Posts Tagged ‘ true story ’

Le Scaphandre et le papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) is the phenomenal adaptation of French journalist and media mogul Jean-Dominique Bauby’s memoirs after a stroke at the age of 42 leaves him completely paralyzed except for his left eye, ending his career as editor of world-renowned magazine Elle and how he dictates his book to an editor using a system of blinking.

Conspiracy is so accurate and realistic, forcing the viewer to see by proxy a real meeting held by Nazi Germany’s administrators to plan The Holocaust that it actually leaves the viewer quite literally on the verge of nausea.  It is a horribly sad, but true tale, based upon the one surviving copy of the meeting’s notes found in the aftermath of World War II.

Martin Scorsese‘s fantastic follow-up to 1990′s Goodfellas, again teaming up with Nicholas Pileggi, who is also again both the author of the book and the writer of the screenplay.  Many of the faces of Goodfellas return here to Casino to tell the true story of how the mafia took Las Vegas from a small-scale military stop-over and turned it into the money-making machine that it is today–and how they screwed it all up on the way.

The best of the best, here are presented the ten best movies about crime which are based on true stories.  They are listed in alphabetical order and each is generally a quite good movie, but what makes them especially interesting, and in some cases, very, very terrifying, is that this is not complete fiction; in fact, most of what is being portrayed really did happen…

1.  Blow 2001 – Directed by Ted Demme

Starring Johnny Depp, Penélope Cruz, Franka Potente, Paul Reubens, Jordi Mollà, and Ray Liotta, this Ted Demme directed picture tells us the story of George Jung (Depp) who goes from being the son of a lower-middle class plumber (Liotta) to drug dealer, to drug trafficker, to basically cocaine king of the United States, to inmate, to parolee trying to get back into his daughter’s life, and finally to permanent inmate.  The movie is heart-wrenching and the kind of movie men will in which men watching will tear up at the end because George finally realizes that the advice his father gave him long ago, when his father’s business was in trouble, was the truth, and George has realized it too late to do anything about it.  It is as tragic as it is brilliant with fantastic acting, a great cast and the never-changing excellence in direction of Demme.

“Chaos; control; chaos; control; You like?  You Like?” states Stockard Channing while portraying Ouisa Kittredge and having her husband Flan Kittredge (Donald Sutherland) flip a double-sided painting by Wassily Kandinsky with the styles on each side being either chaotic or controlled in Six Degrees of Separation.   Adapted from the play of the same name by John Guare who also writes the screenplay, director Fred Schepisi is able to do what very few directors dare try, let alone succeed in doing: adapting a play (Six Degres of Separation) into a feature-length Hollywood film (Six Degrees of Separation) and doing it well!