Singers on Screen
In which I reflect on my love for music based biopics. Plus the usual round-up of words written and spoken.
I think it started with The Glen Miller Story.
I’ve always admired and envied musicians. I love music and anything to do with it, but unfortunately, I didn’t inherit my father’s music genes–he was a proficient keyboard player and church organist for many years. I can’t carry a tune in a bucket and always marvel at friends who can play an instrument or even instantly recall and hum along to a favorite tune.
Instead, I read, research, and write about musicians. I also enjoy watching any music-related movie biography that comes along even if I’m not necessarily a fan of the artist's work. A case in point is the recent A Complete Unknown with Timothée Chalamet, as Bob Dylan. - I preferred Chalamet’s rendition of Dylan’s classic songs to the Dylan originals - I can’t get past his grating voice.
As I mentioned at the beginning I think it was watching The Glen Miller Story on TV with my grandmother (a big fan of Miller’s sound) back in the day that sparked my love of music biopics ( bio-pic, not bi-opic) and over the years I’ve watched more than I can recall, and many of my favorites reside in our DVD collection.
There seems to have been a bit of a resurgence of the genre recently with movies on Queen, Elton John, Elvis, Bob Dylan, and more in theaters.
I am writing this the day after watching one that I feel is getting largely ignored (at least here in the USA) and that deserves a wider audience. Better Man, the story of British singer Robbie Williams is a brilliantly constructed story on the price of fame, self-realization, reinvention, and one of the most innovative exercises in soul-bearing I’ve witnessed. And it has some great music too.
As you can see from the movie clips used in the video above, rather than using an actor to play the central role, Robbie’s story is told with a motion capture / CGI chimpanzee as its protagonist. Because as Williams as said in interviews at times he saw himself as just a “performing monkey.” It was an inspired move as you are immediately aware that here is someone who is different and doesn’t quite fit into the world he inhabits, yet is full of potential. It also prevents you from making comparisons between an actor and the real musician. It allows you to become fully immersed in the story in a way that having an actor play the role can’t.
In our local theater, Better Man was only on a limited run for a couple of weeks with just a single daily showing in the evening.
If you haven’t seen it yet, go find out where it is playing in your area and check it out, even if you have no idea who Robbie Williams is. It is simply one of the best, most moving, and compelling movies I’ve seen in a long time.
========
I also want to give a heartfelt “Thank you,” to all the folks that sent me messages, either in comments, private messages, or emails following last week’s newsletter. It meant a whole lot and I can’t thank you enough.
Alan
Other Stuff
Welcome new folks
Each week when I sit down to put one of these newsletters together I’m always grateful to my subscribers. If you aren’t a member of that wonderful group of folks yet, then click the button below and join our growing community of readers and commentators to get these missives delivered directly to your email inbox every Friday.
Brabazon Bits
I’ve started to send out emails and notes to various venues in the UK to see if we can line up some signings for the launch of the Brabazon book in June when we will be in the country.
So far no bites, but hopefully we can get some things arranged.
“Bristol Brabazon: The Ocean Liner of the Skies and its Ongoing Legacy” will be published on 30 MAY, 2025 in the UK and 30 JULY, 2025 in the US.
In the meantime, the book is available for pre-order on both Amazon UK and Amazon US sites.
The book is also now available for pre-order direct from the publisher.
Word Slinging
This has been a research week on the Casino Royale project, so a lot of reading up on the process of selling and managing movie rights, plus some digging into the players involved in the Casino Royale rights in particular, and the movie rights to James Bond in general.
One surprise this week after working on the chapter about the 1954 Casino Royale TV show recently, was to see the actress who played the first on-screen Bond girl, Linda Christian, pop up as a character herself in the recent Ferrari biopic that we watched the other evening.
Podcast Procrastinations
It’s been an excellent first couple of weeks for the Chronological Christie podcast. Our discussion on Agatha Christie’s debut novel, The Mysterious Affair At Styles has had a much wider reception than we anticipated with 50% of the listeners being outside the USA including the UK, New Zealand, Italy, and Japan.
If you haven’t given the show a listen yet, you can find it HERE
The second episode on The Secret Adversary has been recorded and will be heading into editing and production this weekend.
Pages and Screens
Books Read in 2025 - “East of West: Vol. 1” by Jonathan Hickman and Nick Dragotta
There’s a lot of big ideas and concepts in this post-apocalyptic alternate-history western, and I think that was part of my struggles with it.
It took me a while to actually figure out what was going on. But once it moved from introducing all the concepts and began to focus on the characters it clicked and I started to enjoy it.
I’ll probably look out for the second volume at some point to see where it goes.
Our online bookstore at Bookshop.org I’ve now added a new section listing books read so far in 2025, so you can pick up copies of any that interest you, while also helping out local independent bookstores.
Weekly Web Round-Up
Forest Comics & Books - This week has been all about Lightning McQueen with a few examples of the famous race car zooming their way to new owners. We’ve also started to add a few more items.
Batman On The Cover - The journey through Batman’s comics publishing history continues through November 1969 with reprint and translated editions published in Australia and Brazil
Racing Comics - I’ve finished my run of posting old British Annuals with racing-themed covers on the blog, and have been doing some digging to find new covers to post over the next few months.
And this one really caught my eye - Racing Cars and Dinosaurs !! It doesn’t get much better than that!
Where on the Web is Alan?
You can now find links to all the places you can find me online, websites, newsletters, social media, and more in a single LINKS page on my personal website.
As always, thanks for joining me this week. If you know someone else who might enjoy the contents of this week’s newsletter, or just my weekly ramblings in general - please feel free to share by clicking the button below.
See you next time
Alan J. Porter
The Can’t See The Forest (TM) newsletter is a production of Megrin Entertainment, a division of 4Js Group LLC