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In a world where mimicking the gestures of a historical figure is awards bait, Biopic: A Podcast Story examines the good, the bad, the unspeakable, and the hilarious about this category of film that frequently dominates the Oscars but just as often offends our sensibilities. Biopic: A Podcast Story looks at the casting, the acting, the quality of the script, and the endless tropes that dominate these movies. Hosted by Rena and Sara. New episodes drop every Tuesday.
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Have you ever thought, “Maybe John Gotti has a lot in common with Nelson Mandela?” If so, this is the film for you. John Gotti gets the “throw every good movie about the cosa nostra in a blender and strain out the wrong lessons and the cliches” treatment with this barely-a-movie biopic that boasts 38 producers, 5 production companies, too many conn…
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The mercurial, incredibly talented, and wildly chaotic James Brown gets the biopic treatment with Tate Taylor’s Get On Up!, which depicts a troublingly sanitized version of the musical superstar. Featuring perhaps the greatest framing device in the history of the genre (an office park, a rifle, a life coaching seminar, and a woman who used the wron…
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Holy sh%t you guys. Rena and Sara dive into this colossal fiasco of a motion picture and come dangerously close to anhedonia as they stare into the void for four boring hours. Get on board for a lengthy history lesson about one of the film industry’s greatest cautionary tales. How did everyone involved do so little with so much? Was Richard Burton’…
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We had a lot to say about Race, so much that our fifth edition of Irrelevant Host Banter is entirely composed of material that we cut from Episode 14: Race. Think of it as Sara and Rena having a conversation in non sequiturs, mostly about Race. Highlights include: The sentimental way that Rena commemorates D-Day every year. Spoilers for Jordan Peel…
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Did you even medal, bro? White male mediocrity (compared to last week’s movie, at least) gets its due as we watch one of two debatably necessary Steve Prefontaine biopics that arrived in the late 1990s. What exactly did this guy do except run really fast on the collegiate level, witness the Munich Olympics’ atrocious massacre unfold on television, …
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Hooray! We have a bonus episode: our fourth edition of Irrelevant Host Banter. These are some outtakes that were cut for running time. Think of it as Sara and Rena having a conversation in non sequiturs. Includes material cut from:•Episode 12: Becket•Episode 13: Frida Highlights include: Rena's rant about her unintended visit to Casa Trotsky. An ex…
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All it took for a feature film about American hero, sports pioneer, and Third Reich-bitch-slapper Jesse Owens were French, Canadian, and German film producers to team up to get it off the ground. The results are mostly magical, with a compelling and winsome lead performance from Stephan James and a budget stretched to the max to bring the cringe-in…
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Irrelevant Host Banter, 3rd Edition: Cobb & Evita
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We have a bonus episode: our third edition of Irrelevant Host Banter. These are some outtakes that were cut for running time.Think of it as Sara and Rena having a conversation in non sequiturs.Includes material cut from:•Episode 10: Cobb•Episode 11: EvitaHighlights include:•The extended take of our reactions to Eva Peron’s corpse.•Extra criticisms …
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Salma Hayek’s passion project Frida—a gem of a film directed by the confounding, singular talent that is Julie Taymor—is under the microscope this week. At play: what’s the deal with communist men and the civilized way they hang out with their exes? Why are there so many children’s books about Frida Kahlo, a completely badass artist who played by h…
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How’d we get a biopic about the one-time Archbishop of Canterbury and his bromance with King Henry II before Roberto Clemente? Should we have watched this movie during Pride Month? Rena and Sara debate these and other issues like when forks actually arrived in Great Britain and whipping-as-penance. Sara has many dumb questions because she majored i…
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Rena and Sara confront the ghosts of their theater-kid selves while exploring the Madonna-starring Evita, the film version of hopelessly middlebrow composer Andrew Lloyd Webbers’s musical. Come for Sara’s appreciation of director Alan Parker’s oeuvre and Rena’s impassioned take-down of the least convincing pair of brown contact lenses ever used, st…
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Irrelevant Host Banter, Edition 2: Milk, Bessie, Rocketman & Gia
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Just in time for 4th of July weekend 2024, we have a bonus episode: our second edition of Irrelevant Host Banter. These are some outtakes from the episodes that we released in June of 2024 that were cut for running time. Think of it as Sara and Rena having a conversation in non sequiturs. Includes material cut from: Episode 6: Milk Episode 7: Bessi…
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What better way to celebrate America’s birthday than with a baseball movie with exactly one scene of baseball, elder abuse, racism, and Robert Wuhl? This week we will be talking about Cobb, starring returning champion Tommy Lee Jones as rather evil baseball legend Ty Cobb, who might be less evil than Al Stump, this film’s proposed protagonist. This…
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Is it a movie about the 1970s and 1980s fashion scene if there’s no fashion in it? Rena and Sara are varying degrees of annoyed at this biopic about legendary supermodel Gia Carangi, whose meteoric rise and devastating fall in the modelling industry is kind of documented in this film. Who’s the worse pastiche character – the grubby modelling agency…
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Score: 8.3375 Rena and Sara discuss Rocketman, the 2019 musical biopic about the life and work of the one and only Elton John. Are musicals realistic biopics, or not? We discuss the parameters of why they totally are, and why everything about this movie is pretty darn delightful, from the brilliant costumes, the fabulous singing and dancing, and th…
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Score: 5.675/10 Rena and Sara watched Bessie, the 2015 HBO movie starring Queen Latifah as Blues Empress Bessie Smith. We dissect the glory that is Mo’Nique, the spiritual battle between Dee Rees and Horton Foote, and the world’s fakest-looking pair of emerald earrings as we journey through Bessie Smith’s rise, fall, and recovery (and thankfully, n…
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Kicking off Gay Pride Month with a masterpiece, Rena and Sara discuss Milk, the 2008 film directed by Gus Van Sant and written by Dustin Lance Black. Sean Penn won an Oscar for Best Actor for his outstanding, joyful portrayal of the late San Francisco politician Harvey Milk, who shattered closet doors while battling the Christian Coalition, Anita B…
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Irrelevant Host Banter, Edition 1: Intro, The Doors & Caligula
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Rena and Sara prefer that our podcast be at least half an hour shorter than the movies that we talk about. Rena generally dislikes listening to other podcast hosts banter about their personal lives, so she's happy to cut all of that out. But we needed to learn some new audio skills, so she spliced together a bunch of random irrelevant host banter a…
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Reagan is finally here and boy does it look mighty bad. Rena and Sara try to make sense of the Reagan trailer, a film that has been waiting for its moment since filming in 2020, and speculate on its contents, whether its director is an auteur, and the putty and prosthetics budget. We play a game called “Desperate or Canceled.” This film will star D…
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Introduction: Who Are We and What Are We Doing?
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Rena and Sara do an introductory explainer episode for Biopic: A Podcast Story. This is where we explain how the rating system works, how we choose what movies to cover next, and what is and is not a biopic for the purposes of this podcast. We talk about ourselves a little bit, and Rena serendipitously pitches Sara’s dream biopic project: Andy Warh…
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Rena and Sara discuss The Conqueror, a 1956 Howard Hughes production starring John Wayne as Genghis Khan. You read that correctly. This one is a doozy. Join us as we dig into all the things that make The Conqueror, er, special, including radioactive sand, a demoralised RKO studios gutted by Hughes, a supposedly tame panther, future Klingon gear, an…
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Score: 8.575/10 What do you do when your assessment of a movie is out of step with critical and public consensus? That is a question that we found ourselves pondering on watching Respect, the 2021 Aretha Franklin biopic starring Jennifer Hudson as Queen of Soul Aretha Franklin, Forrest Whitaker as Reverend C.L. Franklin, Marc Maron as Jerry Wexler,…
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Score: 3.25/10 Rena and Sara slog through Caligula, the infamous 1979 life story of the notorious ancient Roman emperor, starring Malcolm McDowell as Caligula, Helen Mirren as Caesonia, John Gielgud as Nerva, Peter O'Toole as Tiberius, Teresa Ann Savoy as Drusilla, and a slew of miserable or clueless-looking naked and barely dressed people. It was …
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Score: 7.675/10 Our second biopic is Coal Miner's Daughter, the life story of country music legend Loretta Lynn. Rena and Sara discuss the Academy Award-winning 1980 flick, directed by Michael Apted and starring Sissy Spacek as Loretta Lynn, Tommy Lee Jones as Doolittle Lynn, Beverly D'Angelo as Patsy Cline, and Levon Helm as Loretta's dad, Mr. Web…
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Score: 5.65/10 It's called The Doors. It's mostly about Jim Morrison. Our first episode! Rena and Sara watched Oliver Stone's The Doors, starring Val Kilmer as lead singer Jim Morrison. Join us as we learn about leather pants, freshmen lit 101, and how to get famous fast in the '60s. Spoiler Warning: We spoil everything. And we enjoy it. Images: ht…
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