Those wacky Canadians! |
|
One of my fallback responses whenever I'm watching a movie with my (almost) 7 year-old daughter and a frightening scene comes on is to remind her that movies are fake. She's gotten rather savvy lately and while she might cringe at quick and shocking moments, she knows the drill when it comes to cinema. Fiction is the name of the game.
This tends to be the case even when movies are made in an attempt to describe real-life events. Not that I would have understood this when I was a young one like my daughter. It took me years to fully comprehend that the written statement prefacing a movie, "Based on true events," didn't mean that I was being told the whole story. It took me even longer to understand just how much liberty would be taken with a previously non-fiction moment in history on the movies with the, "Inspired by true events," header.
I got to thinking about this again when I watched one of these movies recently. While perusing the newer selections available for instant viewing in the "Watch It Now" feature at NetFlix, I saw a movie starring Laura Prepon, that hot chick from the TV show, "That '70's Show." Granted, she's not as hot now that she's a blonde, but the blonde hair was a necessity for her to play the Barbie-doll looking woman who was imprisoned in Canada for the rape and murder of three teenaged girls with her Ken-doll husband. I don't know what it is about salacious material and the human sense of curiosity, aside from the fact that it makes those "Law & Order" and "CSI" shows very popular and it will get me to spend an hour and 41 minutes watching utter crap.
I will hand it to the movie though, despite the fact that it was nauseatingly juvenile in its approach to some extremely dark subject matter, it managed to inspire me to look up the real life case. KARLA, the movie in question, was based on a real woman named Karla Homolka, a young and pretty blonde from Canada who helped her boyfriend (and later, husband) to rape and murder 3 teenaged girls, the first of which was her youngest sister. This is detailed in the movie, with flurries of bad language and impressively bad acting, but the more that I read about the case the lower my respect for the film went. Which seemed almost impossible to do.
The movie takes a sympathetic angle to Homolka, perhaps because nothing else that has been written about her has. It allows Prepon to stumble through the flick with alternately blank expressions and inappropriately sunny ones. From the pictures that I've seen of the real Karla, she was every ounce of a happy bride and dutiful wife, big smiles even when she was being filmed during the rapes of the young girls. She posed playfully in prison during birthday parties for the other inmates, kept posters of cartoon characters on her cell walls and wrote letters to investigative journalists that were festooned with teddy bear stickers. She wasn't bullied into anything. A person would have to be sane to begin with in order for that to have occurred.
Still, much of this is my opinion on what I've read about the case. The movie stays within the realm of being one of the movies that are "based" on real events and then fashioned to opinion of the filmmakers. 
Enchanting, ain't it? |
|
Most of what is depicted in KARLA is fairly factual, it's just told from a particular angle. And as much as we'd like to one day be able to claim that opinions can be wrong, there's still that pesky matter of subjectivity.
I've been a fan of true crime stories since I was about 14. One summer, after working as a volunteer at the local hospital, I received a gift certificate to the local bookstore as reward for my hours served. I strolled through the store looking for something new to read, something different than what I was used to. I ended up picking up a copy of Robert Graysmith's Zodiac based mainly on the way that the cover looked, piercing my eyes with its bright yellow, red and black cover. I read it over the course of two days, enthralled by what was the first serial killer I was introduced to. It helped that Graysmith wrote particularly well, keeping the reader interested in what he had learned through his own personal involvement with the supposed killer as well as providing the details that the police had gathered over the years.
It took 18 years before I got a chance to see that book be properly turned into a "based on true events" movie. Hoping to capitalize on the popularity and good looks of Jake Gyllenhaal, as well as the impressive acting talents of Robert Downey Jr and Mark Ruffalo, ZODIAC wasn't warmly received by the movie going audience. Clocking in at 2 minutes shy of being 3 hours long, most people who weren't in it for the long haul decided to go the "I'll wait until it's out on DVD," route. Not surprisingly, I wasn't one of them.
Just as the book had enthralled me so many years before, so did the movie. Only this time I was able to learn more about the personal life of Graysmith, from his young children and failed marriage to just how poisoned he became over the years of trying to determine who the Zodiac killer was. The movie is long for a reason - it honestly tries to fit as much fact into it as possible all while continuing to have the glossy veneer that movies need to have in order to drive butts into the seats and revenue into the pockets of the studio heads. It's rare that a movie of this caliber gets made. Embellishments are the name of the game when it comes to getting a movie completed. Sometimes no matter how interesting the real life events may be, they're not always going to appeal to a mass market. Niche isn't exactly a word that people in the business of making money - er, movies - want to hear.
Take for example, the movie GRAND THEFT PARSONS. Based on the bizarre promise made between country-rock musician Gram Parsons and his former friend and roadie Phil Kaufman, the movie falls far into the second group of flicks, those that are more "inspired" than they are "based." While there really is a Gram Parsons and there really is a Phil Kaufman, and while Kaufman really did manage to hijack Parsons' body and coffin from LAX where it was waiting to be shipped back to Parsons' home state of Louisiana, there are so many other holes and complete fallacies that caulk the tiles of the story together.
It's true that Kaufman borrowed a hearse from a friend in order to pick up the coffin and drive it and its inhabitant (if a dead body 
Start telling the truth or I'll bite the other nipple off!! |
|
can even be called that) out to the Joshua Tree National Monument. What isn't true is the person that he borrowed it from, the hippie drug addict played (rather well, actually) by Michael Shannon. Robert Forster, playing a man named "Stanley Parsons," was supposed to be Parsons' father when in reality Parsons' real father not only had the surname Connor but had committed suicide when Gram was 12. His step father was Bob Parsons, a man who might have adopted Gram and his sister but never went hunting Kaufman down during his mission to cremate his buddy in Joshua Tree. There are other characters in the movie which are entirely made up as well, in addition to leaving out the fact that while Kaufman DID manage to set the coffin on fire, those close to the singer and his family say that the attempt only destroyed the coffin and mutilated 60% of the corpse.
While the movie does start out by warning the audience that it is inspired by what happened, as well as stating that some of the characters in it are fictional, it also has the real Phil Kaufman featured at the end of the flick as the convict being hassled into the courthouse. Oh, and then there's the pesky problem of it being an entertaining and funny movie. What do you do when you watch a flick that happens to be good only to find out that the majority of it isn't just embellished, it's flat out imaginary? Myself, I go searching the internet looking for the facts. However, most people are going to watch the film, disregard what the preface might have warned them about the factuality of the events, and then believe the entire thing was real.
I mainly encourage people to watch movies so that they can get something out of them. I will recommend stuff that I hated knowing that it will in some way educate other people and help them to determine what they like and loathe. I like to have the fullest experience possible when it comes to cinema. I might not be a big fan of paintings or sculptures or even video games with good graphics, but movies are my art. Each one is a piece in a greater mosaic for me. I need them all to form the bigger picture.
With the popularity of documentaries rising due to the controversial handling of material by men like Michael Moore (SICKO, FAHRENHEIT 9/11 and BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE) and Morgan Spurlock (SUPER SIZE ME, WHAT WOULD JESUS BUY?) and the questioning of just how true a genre that was supposed to be all about facts and non-fiction is becoming, I wonder how much longer we're going to believe much of anything. Our news is censored and filtered by an administration afraid of the people finding out what's really going on lest they stop with their frivolous spending and unnecessary accumulation of credit card debt, our "based on true events" movies are taken as gospel by the movie going audience at large because they're too lazy to read anything longer than an article in People Magazine (or a column on an entertainment website) and our reality television shows now feature seasoned performers in staged predicaments.
Well, at least you can count on my really being Awesome. I swear. I'm as "true event" as it gets.
 email this column to a friend
|
| Neglected Foster Child of Hollywood |
Every other Wednesday
Not-so-gentle musings from the girl who is saving room in her uterus for Tarantino's spawn.
|
| AwesomeZara |
She's awesome, who would have guessed that?
|
| Contact |
If you have a comment, question, or suggestion, you can send a message to AwesomeZara by clicking here.
|
|
