Sugar Man" in 220, "21960 Feet from Stardom" in 19853, "Amy" in 21985), one on an athlete ("Undefeated", 210) and one a whistleblower ("Citizenfour", 22015) —all revolved around compelling personalities.
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Biopics about the lives of influential Black people have run the gamut between blockbuster hit (Ali, Ray, and Straight Outta Compton) and better luck next time (All Eyez on Me and Wendy Williams' failed attempt at an Aaliyah movie).
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Noam: One of the main things the movie lacked for me was any sense originality or a particular perspective, so I would point people to two biopics that really seemed to think hard about how to present iconic characters.
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While no one expected Britney Ever After to be anything other than The Room of biopics, it seems the unauthorised Lifetime movie that aired Saturday night was so bad it shocked even the most unshockable viewers with its hilarious inaccuracies.
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And if you don't have people of color depicted as heroes, as people who fall in love and who get hurt and who have angst—not just victims of racism, not just biopics or Mississippi Burning-type shit—but human beings.
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It is associated with the post-World War II bandit operation run by Graziano Mesina, a legendary figure known as the "Scarlet Pimpernel of Italy," who has been the subject of many scholarly books and at least two popular biopics.
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Popcast Listen to this week's podcast | Subscribe: iTunes | RSS | Stitcher| Audioboom What a weird coincidence: There are currently two first-run biopics in American theaters about brilliant jazz trumpeters, both with emotional and chemical problems, both in career down-cycles.
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The arc of the film will feel familiar for anyone who's seen "Bohemian Rhapsody" or most other musical biopics: Spectacular success begets trouble with drugs and alcohol, and soon the star's most steadfast companions can do little but shake their heads.
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Often, biopics built around a single virtuosic performance make a big, unsuccessful show of trying to capture the magic of that performance overall — see Meryl Streep's Margaret Thatcher and The Iron Lady or Gary Oldman's Winston Churchill and Darkest Hour.
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Still, Professor Marston succeeds where so many biopics fail – in showing us its subjects as more than just the sum of their accomplishments, and getting to the heart of the maddening but all-too-human contradictions that drive them forward.
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It's common to pull out the criticism that biopics are like Wikipedia entries in cinematic form (and it's been employed by others against this film), but one would actually be better served by reading Mapplethorpe's Wikipedia page than by this film.
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Disney said that while the bill was "presumably well-intended" because it could prevent the use of celebrity images in unauthorised pornography, it would make it difficult for "companies like ours to tell stories about real people and events", for example in biopics.
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Reflecting the politics of a post-civil-rights-era America, the recognition that African-Americans played a foundational role in creating and innovating in jazz was a sign of progress after their often marginal to nonexistent presence in the white jazz biopics.
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If the first half suggests the neorealist Rossellini of "Paisan" in showing the condition of life in Gagliano, the second half is closer in spirit to his TV biopics, like "Socrates," in allowing the people to hold forth on their various philosophies.
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"Some people are realizing that projects with female leads are big-time moneymaking commodities, but I've also had studio heads say to me, 'We don't want to make biopics about women,' or more simply, 'We're not interested in female-driven material,'" she says.
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"The New Edition Story" is, by far, the best of the recent spate of black pop biopics, miles beyond the shoestring Lifetime entries about Toni Braxton and Aaliyah, films that have contributed to an air of lowered expectations for projects of this nature.
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Bollywood loves its spectacular biopics — but in 2006, Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra made waves by telling the story of independence revolutionary Bhagat Singh and his fellow rebels through the eyes of jaded college kids struggling to believe in a country they saw as broken.
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Biopics love to dazzle us with their try-hard verisimilitude, and this one gives us nearly 10 minutes of end-credit split-screen comparisons between the real Crüe and the movie Crüe, presumably so we can marvel at the skill of the duplication.
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Colette, the new film about the life of famed French author Gabrielle Colette, resembles so many other historical biopics of men and women with expansive personal lives and achievements: It's gorgeously costumed, transporting in its set design, and struggles to find a suitable, sensical ending.
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And with that, I would like to state my unequivocal hope that this film becomes the The Room of music biopics, the stuff of legend and cult status and late-night screenings in theatres where everyone gathers to relive the cringe one more time.
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Robin Benger, the director, and producer behind the Gemini nominated, First Person Shooter, and Nelson Mandela: The Life and Times, is a self-proclaimed, "strictly documentary guy" and is wary of the self-serving leverage that can be achieved from biopics that feature political figures.
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Like most biopics about brilliant assholes, Darkest Hour has a "neglected wife" character – but because this one's written as a more clear-eyed variation on that type, and because she's played with grit and grace by Kristin Scott Thomas, Clementine Churchill makes a strong impression.
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He had done biopics before, starring as Sammy Davis Jr. in "The Rat Pack" (1998), which earned him a Golden Globe, and as the hotelier and accidental humanitarian Paul Rusesabagina in the 2004 film "Hotel Rwanda," for which he received an Academy Award nomination.
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Nonetheless, even though tour de force biopics aren't safe from partisan issues, Miss Virginia will hopefully act as unequivocal proof of the acting prowess of the cast involved, and as a platform to raise its stars, Aduba and Fitch, up toward more leading roles.
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Widely considered to be one of the best biopics of the past twenty years (admittedly, not a category rife with competition), Milk tells the story of Harvey Milk, the City of San Francisco's first openly gay mayor and the first openly gay official in the country.
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And the 2018 fest yielded a bumper crop of terrific offerings, including a number of lauded biopics about figures like Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the late actor Robin Williams, actress and activist Jane Fonda, women's rights attorney Gloria Allred, and the beloved TV figure Fred Rogers.
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One of those biopics that tries to encapsulate the sweep and substance of a life by narrowing in on ostensibly representative moments, "Judy" concentrates on Garland's bumpy, weeks-long engagement at the Talk of the Town, a London cabaret-restaurant where patrons sometimes threw breadsticks at the faltering talent.
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Black History Month has particular meaning if we honor the wonderful people we have read volumes about and seen biopics on, but we must also take heed of the unknown people, the folk who in the light or in the dark do the work to improve the lives of everyone else.
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The songs feel so superfluous to the movie's narrative, especially compared to the much more sophisticated ways many other composer/musician biopics and dramas have handled the integration of the music into the storytelling (think of Walk the Line or What's Love Got to Do With It, for example, or even 8 Mile).
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New Zealand novelist Anthony McCarten—who has made a career out of writing Oscar-nominated biopics over the past few years with The Theory of Everything (24) and Darkest Hour (2017)—adapted his own 2017 play The Pope to create The Two Popes, which earned three Oscar nominations (including one for McCarten).
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It's about how he comes to create Middle-earth, and how its creation is tied in with the outbreak of World War I. The film looks a little generic as far as biopics go, but the way it intersperses the real world with the world Tolkien imagines could make it a bit more interesting.
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So it's surprising that Harriet is the first biopic about such an important woman in American history, considering how this is an industry that loves making historical biopics — surprising, that is, until you remember that Hollywood has typically exhibited skepticism toward the idea that movies led by women and people of color can make money.
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It's an industry that has often seemed invested in black Americans primarily as slaves (12 Years a Slave), victims of inner-city strife (Detroit), or symbols of comfort (The Help) and is fixated on stories about the post-Reconstruction and civil rights eras and biopics of famous black people that only glimpse at race.
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In the past few years, the most notable movies about Silicon Valley were The Social Networkand Steve Jobs, critic catnip biopics that may not have idolized their subjects but gave Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg the great-man-of-history treatment: Just imagine, without those two titans of industry, you wouldn't be scrolling through Facebook on your iPhone right now!
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The film plays fast-and-loose with the facts, adhering to the formula of traditional biopics like "Walk the Line" and "Ray," but it was a box-office sensation for a reason, tapping into the creative breakthroughs that led to hits like the title track and into the passion that infused the band's career-capping Live Aid performance.
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When it comes to the Oscar-nominated films that make up the ceremony's Best Picture category, it's more than likely every contender will fit at least one of these four groups: Biopics, devastating true life stories of people overcoming adversity, soaring movie-musicals, and the type of film with one scene that will leave you shamelessly ugly-crying in the theater.
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Fan, where fan Andy Saunders chronicles every episode in detail, the show's set may have malfunctioned: Before anyone accuses the three players of not knowing Tom Hanks (the BIOPICS $200 clue), it has been reported by audience members from this game that the lights on the signaling system malfunctioned (failed to activate properly) and the contestants were unable to buzz in.
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But of course Bohemian Rhapsody also teased the idea of a great ensemble film about a group of brilliant creators, and if we're looking at great ensemble biopics, the one that springs instantly to mind is Straight Outta Compton, which was woefully overlooked by critics but is, in my opinion, brilliant in the way it captures complicated, contentious group dynamics without losing its creative sparkle.
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"The type of claims pursued by a celebrity like Olivia de Havilland here deserve especially heightened scrutiny because docudramas, biopics and historical dramas — which by design do not portray individuals or events literally or with obedience to historical fact — often depict real people who may not like, and may even be offended or embarrassed by, how they are portrayed," the M.P.A.A.-Netflix brief says.
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This year's program runs the gamut from feature-length biopics — like Harriet, acclaimed director Kasi Lemmons's take on the life of Harriet Tubman, which will open the festival — to documentary shorts — like Corine Dhondee's Bradford Young: Cinema Is The Weapon, which puts the award-winning cinematographer of Ava DuVernay's Selma and Denis Villeneuve's Arrival (to say nothing of Space Jam 2) in front of the camera.
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The films on the lineup this year promise to do all that and more: from biopics about tragically talented icons (Judy); to Pulitzer Prize-winning literary adaptations (The Goldfinch); to true stories about strippers living their best, most crime-filled, lives (Hustlers); to sequels about horrifying, demented clowns (It: Chapter Two); and let's not forget the adventures of Brad Pitt in space (Ad Astra).
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Harry and Oprah will serve as co-creators and executive producers of the mental health series for Apple's streaming service and will include Kahane Cooperman, a former co-executive producer of The Daily Show with John Stewart, at the helm and will be produced and directed by Dawn Porter (director of Bobby Kennedy for President) and Asif Kapadia (the filmmaker behind biopics Senna and Amy, about ill-fated singer Amy Winehouse).
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"The thing about doing biopics is that the younger generation doesn t really know who they're coming to see like when Jamie [Foxx] did Ray Charles I'm pretty sure there was a big percentage of the fans who didn t really know who Ray Charles was – really the younger audience – so they were really just coming to watch Jamie Foxx perform," he said of Foxx's Oscar-winning performance in 2004's Ray.
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The partners who cut their teeth together in the lo-fi worlds of digital radio and microbudget sitcoms have arrived, two decades later, in the most glamorous territory imaginable—albeit of two very different types: Gervais in the auteur's playground of the TV miniseries, making adult dramas about bereavement and existential misery; Merchant in the director's chair in Tinseltown, rattling out feel-good sports biopics with the planet's most bankable movie star.
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But even so, it's clear that Hollywood is in a strong position to repeat its record-busting 1403, with a queue of upcoming 2019 releases that includes the next Avengers film; standalone movies about Spider-Man, Captain Marvel, and the Joker; two X-Men films; a Fast & Furious spinoff; three live-action remakes of beloved Disney animated films; sequels to Toy Story, Men in Black, and Frozen; biopics of Fred Rogers and Elton John; and movies from beloved directors like Jordan Peele (of Get Out), Greta Gerwig (of Ladybird), and M. Night Shyamalan (of Unbreakable and Split).
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