La Vie en Rose

A competently made movie that should never have been made. The story of Edith Piaf, who apparently was a Parisian singer of some repute who sang songs I've never heard of. She was poor and then she became famous and she did drugs and drank too much. Yep, that's the story.

Aside from the musical, the biopic is the most worthless of all film genres. Each has exceptional movies ("Singing' in the Rain" and "Citizen Kane" come to mind -- I'll count "Citizen Kane" even though it's a fictional biopic), but by and large, biopics are too long, self-indulgent, and lack any coherent, engaging narrative arc. You can watch "Ali," "Walk the Line," and "Ray" all you want, and you may never be able to tell what the story is. "Capote" and "The Last King of Scotland" are based on books, so they escape that biopic trap, but with these films too, the viewer is left with nothing but the feeling that they watched nothing more than an impression.

This leads to the primary characteristic of these movies, which is also the chief flaw -- the movie focuses on one actor and requires the audience to watch this person for 2 and a half hours, only to say at the end, "Yeah, that's probably what that person was like." Why should we have to sit through such a long imitation of someone? Who expects this of us? And why do we do it?

Fictional films that have adopted the biopic format are infinitely superior: "Boogie Nights" can hold its own against any true biopic in the last 30 years. That's because fictional films don't feel the need to include every detail of a person's life, whether it matters or not, and don't have to include characters that don't matter. For instance, in this film, there's a scene where a woman talks to Edith Piaf, and Piaf is overjoyed at the praise from this particular woman, but we have no idea who the woman is, and then at the end she sees an "old friend" at her last concert, and we can't remember who he is because he probably doesn't matter.