Yes… A movie can be both awful and great
Let’s start with a fact…a true story HAS THE POSSIBLITY of becoming a fantastic film. Others should have never been attempted to put up on screen. I recently went to go see “The Changeling” with Mrs. Pitt. The movie is not “Based on a true story” but is advertised as “A true story”. I looked into it (because I’m cool) and to be able to drop the ‘based on’ it needs to be all factual (with little made up stuff for dramatic emphasis) and you get a lot of fact checkers and historians look into the film to see if it truly is factual, and everyone looks bad if it’s not when you say it is.
It’s a Clint Eastwood film and the photography is just amazing. As a period piece set in the late 20’s L.A it looks really authentic. And Angelina Jolie does a convincing job as a mother who wants to find her son.
Without going into plot summary (Don’t be lazy…Google it) it’s about a woman whose son goes missing and months later the L.A.P.D claim they find her son. But it’s not him, so the film goes through the corrupt police (instead of admitting their mistake, they try to convince the mother that this boy is her son, and then they hide her in a ‘psychopathic’ hospital). BUT then….this whole other back story comes into play…. About this deranged man who (with the forced help of his 14 year old cousin) snatches little boys off the street, hold them prisoner in a chicken coop, he collects a few, and then kills them with an axe. The 14 year old kid gets caught for deportation (he’s Canadian) and then tells the police the story of killing the boy. He also recognizes Jolie’s son from a picture as one of his victims. The film was graphic and disturbing. It was heartbreaking when you see the killer tell a little boy this story to get him in the car and it actually works
Without giving the story away too much, the two story lines connect… who is this boy who is saying he is Jolie’s son? Was her real son one of the victims of the ‘chicken coop massacre’? Or did he get away?
And this is a real story… some psycho (who is Canadian but killed in the U.S) actually did this. The actor that played him was truly amazing. It was a haunting performance. People were crying in the theater, and even I had to look away multiple times during the film.
Look up the story, they called it the Wineville Chicken Coop Murders.
“On the night of November 14th, two men broke into a quiet farmhouse in Kansas and murdered an entire family. Why did they do that? Two worlds exist in this country: the quiet conservative life, and and the life of those two men – the underbelly, the criminally violent. Those two worlds converged that bloody night.” Truman Capote, ‘Capote’.
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