"Inspired by a true story."
"It's not a docudrama. But this event happened, and that is what the whole movie is centered upon," Mr. Marshall says. He adds that the words "inspired by" are used because "it's important to know that this could happen. It validated the hook of the movie."
In the Wall Street Journal,
John Lippman considers the trend of movies based or inspired on a true story (
or real dog). While Lippman doesn't actually demonstrate that there are more "reality-based" (
truthy?) films in theaters tonight than there were twenty years ago, it's fair to say that memoir, reality television and based-on-a-true-story have a cultural privilege right now over fiction and invention.
Why? Since this has been sitting in the draft pile for a while, I'll leave it as a question and come back to it in a later post, if it continues to nag me. I suspect that our tolerance for lies is at one with the denigration of imaginative capacity, of the truth in fiction. Now, evidence!
The Top Ten for 2005
The ones I would throw down for in a bar fight:
Mysterious Skin
New York Doll
The Squid and the Whale
The really good ones:
Grizzly Man
A History of Violence
Munich
War of the Worlds
Last Days
Serenity
Good Night, And Good Luck
In Her Shoes
Funny Ha Ha
The "what's a top ten if it doesn't reach fourteen" ones:
Brokeback Mountain
Walk the Line
10 Things I Hate About You/Well, that was embarrassing
As a kind of scourge for not posting on the movieblog in seven months (and not even having a preemie to show for it) I changed the template to argyle. Nice, huh? But here the Academy Award noms are all out and stuff and I haven't even written something
almost entirely needlessly contrarian but also basically true about Brokeback Mountain.
This much I'll say:
10 Things I Hate About You was, like, the Gay Coming Attraction Movie of 1999. Not only was Ennis del Mar the A-couple heartthrob, but Mysterious Skin's Neil McCormick (a/k/a Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and how did
Dan Savage call that one just from watching Third Rock? Hello?—follow link and scroll to the bottom) played the B-couple nerd. Poor Julia Stiles, left in the knitting circle with Ann Hathaway and that other girl who acted real good but isn't as famous.
A list of 2005 movies I saw
THE ARISTOCRATS
BAD NEWS BEARS
THE BALLAD OF JACK AND ROSE
BATMAN BEGINS
BREAKFAST ON PLUTO
BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN
BROKEN FLOWERS
CINDERELLA MAN
THE CONSTANT GARDENER
THE 40 YEAR-OLD VIRGIN
FRANK MILLER'S SIN CITY
GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK.
GUS VAN SANT'S LAST DAYS
A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE
THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY
HOWL'S MOVING CASTLE
THE ICE HARVEST
IN HER SHOES
KISS KISS, BANG BANG
KUNG FU HUSTLE
LAYER CAKE
MAD HOT BALLROOM
MARCH OF THE PENGUINS
ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW
MILLIONS
MR. AND MRS. SMITH
MUNICH
MURDERBALL
MYSTERIOUS SKIN
NEW YORK DOLL
NINE LIVES
PALINDROMES
RED EYE
SAHARA
SARAH SILVERMAN: JESUS IS MAGIC
SERENITY
THE SQUID AND THE WHALE
STAR WARS: EPISODE III REVENGE OF THE SITH
SYRIANA
THE TALENT GIVEN US
THE UPSIDE OF ANGER
WALK THE LINE
WAR OF THE WORLDS
WEDDING CRASHERS
