I love musicals. My favorite movie of all time is Moulin Rouge, and I will love it until the end of time, come what may.
And among musicals, I was a pretty big fan of The Greatest Showman. Granted, it's climax was absolute trash. (Oh, no, the circus got burned down! Good thing we just have the money to rebuild it instantly!) But outside of that, the choreography was awesome. The music is sick. Like, I have the sheet music book and freaking love playing A Million Dreams and singing it horribly.
So imagine my excitement when I see a new movie called Better Man being released by the same producer of The Greatest Showman. And it was a musical! My cup runneth over! I watched the ad and found it weirdly off-putting that there's just some random CGI monkey. They dropped a full song as a promo, something where they're dancing in the streets, and I'm just thrown off by the actual humans doing very impressive choreography being upstaged by a random CGI chimp. How much of his stuff is real and how much is just more CGI? I'm the type of person that is not impressed by animated characters dancing because it can be edited to perfection. There's no real effort there. I don't care.
And the song was so incredibly boring. I can't even remember its lyrics, tune, or subject matter. It just went in one ear and out the other. The only thing I really remembered was that they caused something like $20,000 dollars in property damage walking down one city block.
On top of it all, I recently learned that it was not a pure work of fiction, but rather a biopic of UK singer Robbie Williams. I saw his name in the ads and thought he was another producer or director. I had to Google who the Hell he was and was shocked by how apparently famous he is. I listened to some of his music, thinking that someone so famous had to have some absolute bangers. It was boring. None of it stuck with me.
And that's fine. I listen to weird stuff that a ton of people don't like. Music made for everyone is music for no one. To each their own.
I saw Better Man made something like $110,000 against its $110,000,000 budget, so it appears to be a bit of a box office bomb. I don't plan to see it. Maybe if it's free for streaming on Amazon I might put it on while I work on a comic. But, as a musical lover, this one just didn't grab me.
Boring music aside, I also dislike the premise. Biopics can be pretty interesting, but I think biopics are like dirt in a grave: It's best if what they're covering is already dead. I have no interest in the idea of somebody so self-indulgent that they have millions spent to make a movie about their life while they are still among the living.
And it made me think about another Rob Williams. A dead Rob Williams. Robin Williams. One of my favorite actors. That would be an interesting biopic. Better yet, it would be a project to honor the deceased instead of stroking the ego of the living.
Additionally, I didn't have to Google Robin Williams, so I feel like an American audience would get more out of it.
