Why Are Biopics So Inaccurate?
I've decided to watch [I]Ip Man[/I] movies (all 6 that I know of, not just the ones starring Donnie Yen)... and any time there is a Chinese martial artist biopic the movie is basically turned to a superhero movie.
Let's look at the non-Donnie Yen Ip Man movies:
[B]*The Legend Is Born:[/B]
[LIST][*]According to some texts about Man's past, he didn't have an adopted older brother, and he did not fight him while stopping a gang of Japanese smuggled spies sent as children to invade China. The movie does this stuff.[*]He did not get taught new techniques to Wing Chun because he was a pride of the place he was in, apparently his story was different.[/LIST]
[B]*The Final Fight:[/B]
This movie made him fight a gang leader in an enclosed area inside a wall, and not only did none of the events described happen, the villain in that movie was fictional.
[B]*Donnie Yen movies:[/B]
I am yet to watch the final film, but the rest made him a spiritual hero who fought against all kinds of oppression with his fists, like a twister (there's a pun in there, you'll get it if you watched movie 2 or read about it and remember the made up nonsense) removing trees from their roots. Or he fought gangs and hordes of enemies that are made up for these movies.
Why are they called biopics when the 'biography' part is disregarded?
American movies about Ip's most famous disciple share a similar guilt of course, but I'll spare making this a rant about turning biopics to superhero movies to move on to other stories that feel at least realistic.
In movies like [I]Catch Me If You Can[/I] they make the character more of a troublemaker than the real character was, something Frank Abignail jr himself was shocked to know about the film adaption of his autobiography and how people reacted to it.
Why do directors and screenwriters do that? They don't need to add so much fictional content to make a movie engaging, show it as it is, don't put misinformation there just cause your movie is based on true events.
Movies inspired by true events can get a leeway because they create new characters with different stories and names, and some of them point someplace that the real characters lives are different from the onscreen people.
Why are biopics so inaccurate?
[QUOTE=Cyke;5230299]I agree with several points here. From a narrative standpoint
Then there are other cases that are super egregious. I flash back to the disaster that was Stonewall and its near [B]total erasure of Martha P. Johnson[/B]. For LGBTQ folks, it would have been like having an original white male character delivering the historic "I Have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial with an actor playing MLK looking on in approval.
....[B]Oh no, it wasn't a black trans woman that threw the first brick[/B] in protest of the NYPD, it was actually an earthquake caused by a Soviet weather satellite that gained sentience through alien interference and wanted to live its best life, dammit!
[/QUOTE]
Ironically.... Even in history ^ people (either knowingly or not, for better or worse) choose, embellish, lie, fantasize, and spread their own preferred made up narrative as an idea of "reality".
Your own tongue-in-cheek example above, meant to convey an examples of a hard truth vs narrative fiction, is unwittingly and ironically the best proof of [B]why[/B] biopics (and the likes) exist, and are obviously going to be embellished and inaccurate.
Unless you were there, have documented proof, you are an unwitting tool, in spreading someone else's (true or false) narrative.
In the end, they (for their fantasy biopic) are no more accountable than you are, for spreading your agreed upon fantasy above.
So yeah Biopics are just a reflection and extension of the same.
A difference might be they know what they are doing is to "sell" a story and assume their "audience" would know going in. Not sure the person here is even aware how they are an unwitting tool in spreading an embellished fantasy.
The difference is just one is captured on film, the other on a random message board, there shouldn't be any surprise by how and why we tell stories and embellish "characters" even when loosely based on facts.
[video=youtube;S7jnzOMxb14]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7jnzOMxb14[/video]