Film
C4
August 14–20, 2015
www.TheEpochTimes.com
10 Best Musical Biopics of All Time
Talent is the ability to channel
By Mark Jackson
Epoch Times Staff
The best musical biopics result
when the actor feels the role
so powerfully, it goes beyond
mimicry and gets into what’s
commonly known as “channeling.” We know the word
from seances, mediums, and
the Oracle of Delphi and such,
but the main thing is, when it
happens, it’s slightly eerie.
It’s really a live theater phenomenon. It’s when the performance is so dead-on good,
the hair stands up on the back
of your neck because all traces
of the actor completely disappear, and the historical character being played appears to
reincarnate before your eyes
onstage. The atmosphere during such channeling feels electrically charged; you can hear
the proverbial pin drop.
In the movies, because of
all the electronic and technical manipulation and the fact
that there’s no living, breathing being onstage whose every
move and breath is finely tuned
and synced with the mood and
breathing patterns of the audience—channeling translates
less powerfully.
Still, there’s a bit of it going on
in the excellent biopic “Straight
Outta Compton,” with O’Shea
Jackson Jr. playing O’Shea Sr.
(aka Ice Cube). Of course, in
this case, the physical genetic
replication might have a little
to do with it.
Top Ten
The following is a list of musical biopics, from worst to best
(worst being a relative term,
these are all top-notch performances) where we believe some
channeling was happening.
10) ‘La Bamba’
Richard Steven Valenzuela (Lou
Diamond Phillips) is a Mexican
kid who attains rock-and-roll
superstardom under the stage
name of Ritchie Valens. His
half-brother Bob Morales (Esai
Morales) is endlessly jealous of
Ritchie’s success. After his hit
“La Bamba” hits the top of the
Billboard charts, he’s supposed
to do a concert with Buddy
Holly and “The Big Bopper.”
They all fly through a snowstorm and their plane crashes
and burns on Feb. 3, 1959. Don
McLean called it “the day the
music died” in his ‘70s song,
“American Pie.” The film put
Lou Diamond Phillips on the
map. For reasons of channeling.
9) ‘Cadillac Records’
Leonard Chess ran Chess
Records in Chicago with his
brother Phil, selling records
out of the back of his Caddy—
hence the movie title. Chess
put blues legends Little Walter,
Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters,
Willie Dixon, Etta James, and
rocker Chuck Berry on the map.
British actor Eamonn Walker
channels the lightning of
American blues howler Howlin’ Wolf like a thundercloud,
the raw sexuality of his performance coming from a such a
primal place as to be almost disturbing. Beyoncé channels Etta
James; she’s riveting. So much
so that the performance may
have been the reason the real
Etta James threatened Beyoncé
with bodily harm for having
had the audacity to sing Etta’s
1961 signature song, “At Last,”
at President Obama’s inauguration.
8) ‘Coal Miner’s Daughter’
Loretta Lynn, one of country
music’s biggest stars, picked
Sissy Spacek to play her. Spacek
wasn’t feeling it, but went ahead
anyway. Lynn’s husband was
played by Tommy Lee Jones—
Lynn was only 13 when they
married, and had four kids
by the age of 20. Clearly, Lynn
recognized that something in
Spacek’s constitution recognized Lynn. Because there’s a
Spacek best-acting Academy
Award to prove Lynn’s gut feeling was accurate.
7) ‘The Doors’
Speaking of channeling, Val
Kilmer totally channels Jim
Morrison in Oliver Stone’s
biopic “The Doors,” so much
so, that when The Doors band
members themselves heard Kilmer’s singing, they couldn’t tell
it wasn’t their former charismatic and disturbed lead singer.
That’s talent.
6) ‘Walk the Line’
Joaquin Phoenix channels
Johnny Cash with a singing
voice that’s very hard to tell
apart from the original. And
Reese Witherspoon channels
Cash’s love interest (and later
wife) June Carter. Might have
done a better job than Joaquin.
She did win the Oscar for it.
5) ‘What’s Love Got
to Do With It?’
Without Tina Turner’s incandescent talent and charisma,
along with her sexy backup
singers, the Ikettes (one of
whom dated Mick Jagger for a
time), Ike Turner would have
had a fairly low-wattage musical career. He was a talented
show-businessman, but coming
from his era, Ike did business
as he learned it from his surroundings. He wasn’t so much
a husband to Tina or a manager
to the Ikettes, as a pimp to his
Stone lithographic advertising poster detail, China, Ca. 1920
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It was during Kurt Russell’s channeling of Elvis in a TV miniseries
two years after Elvis died that
Hollywood recognized his talent.
whole musical venture (specifically the females involved in it),
treating them like a kind of stable of musical prostitutes, with
pimp-ish beatings meted out for
rule infractions.
A live wire from start to finish, “What’s Love Got To Do
With It?” provides the nostalgia of ‘60s soul music and has
terrific dramatic scenes.
It features fully arresting performances from Laurence Fishburne as Ike, and an incredible Angela Bassett channeling
Tina.
The actual Tina Turner does
the singing, but Bassett owns it
by getting all the dance moves
spot-on and committing to the
portrayal of years of physical
and emotional abuse.
4) ‘The Buddy Holly Story’
If you ever wondered how the
lately kinda interesting-looking
actor Gary Busey got his start
in movies (he was formerly a
musician), it was because of his
uncanny channeling of Buddy
Holly in the 1978 biopic “The
Buddy Holly Story.”
And there’s no dubbing:
Busey sang and played it all
himself, sounding eerily like
the real deal. Holly was a trailblazer, influencing everyone
from the Beatles to Linda Rondstadt. Buddy Holly and the
Crickets were the first white act
at Harlem’s Apollo Theater—
the Apollo booker thought
Holly was black. You know
the songs: “That’ll Be the Day.”
“Peggy Sue.” “It’s So Easy.”
Look into the East
(L–R) Bobby Byrd (Nelsan Ellis) and
James Brown (Chadwick Boseman) in
“Get On Up,” based on the incredible
life story of the Godfather of Soul.
3) ‘Ray’
Who knew motor-mouthed
Jamie Foxx was such a brilliant pianist? It’s part of what
won him the role and then the
Oscar, and then the Golden
Globe, for a stellar channeling
of legendary R&B singer-pianist
Ray Charles. Director Taylor
Hackford, who’d made one of
the greatest musical documentaries of all time, “Hail! Hail!
Rock ‘n’ Roll” (which could
almost be thought of as a biopic
with the notoriously cantankerous, miserly, charming, and
hilarious Chuck Berry playing
himself), clearly had his learning curve with “Hail” translate
into an award-winning, actual
biopic with “Ray.”
Jamie Foxx already had a handle on “Ray” through the piano
playing, but it was his talent as a
gifted stand-up comedian, and
the penchant for mind-blowingly accurate mimicry that
Elvis Presley at a press conference inside his private railroad car at
Los Angeles Union Station, on April 20, 1960.
tends to accompany that profession, that synced with the
piano playing and shifted the
whole performance to the channeling level.
2) ‘Get On Up’
Chadwick Boseman, so good in
the biopic about Jackie Robinson, soon after stepped up to the
James Brown plate and absolutely knocked the role of the
self-appointed “Godfather of
Soul” out of the park.
As I said in my review of the
film: “Oh, he nails it. Top to bottom. Hair, talk, attitude, and jittery, shimmying, blurry-footed
dance moves. Not even Jamie
Foxx playing Ray Charles surpasses Boseman becoming
Brown. Close, maybe. But if
Jamie won an Oscar, so must
Chadwick.” The word we’re
looking for here is channeling.
1) ‘Elvis’
It was an ABC miniseries, made
two year after Elvis died, and
was also the first collaboration
between John Carpenter and
Kurt Russell. People think it
was Russell’s character “Snake
Plissken,” with the eye-patch,
the giant black cobra tattoo
on his stomach, and his whispery, Eastwood-esque whispery
delivery of the line “Call me
Snake,” that announced Russell to the world as a Hollywood
leading man. Which is true. But
it was really during his earlier
channeling of Elvis that Hollywood recognized his talent. Of
these ten picks, this one may
actually make the hair stand up
on the back of your neck.
In the movies, channeling is
just good acting. Onstage, it’s
definitely something more.
There have been actors, like
Michael Chekhov (nephew of
famous playwright Anton), who
claim they felt or even saw some
entity moving about the stage,
and simply copied what they
were experiencing.
Either way, when it’s really
good, you’ll know it when you
see it.
AP PHOTO/STEVE YEATER
Actor Joaquin Phoenix performs a song from his film “Walk the
Line” for inmates at Folsom Prison after a screening of the movie on
Jan. 3, 2006. Phoenix played singer Johnny Cash in the movie.
AP PHOTO
Actress-singer Sissy Spacek (R) and country singer Loretta Lynn pose
at a post-Oscar party in Beverly Hills, Calif., on April 1, 1981. Spacek
won the Oscar for best actress for her portrayal of Lynn in “Coal Miner’s Daughter” at the 53rd annual Academy Awards.