The Oscars

[Not Afraid]

I guess I don't care much if the story is a remake or the character has a place IRL. I just want a compelling story and quality acting - and great visuals.

[mousepod]

Originally Posted by Not Afraid

I guess I don't care much if the story is a remake or the character has a place IRL. I just want a compelling story and quality acting - and great visuals.

Hear, hear.

[Alex]

Originally Posted by mousepod

Hear, hear.

And I agree as well.

I didn't walk out of Ray saying "well, that would have been a great movie if only it had been a complete work of fiction." It was a great movie.

Where it begins to be relevant to me is when prompted to make qualitative and comparative evaluations. Forest Whitaker and Peter O'Toole were both fantastic and yet we discuss which was best. When asked to make such a calculation, personally, the fact that O'Toole's character had to be created from whole cloth while Whitaker was, to some degree, simply recreating a real person leads me to devalue his performance in relation to Peter O'Toole's. But the Last King of Scotland remains a remarkable movie in many ways (I pointed out my complaints in the random thread after seeing it).

Perhaps that is why I have this discrepancy between acting "remakes" and Best Picture "remakes" since best picture brings it all together and is about the complete package more than its component parts.