Not the biographies but the real events that have been translated into huge films, so incredible they don't seem real.
We live in the years of true stories, those in which cinema and television series draw abundantly from the world of real events, whether it be cases and very famous stories or dark sensational events. Fiction is always present, but real inspiration in some cases gives these films an ability to dare and to represent (real) facts that are so sensational, absurd, and unthinkable that they would not be acceptable in an invented story because they are too little credible.
And the story of the Stockholm robbery would be not very credible, the film that tells the true genesis of the Stockholm syndrome, or that robbery with hostages that took place in the 70s in Sweden at the end of which all the kidnapped developed a sentimental relationship with their jailers, tried to defend them and help them not to end up in prison. The film is fictionalized and takes quite a few licenses (so much so that the characters don't have the names of real people), but if there weren't a fact, it would not be easy to accept it.
However, the true stories have always been told since the first decades of the life of cinema; they have often been biographies of great characters and, in some cases, the chronicle of great events. We looked for the 10 films that best told great true stories (but not biographies like Raging Bull or Gandhi).
10. Argo
The true story of how Hollywood, with an incredible series of tricks and deceptions, managed to free the prisoners of the American embassy in Iran has only recently come out, and the cinema has immediately made it its own, in a film of rare size and equilibrium. One of the first feature films is that true stories are often so sensational that they can be told with irony.
9. No
The true story of the campaign for the "No" to the referendum deposed Pinochet in Chile. Shot a few years ago, but with colors and looks that make it look like an 80's television product, this beautiful film by Pablo Larrain adheres in all respects to everything at the time and with the archive material, so that it is impossible to know what is true and what is not of the images we see.
8. Escape from Alcatraz
With Clint Eastwood as Clint Eastwood, this true escapist story becomes a pure genre film. Instead of using drama, the most usual frame for real facts, Don Siegel chooses to make it a film of open fiction that respects the facts.
7. Real men
One of the driest and driest films ever tells about events in which no one else had seen a story, that is, the flight experiments that preceded space travel. They are men aboard precarious and experimental vehicles launched ever closer to the stratosphere or space to test the potential of human engineering. An exceptional film with a crazy cast and a back so straight it impresses. Official inspiration for Interstellar.
6. Try to get me
Spielberg takes his obsession with absent fatherhood to the maximum and makes the best films with Leonardo Di Caprio. The true story of America's greatest con man, constantly on the run from the same FBI agent, in constant disguise and able to scam anyone, not only fits Di Caprio's brat face well but is a tour de force of rhythm and laughter amplified by the awareness that it really happened.
5. The battleship Potemkin
There are so many things that are not known about Battleship Potemkin. Overwhelmed by Fantozzi's anathema, this film, which is actually very short (60 minutes) and very fast (it's a war story), has become the emblem of boring cinema when it is not. It is the true story of what happened to a cruiser at the time of the Tsar, whose crew rebelled against the officers for the quality of the rancho and was shelled from shore for this. The film is Soviet, pure propaganda, and in the rebellion of the crew against the officers, it sees a metaphor of the people carrying out the revolution against the elite. Read past events to talk about the present.
4. The violent arm of the law
There are quite a few licenses, but Friedkin relied on the true story of the New York-Marseille axis in drug dealing, how it was transported and how real cops hunted down criminals. In his hands, it became a furious obsession and a film of incredible chases, but the backbone is real.
3. All the men of the president
American-style investigative cinema. The true story of the Watergate scandal was told by the two journalists and the newspaper that unveiled it. A film about politics, journalism, and American society of the time, all true, all in one story.
2. Salvatore Giuliano
Rosi is probably the greatest filmmaker of Italian reality. In years in which the hybridization with the documentary was still to come, he had filmed The Mattei case, in years in which the investigation was in hiding made Le mani sulla città. Still, it is Salvatore Giuliano, the chronicle of what determined the end of the well-known bandit, his masterpiece. A biography is not a biography because its subject is not actually told. It is a true treatise of Sicily and pure ancestral humanity.
1. That dog day afternoon
From a fact known only in America, Sidney Lumet draws a great story on several levels. A robber looking for money to finance the sex change operation of his love makes a big mistake, ends up surrounded, and takes bank customers hostages. There would already be enough, but the heart of the film is something else, what happens during the negotiations and, above all, the incredible media turmoil that the story provokes, the presence of televisions, and the interference of bystanders.
Al Pacino's debut in a prominent role, he launched it internationally.
You must be logged in to post a comment.