Favorite Movie about a singer/musician etc.

I really liked Almost Famous and Rock Star.

24 Hour Party People


Control (this one's pretty painful to watch)


Velvet Goldmine

Though haven't seen most of the movies mentioned on this thread I completely loved Ray.

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The Doors of course. and Velvet Goldmine (supposedly about D.Bowie)

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My 100 ALL-TIME FAVE Movies

Haven`t seen so much of those, but RAY was the one I liked the most.

this is spinal tap!!!

walk the line....both joaquin phoenix and reese were brilliant.

&feature=related

Control is pretty excellent stuff. I actually haven't seen that many films about musicians or films with a strong musical theme, but yeah, I saw Bird fairly recently and it was a powerhouse performance by Forrest Whitaker. Ray wasn't too bad, but a bit forgettable in most places.

I'll add Control to my list as well..IN CRE DI BLE...This one goes beyond being a movie about music/musicians...it goes deep inside and explores the human psyche in ways i havent seen done very effectively in modern cinema before..backed up by an incredible direction...Top Stuff!!!

Purple Rain....if that counts

Walk The Line
A Mighty Wind
Airheads

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It's not about Bowie. He's obviously used as a jumping-off point for the Brian Slade character (just as Iggy Pop is for the other guy), but that's about it.

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the angel stayed until something died, one more murder suicide

I liked Pure Country more for Strait's songs than for his acting and movie plot, but it has some good character actors including as I recall former Western star Rory Calhoun.

Was less impressed with Walk the Line. Cash wrote two autobiographies so that film should have been more true to life than it is.

Other night I caught the final minutes of a film I'd never heard of, All the Way a.k.a. The Night We Called It a Day [2003] with Dennis Hopper portraying Frank Sinatra. Hopper is the right size, had the right tux, and apparently one of Sinatra's old wigs, because the hairstyle and coloer were exactly right. Captured some of Sinatra's mannerisms, a little of the Sinatra attitude, but I was always aware I was watching Hopper. Mostly it was Hopper's speaking voice and delivery. Whoever did the singing for Hopper as Sinatra sounded a lot like Frank but wasn't.

I liked Kevin Spacey as Bobby Darin in Beyond the Sea (2004). Doing the film as a fantasy was just right because the viewer could then put aside any mistakes and differences from the real Darin. Spacey was very good in doing his own singing for the film, but not as good in playing the movie scene in Dr. Newman, M.D. that earned Darin an Oscar nomination.

My absolute favorite, however, is The Glenn Millier Story (1953) with Jimmy Stewart in the title role. The plot is pure corn with hardly a true word in it, but there's one scene that really grabs me every time I see it.

The setting is a concert outside a hospital in England on a sunny day with hundreds of wounded soldiers sitting and lying around the bandstand, some on the ground, some in wheelchairs, some in hospital beds, some watching from the hospital windows. The band is swinging one of Miller's greatest tunes--my favorite--"In the Mood" and just as they get to the point where the band starts muting down the music, you hear in the distance an approaching buzz bomb, pilotless jets loaded with explosives that the German's launched at England and other European nations. The bomb is fast, making it hard to knock down, and when it runs out of fuel it falls on any random target below. Sure enough as the sound of the approaching bomb gets louder, it starts to sputter, then goes into a whistling descent. All the battle-savvy soldiers and the medical staff duck for cover, but Miller and the band--in the open on an elevated stage--keep playing, their sound getting softer and softer as the bomb drops. Suddently there's an explosion that rocks--but misses--the concert site, and then the band comes blasting back with their music, just as the song was written and recorded (find a copy of "In the Mood", and you'll recognize on first hearing the passage I've tried to describe). All the wounded soldiers leap to their feet and applaud--all of those with legs to leap and hands to clap.

That one scene sums up all of the entertainers who went to Europe and the Pacific and dozens of other places to entertain the troops during World War II. Some even went right to the front lines. And some--like Glenn Miller--died trying to bring a moment's relief, a bit of fun, and memories of home and an earlier peaceful life to men fighting the most massive war ever. Like I said, I choke up each time I see it.

Walk hard (lol) and almost famous was great.

Very interesting choices Rufnek. I may have to see The Glenn Miller Story. I'm a Stewart fan and I've heard good things about it.

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It's a great feel-good story with Stewart at his fumbling, stumbling, aw-shucks best. The storyline is full of corn, a kernel of truth, and some outright lies. In the movie, the title of Miller's hit tune "Pennyslvania 6-5000" becomes the number Stewart calls to propose to June Allyson, who plays his wife in the movie. Actually, the title refers to the number of a hotel (I think in Chicago) where Miller and his band played for an extended period (they may have had a radio program from there. Haven't looked at the data in a long time). In the film, Stewart's Miller comes up with an arrangement of the very old tune "Little Brown Jug," because that's wife June's favorite song. (Can you picture that corny tune being anyone's "favorite"?) In real life, Miller came up with the tune when ASCAP (or whatever became ASCAP) went to court to keep all copyrighted music, which means all the modern music of that period, off the radio until stations began paying fees to the songwriters and artists each time they played their records (or live tunes) on air, which they previously did for free. So for a period there, Miller couldn't play even the tunes he wrote over the airways, so there was a scramble to come up with old tunes for which the copyrights had expired, and update them for radio play: Hence, "Little Brown Jug" and other folk songs.

In the film, the unique sound of the Glenn Miller band comes accidently when his trumpeter hurts his lip and Miller has to rewrite all the leads for the clarinet. In real life, Miller worked long and hard to develop his trademark sound.

Although the film spotlights Miller's music, the background tune in the romantic interludes between Stewart and Allyson was a modern ballad called "Too Little Time," a reference to Miller's death at a relatively young age. Flash forward 11 years and that song again appears in the 1964 remake of The Killers, starting Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson and Ronald Regan in his last movie. Song is sung beautifully by jazz great Nancy Wilson. It's one of the few really good remakes of a classic film, since it retells the story from the eyes of two hitmen hired to kill a man who doesn't even try to run from them. The 1946 original (and still the best) has an insurance investigator tracking down the facts (in flashbacks) following the murder of the victim. The original made big stars of Burt Lancaster (who played the victim) and Ava Gardner.

So there you have two movies connected through one song with a throwback to a great movie classic. If you can, see The Killers as a double feature, first the original and then the remake, and check out the way the films are alike, yet very different. Both are based on an extremely short story (also titled "The Killers") by Ernest Hemingway, the elements of which take up about the first 15 minutes of the original and maybe even less in the remake.

I liked the Anvil documentary. I like metal music so I enjoyed it. It was a well made story about a band together for over 30 years despite no real success and the pure love of their music.

I can't even begin to pick a favorite!!

Ray
Walk the line
Coal Miners Daughter
Doors and
on and on and on and on............


I am however waiting for some great biopics on some of my all time favorite singers and legends..

Judy Garland (I hear there doing something with Anne Hathaway, we'll see)
Barbara Streisand
Liza Minelli
Julie Andrews
Sammy Davis Jr. (actually the whole rat pack!)
Jerry Lewis (yes he's mostly comedy but the man really can sing too!)
Rolling Stones ( I'd really love to see this...it'd be smashing!)
Janis Joplin (a good one...not just a watch me get stoned and die biopic, because the woman was more than just a party...she was a musical genius)


Oh there are just too many to really put into a concrete list..now I think I'm going to go to the video store..I suddenly have the urge to see some musicals!

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