Tag Archives: actual events

Obsoleting Reality

Posted on by under Generic Rant, Movies

These are not good days for reality. They haven’t been for some time, but the old boy’s decline seems to be hastening. From all indications, people don’t have a lot of use for reality.

As an entity, reality has been, as we were wont to say in the software world, deprecated. That means it’s still out there somewhere, but you’re discouraged from using it. It’s just as well. It’s getting as hard to recognize as it is scarce.

The reality (there’s that word again) of the situation has been driven home for me most recently with the suddenly huge and profitable enterprise known as fantasy football. Fantasy sports have been around for a while, mostly played out among friends and co-workers. The lunatic fringe started getting involved. That was bad enough. Then it became Big Business, giving us all the gift of legalized gambling in all 50 states.

fantasylandThe fantasy versions of sports have surpassed their reality counterparts in importance to many people. At least it’s called “fantasy” because it isn’t “real”. (Would that TV showed the same discretion, q.v. below.) Unfortunately, some people take it to extremes and trade reality in for fantasy. They forget the actual sport – or worse, interfere with the actual sport! – in favor of the fantasy version. Read “Fantasyland” by Sam Walker for a glimpse at the insanity of it all in baseball.

Worse is when we slap the word “reality” on things that are anything but. It should come as a surprise to exactly no one that I’m talking about so-called reality TV. And by reality I mean fantasy. How did that happen? In this case, reality refers to something that is surreal, absurd, contrived, and a slew of other qualities that are in reality (I mean it this time) descriptive of things such as fiction, fantasy, and general nonsense.

That situation isn’t all that distinct from the average based-on-fact movie today. Maybe in days of yore movies that were about people or things that actually existed were factual. There’s no such pretense these days. Movies simply aren’t telling true stories anymore. In order to squeeze into the save-the-cat mold or whatever other generic screenwriting template is in vogue, films are dramatized often to the point of camouflaging the truth beyond recognition. You see the disclaimers at the end of the ridiculously long credits:

Although this movie is based on actual events that may or may not have happened, none of the characters are real. The settings and dialogue have been fabricated for dramatic effect. Organizations depicted herein are not and have never been and most likely never will be real. The story has been twisted like a Möbius strip in order to maximize income for the producers. However, it is true that there once was a guy.

Movies use a variety of descriptions that, if analyzed correctly, reveal how far they’ve drifted from historical veracity. Here’s a sample:

  • a true story – This means what it says: It’s a true story. You will never see this claim.
  • based on a true story – There was indeed a story once. The movie is a fictional retelling of that story.
  • based on actual events – There were some events. One or two might have accidentally ended up in the movie.
  • inspired by actual events – Forget about it. Any connection to reality is purely coincidental and probably a mistake. You could say this about “E.T.” It could have been inspired by the actual event of a kid who ate Reese’s Pieces and faked being sick so he could stay home from school.

Reality. headstone

I miss it.

Bad movies of good stories

Posted on by under Movies

inspired by actual eventsRecently I watched what looked, from descriptions I’d read, like an interesting movie. It was a fabricated story “inspired by actual events”, as opposed to “based on a true story” or “inspired by a true story” or “based on actual events.”

According to the blurb on the DVD cover, the film was “Astonishing.” As it turns out, the only thing about the movie I found astonishing was that it got made at all. Surprisingly, the “actual events” that inspired the story were more horrific than the ones actually portrayed in the movie. More often than not, the opposite is true. Otherwise tepid events are typically sensationalized to titillate potential viewers. That should give you an idea of how grim these particular “actual events” were.

There are a number of questions and concerns that films like this raise in my mind:

First, when is a true story not a true story? Is it fair to sell fiction as fact? The Academy Award winning best picture of 2012, “Argo”, brought this question to the fore. It was publicized as, “Based on the declassified true story”, but it was more fiction than history. How discerning is the average moviegoer? From my perspective, not very. Therefore, in a very real way, we’re rewriting history.

Then, is it fair to review a movie’s content versus its quality? I’ve seen plenty of weak movies that tell amazing stories ripped from headlines or history books. Great story, mostly because it was great in real life. The movie, not so much. Still, these are worth watching. One good example was a biopic (probably heavily fictionalized) about Cesar Chavez, a man whose story should be more widely known. The film was marginal, but it was important to see because I regularly need to be inspired by great – and real – men.

That also brings up the question of whether the moral content of a film should be included as part of its review. In today’s political climate, a siskel-and-ebertracist film would almost certainly be trashed, as it should be. Yet misogynistic films and TV shows seem to be proliferating without much resistance. One could legitimately say that the moral judgment of a story is dependent on the morality of the reviewer. But doesn’t the reviewer’s bias come into play in any review? If every reviewer agreed on every movie, we could eliminate personal prejudices as a factor. But then we would never have had Siskel and Ebert arguing about the direction of thumbs. What fun would that be?

So then, of what value are critics’ opinions? Probably none at all, except in those rare cases where all the critics seem to agree. But even then, if I’d listened to that unanimity, I’d have missed out on some films I consider terrific. (Call me weird.) Worse are the films I’ve seen because the cognoscenti decreed them great and they’ve left me feeling like I needed a good scrubbing afterward.

Unless you have a particular reviewer whose opinions always align with yours – Ebert was one who came closest for me – you’re pretty much on your own.

Like me, be your own best critic.