If you like those connect-the-dot exercizes between an artist's work and fantasies about their personal lives, have at Becoming Jane. Even if you don't it's fun to gaze with thumping heart at McAvoy & Hathaway (whichever suits your preference... my heart beats for both of these rising stars). But a warning: if you, like me, feel that it's relatively demeaning for an artist's imagination to be explained away as pure biography you might have issues with the movie. It's the type that either turns you off or on at the concept stage.click to read my review of Becoming Jane
Real life is much more complicated than Stereotypical-Event-A-shaped-everything-about-_____'s life. This is but one of many reasons I have difficulty enjoying the biopic genre. So, yes, I'm biased. I don't like too much explanation --especially when it comes to the creative process. What happened to the magic and the mystery of art? I prefer to think of great creators as highly imaginative people rather than as autobiographers even if their themes, stories and art do spring from the deeply personal.
What's next... Becoming Alfred?"Becoming Alfred" is the chilling story of a portly director with a ghastly sense of humor. Unable to find true love with a series of nearly idential icy blondes, and plagued with agoraphia and vertigo after narrowly escaping a vicious freak bird attack and a fall from great heights, he holes up in his mother's rickety old home until his death. His last days with his stern mother were shrouded in mystery. Discover the great untold story that inspired his greatest and grisliest works!
Imagine your own Becoming... in the comments. Amuse us.
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14 comments:
Honestly...I would never see this if the McAvoy weren't in it.
I would love to see Becoming David Cronenberg, wherein Mr. and Mrs. Cronenberg fuck like wild people on their back staircase after Mrs. C catches Mr. C putting a videotape into his stomach. David is conceived in the process, as is his twin brother; they come rolling out of two compartments of Mrs. C's three-chambered uterus, though a third sibling remains stuck to the outside of her body in a little amniotic sac, while she gets angrier and angrier. Sadly, David's twin brother is killed when he gets into a sexy auto-collision with a man-sized fly that has a little secret knife in its armpit. Somehow, despite losing his younger brother under such traumatic circumstances, David resists the powerful urge to become a legendary American singer; instead, he becomes a cross-dressing Chinese infiltrator of the Russian mafia, whose head explodes from time to time, but he still succeeds in popping out a film or two, mostly by having sex with his typewriter, and also with Judy and Geena Davis.
All of the roles in Becoming David Cronenberg are to be played by Miranda Richardson.
nick --i think you've created the new midnight movie sensation!
BECOMING VAN GOGH... my next short film.
We see a 2 year old in an antiquarian high chair, uninspired by the food on his plate. He grabs a handful of food tentatively, and smears it all over the wall. The plate drops to the ground, the child climbs out of the chair, and forces the mushy meal into every crack in the floor. He covers his face with the food - fills one of his ears.
What has become of the room when his strict mother returns five minutes later can only be described as....
THE BIRTH OF AN ARTIST!
- The Desplat-loving, Luhrman-hating Australia
Becoming Lindsay Lohan: A Modern Horror Tale. Nuff said.
Becoming Nathaniel R., in which She Who Must Not Be Named and Beelzebub attempt to strangle baby Nat in his cradle, only to have their dastardly plans foiled by La Pfeiffer and The Bening, with the help of a phalanx of Hump Day Hotties. It writes itself, really.
Becoming Wes: Taylor Hackford directs Jamie Bell's bravura performance as the young Wes Anderson. Wes copes with the tumultuousness of teenhood and the death of his father by taking drugs, listening to angry rap music and vandalizing grocery stores. He is soon arrested for burglary, but the judge at his trial (James Avery) sees promise in the bespectacled young man and sentences him to a year of sessions with offbeat psychiatrist Dr. Tenenbaum (Michael Caine). They butt heads at first, but the good doctor's fondness for wistful storytelling, '60s curio folk music and symmetrical furniture arrangement soon rubs off on Wes. But will his girlfriend (Fairuza Balk) drag him back into the downward spiral of street life?
Jeffrey Lyons calls Becoming Wes "unforgettable... an unflinching look at the life of the mind."
I want to see Goatdog's movie. (He forgot the musical score by Olivia Newton-John and Rufus Wainwright, and that sinister, grotesque mobile of de-glammed actresses that Beelzebub and SWMNBN installed about his crib.)
I think the Becoming-type plot can only work if written a) primarily as a comedy or b) by someone who really knows the original material like the back of their hand (and thus won't just pander to the audience with the most obvious allusions). Shakespeare in Love fulfilled both those conditions and I admired it (which, as far as I know, makes me a minority around here).
BEST POST EVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1
I know Becoming Jane is probably going to be disappointing but I have to see this for Hathaway and McAvoy, sorry.
And I think in Nick's Becoming David Cronenberg,
Ralph Fiennes and Jeremy Irons have to be given some cameo parts, maybe as tortured twins.
but didn't you hear the instructions that ALL roles must be played by Miranda Richardson?
but that would be okay really since she could play them AS Jeremy Irons and Ralph Fiennes. Miranda could do it. You know she could.
****
as for that grotesque deglam mobile above my crib. If that happened I surpressed the memory but I did once wake to find pictures of Melanie Griffith taped to my ceiling.
which was almost as bad.
Becoming British - Where Beelzebub and She Who Must Not Be Named, obviously not satisfied with their awards, embarks on a mission to understand the British record at the Academy Awards. She Who Must Not Be Named disgiuses as The Queen of England while Beelzebub steals all the "ugly" of SWMNBN's past roles to pose as an aging Prince Charles.
They then make war with Australia for attempting to seize the Brit track record.
Transitional device will be Mary-Louise Parker's "Americans make for bad Europeans" line from The Portrait of a Lady to which nobody pays attention to of course.
Oh, all British roles will of course be played by Scarlett Johansson.
Scarlett made for a passable cockney in The Prestige, non?
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