Sometimes its feels as if the world of cinema has gone crazy with biopics. It’s probably the one connecting factor throughout the various nations- that a film about a famous person is seen to be a seller, yet it’s usually an incredibly dull affair that boasts one or two noteworthy performances, from Night and Day to La Mome. Another film to add to the list of mediocre biopics is The Edge of Love, a story that centres around the debauchery of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas.
The film follows the viewpoint of Vera Phillips, Dylan Thomas’s childhood friend and supposedly first love. Working as a singer in London during The Blitz, she comes across Thomas in a bar, who is of course drunk and attempting to wrangle booze money out of friends and family. Their potential romance is marred by the arrival of Thomas’s wife, the borderline nutcase Caitlin, Thomas’s match in promiscuity and alcohol consumption. Vera ends up living with the couple, befriending the normally catty Caitlin. Soon, Vera gets involved with the possessive Killock, who gets shipped off to the War, only to return to a pregnant Vera, and suspicions of her infidelity.
If there’s one surprise in this film, its Keira Knightley’s performance. Many are still dubious about her acting performances. While many saw her role in Atonement as a pouting object, she was probably the best part of the film. And while her “Lizzie” in Pride and Prejudice was slightly off the mark, she deserved her Oscar nomination. In this film, not only is her Welsh accent convincing, but she carries a kind of rural sultriness that makes her character more watchable than it could have been. Read the rest of this entry »
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Films based on bands almost never work out, and it seems that The Motley Crue’s biopic Dirt is also one of them. Announced back in 2006, the band talked of plans with MTV Films and Paramount Pictures to produce a biopic based on their best-selling autobiography The Dirt co-written with Neil Strauss. The film, however, has fallen flat, as bassist/lyricist Nikki Sixx told Reuters that they are trying to take back the property and find a new partner.
"We’re trying to get them (MTV) out of the way to make this movie that should have been made a long time ago,” said Sixx. “MTV has become bogged down in its own way. It’s a channel that used to be hip and has now actually become unhip.”
“We signed with them because we believed they were right, but they haven’t come to the table,” he further added. “We need to find the right partner. They are not the right partner."
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The epic is dead. At least for Hollywood it is. Long gone are the days of The English Patient. If Cold Mountain was a sign of interest wavering, Kingdom of Heaven and Alexander showed that people were getting tired of swords, sandals, and sand. Even the excellent The Assassination of Jesse James, epic at least in its running time and cinematography, was a bit of a box-office disaster. But is there life outside of Hollywood? The glorious trailers of Mongol, the biopic of Genghis Khan, suggested that there very well may be, but did the film live up to its expectations?
Genghis Khan was once known as Temudgin, son of a local tribe leader. Khan was brought to a nearby village of his father’s enemies to make piece by having young Temudgin marry one of their daughters. However, Temudgin displays his stubbornness by picking a girl from a nearer village, which results in a rather unhappy fate for the boy’s father and family. Temudgin spends much of his life running from his new enemy, one of his father’s tribesmen Targutai. Temudgin grows up fast when living in a land where Mongols are not living by etiquette, and when his bride is kidnapped, he convinces his blood brother Jamuqa. But differences in attitude causes the two to be split apart, ending in further misery for Temudgin, as he is imprisoned once again, giving him time to decide on his future: to unite the Mongolian tribes and honour the ancient way of living.
This all sounds pretty far from the traditional image we have of Khan: as a barbarian. This Western image is not quite replicated in the East, where Khan is seen as more of a hero, perhaps in a similar light to Alexander the Great. Read the rest of this entry »
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Sometimes its feels as if the world of cinema has gone crazy with biopics. It’s probably the one connecting factor throughout the various nations- that a film about a famous person is seen to be a seller, yet it’s usually an incredibly dull affair that boasts one or two noteworthy performances, from Night and Day to La Mome. Another film to add to the list of mediocre biopics is The Edge of Love, a story that centres around the debauchery of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas.