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Robert Hanssen was a FBI agent responsible for tracking down a Russian mole. The mole was responsible for the worst breach in American security and led to the deaths of many foreign assets. Hanssen was that mole for 22 years. It's a hell of a story of intrigue totally destroyed in the movie Breach with Chris Cooper as Hanssen. What incredible true tales have needlessly been turned into dreck by Hollywood?
In the words of Roger Ebert, “Pearl Harbor" is a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours, about how on Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle.”
Pearl Harbor was trying to be like Titanic, having a romance in the lead up to and during a tragic event. And knowing that, I fully expect there to be a romantic tragedy movie surrounding 9/11 to come out in about 50 to 70 years' time.
Let me spoil "Remember Me" for you.
Wow, I absolutely stand corrected
Does that really count though? Titanic/Pearl Harbour have the love story shite taking place before/during/after the "main event". Doesn't Remember Me play like a normal romantic film and then right near the end the camera pulls back and you see R Patts works in the twin towers?
I once read a novel with a way more interesting plot: two people unravel in a conspiracy where a group of rich and powerful people seem to be behind a large number of tragic historic events.At the end they have to meet a guy at a restaurant for answers, turns out it's in the the twin towers and they see the first plane coming towards their window
Yes and no lol
He's there to meet Pierce Brosnan, who, if I remember right, played his father... I don't think he even worked there. It was just like, he went to meet his dad for lunch or maybe he had a job interview... I could be wrong though. I saw the movie once in theaters fourteen years ago and had no desire to see it again.
Never Forget Me was right there!
That'd be a movie about a romance in Texas leading up to the war at the Alamo
Boy do I have a Robert Pattinson movie for you.
Please God let it not focus on the falling man starting the day with his quirky new girlfriend
The falling man becomes that guy who hits the propeller in titanic and everybody laughs.
Oh god I hope it's not one of those freeze-frame "that's me, I guess you're probably wondering how I ended up here"
Only if the voiceover is one of the hijackers
And then the Twin Towers kissed as they fell in love while the sunset on September the 10th. *cue ominous music*
Watch "Tora, Tora, Tora" both the Japanese pov and the American pov. Phenomenal casting, great cinematography and still the definitive Pearl Harbor movie.
Mixed reviews. Not a blockbuster, yet most historians said it was a legitimately accurate portrayal.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tora!_Tora!_Tora!
My buddy who is a major history buff sat me and and made me watch this years ago. He said it's the closest representation you'll ever see because the truth doesn't sell movie tickets.
Pearl Harbor had so many stories crammed into it, it was like the turducken of shitty movies.
Funniest part is that Michael Bay couldn't end the movie with America losing so he made sure to include a bombing run of Japan at the end, even though the movie was long as hell.
Yep I was like really? More of this shit?
I remember getting it on DVD as a kid. DVD #1 was before the attack and was not played much.
From Here to Eternity is a lot like Pearl Harbor., except the romance and goings on before the attack are interesting. Pearl Harbor, not so much
God he was such a good writer.
Nothing will ever top his review of Highlander 2. "There should only have been one ".
"Stardust," the David Bowie biopic where they skip right over the arguably-overdone but inarguably-the-entire-reason-people-watch-music-biopics, "the part where they get famous."
It focuses on the time period when he was a little famous in the UK after having one or two minor singles, but before he blew up into the star that we know and love, mostly wandering around being sad and playing occasional acoustic shows in coffee shops of other people's music.
Oh, I hadn't mentioned the best part yet? They failed to secure the rights to any of his music, so this David Bowie biopic doesn't have any David Bowie songs in it.
uh oh, we have a Jackie Jorp-Jomp situation
Have another little chunk of my lung now mama!
Synonyms just another word for the word you want to use!!
Reminds me of that Jimi Hendrix movie with Andre 3000. They picked a weird time of his life to cover and they didn’t get the rights to any songs, except maybe ‘Hey Joe’.
Lol there's a Hendrix movie from 2000 starring Wood Harris that also didn't get the music rights. Luckily Jimi played a lot of covers so they just do those ones.
You mean the Hendrix biopic where it was basically 2 hours of Andre 3000 beating women, despite the fact that Hendrix didn't do that?
Wonder why they couldn't secure the rights for his music? 🤔🤔🤔
I bet Andre could have beaten it out of them..
There was no "get the band back together nonsense" with Queen at Live Aid, because they never stopped performing. It was not an outlier for Freddy to have a side gig, because all the members did. They all had hedonistic parties, not just Freddy. That crappy movie inevitably skips their residency in apartheid South Africa.
My favorite was the band doing an intervention on Freddy Mercury. “You’re partying too hard Freddie this is off the rails!” Meanwhile what transpires behind them seems to be a party that looks like it was thrown in a suburb by a married couple in their 30s. Like for fuck sake, Mercury used to hire a naked dwarf to go around his parties giving out cocaine as party favors.
Also they didn’t need to fight the label for Bohemian Rhapsody. Pretty much everyone who heard it was pretty “ride or die, this song is fucking awesome”. The only slight issue was pitching radio play on a longer song. But a lot of bands paved the way for them on that.
The moment all the other members were like "Freddy we hate this party life, you're out of control!" and they take their partners walk away is a so clearly not how it went
"Now excuse us, Freddy. We're late for our volunteer time at the local soup kitchen."
"Please don't party too hard while we build socialized housing for the disenfranchised and donate money to poor African children!"
I call them Freddy and the choir boys. Cause those 3 behaved like naive children throughout most of the movie. The worst thing any of them did during the movie was almost throw away a toaster....
In 15 years of being in the biggest rockband on the planet? Don't make me laugh.
Roger Taylor most definitely fully explored the rock n roll lifestyle. May and Deacon, not so much.
The dwarfs (plural) had bowls of cocaine strapped to their head.
They also had a naked man covered in a cold meat selection.
And these are just the things we know about....
That was Lady Gaga's uncle..
David, 12th Duke of Gaga. Known affectionately as 'Radio' to his friends.
I HATE YOU
YOU SUCK
hey check out this new bassline.
Wait until you hear the operatic section
The what? Gasp
Producer and Label Guy IRL: "oh....cool you're layering sounds and orchestra stuff over all the guitars? That's totally in right now. Zeppelin did that earlier this year in their album. We need to get in on that too."
I literally rolled my eyes in the theater. Though I enjoyed the film and expected it to be a PG-13 version of an R rated story.. this moment was just so goddamn stupid lol
Read somewhere that when a PG-13 movie has a character with an addiction problem they just make it look like they’re addicted to “partying” to keep the rating.
They should just go full Saved By The Bell and make it caffeine pills.
They did the same with the The Doors. They made Jim basically be an insane alcoholic junkie from the get go. Almost everyone who knew him said he was a quite friendly guy for most his life. It was only in his last couple of years that he lost his shit
None of those 'will the guests actually turn up to my party' worries for Freddie.
That movie was the end point of my desire to see musician biopics. Really all biopics.
Dewey Cox ruined the musician biopic forever.
"Goddamnit, this is a dark fucking period!"
Well, maybe give "Weird: The Al Yankovic Story" a spin before you say that. Al was very strongly motivated by Bohemian Rhapsody's liberties with the truth to show an honest, warts-and-all biopic about his own controversial rise to fame.
Probably the only fully truthful and accurate biopic ever made.
They omitted the part where he played Live Aid with Queen, though.
I felt the same way but Rocketman was very well done and deserved every ounce of praise that Bohemian Rhapsody received.
Rocketman is sensational. How to use the music to tell a story, regardless of when that music appeared. How to make it fresh (Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting with added Indian elements), how to show flaws and all. Given he also actually performed the music, I deeply wish Taron Egerton had won the Academy Award rather than Ramy Malek. I like RM, but even Elton said he often felt like he was watching himself onscreen with Taron.
Rocketman is from 2019, Bohemian Rhapsody is from 2018 they didn’t compete with each other. Taron Egerton wasn’t even nominated for the Oscars which is a travesty.
I could watch it on repeat and never tire of it. It's own flaws and truth fudging are well documented but it's a dreamy wonder of a thrill ride that transcends the musician biopic. Bohemian Rhapsody just made me sad and left me wanting.....everything. it felt like it gave us nothing and expected our love and awe.
Especially since all of the blame for everything gets laid at Freddie's feet, since he is the only member too dead to object. It's like if Paul, Ringo, and George had made a movie in the 90s about how, actually, they never really liked John, they were totally better off without him.
Yes I know John Lennon was an asshole, but my point is more that people would have been piiiiiiissed if that had happened.
I was really hoping to see the Queen movie with Sasha Baron Cohen. He wanted to tell the real story, not the glossed over PG story that we got. Unfortunately the living members of the band controlled how it was done.
The film making a definitive statement about Freddie's sexuality was pretty egregious to me as well. Complete bi-erasure, based on no concrete facts, pushing the narrative that he wasn't in a Kinsey Scale grey area.
I agree - but I also know that the conversation with Mary went down exactly as the film showed it. That literally was her response, as per her own interviews.
Medieval.
Jan Zizka is probably the most interesting and badass motherfucker in history. He never lost a single battle, for many of which he was leading essentially rebels against the absolute infinite behemoth of the Catholic church at the time. And he pioneered the usage of the wagon fort in combination with firearms, leading to some truly unbelievable wins against insane odds. So, he won a bunch of battles, then he lost an eye in battle.
And then he continued to win every battle.
THEN HE WAS FULLY BLINDED.
AND HE CONTINUED TO WIN EVERY BATTLE.
THEN HE DIED, AND THEY FULFILLED HIS FINAL REQUEST: FOR HIS SKIN TO BE MADE INTO A WAR DRUM SO THAT HE COULD CONTINUE TO CHARGE INTO BATTLE WITH HIS FELLOW HUSSITES AFTER DEATH.
Sorry for the caps, but seriously it's hard for me to even tell that story without freaking out about how amazing it is.
And they had Ben Foster playing him, no less, whom we KNOW can be virtuosic as an absolute monster of a man, a lá 3:10 to Yuma. I was so fucking excited.
And then Medieval was a fucking absolute parade of clichés and meaningless fake medieval fighting with a heartless love story shoved in the middle. They didn't even tell a fragment of Zizka's actual story.
😭
Wow, what a story! Have to look that guy up.
There's an old Australian movie about the explorers Burke and Wills which changed the truly interesting story of what happened to them.
Canned history - they set out on an expedition to go from the South to the North Coast of Australia in one go. It was a spectacular failure. Not only did they not get to the top, a lot of the team including Burke and Wills themselves died trying to get back. Famously, they left a group of guys as a supply outpost en route, with instructions to leave if they weren't back by X date - the guys waited way longer in vain hope, but ultimately gave up and left the outpost a few hours before Burke and Wills actually did make it back. Subsequently they actually made contact with an Aboriginal tribe who helped and fed them, but they screwed it up (almost shot a kid) and then eventually died not of starvation but a kind of poisoning as they were eating bush tucker but not removing the toxic parts of the plants, even though they should have learned this from the Aboriginal people they were with.
That's a fucking great story on heaps of levels. The adaptation decided to jettison it though 🤣 in the movie, they DO reach the top end, only to later die in the comfort of the knowledge that they achieved their goal (and with none of that pesky business about nearly shooting an Aboriginal kid and blowing your shot with the until-then-friendly locals). I remember them showing us the movie at school, then awkwardly explaining that no, actually the mission was a failure.
I know it’s a tragedy but if you do a film on these fuckers, it needs to be a comedy. This was the biggest clusterfuck in Australian history and we fought fucking emails. From the selection of Burke to lead, an inexperienced mildly alcoholic police dude from Ballarat over the dude who was basically the adventurer pro, To bringing a grandpiano over like juice, to the carriage that turns into a boat, to the whole situation with the fucking dig tree. This whole story is a black comedy and you gotta make a movie that is one too.
I know you mean we fought fucking emus but it autocorrected to emails and I'm 🤣
Did the Australians not fight emails then? 😂 I thought they meant the country resisted the technology or something crazy like that
The whole world has been fighting emails.
We're losing.
That is a great and tragic tale for sure.
Haven't seen either but there was also a comedic film - featuring Nicole Kidman - out at the same time called Wills and Burke covering the same story
Lucky you for having decent teachers. I remember watching that movie in school and had no idea until I read your post that they never even made it.
🤣
To be fair, I think we were told they "almost made it". Like, yeah nah close enough mate.
Anyone interested in hearing more, check out the Do Go On episode about the journey. It's hilarious.
Do a shot for every time they split the party
Honestly, Napoleon is a very good example of this. By refusing to really have an opinion of the man, the movie was boring. That they made a woman central to his motivations is also a great deal less interesting than the truth, which is that he was a mess of ideological contradictions.
Scott’s Napoleon takes one of the most fascinating and conflicted men in history and made a boring digestible Hollywood biopic out of him.