Happy Birthday, Dead Jackson Pollock!

And thank you Google for letting me know with your cute visual.

Dead Philip Whalen says, "As bad a driver as he was in your world, he's much worse in ours. Very few of us feel the need for cars in the afterlife, but he's the irksome exception. We all feel as though he's trying to prove something to us. What a tool. He never gets out of it, really. He just lives in that thing."

One of the channels (is it IFC) runs that biopic of him all the time.

That movie follows what I call the FUFA DOS formula. In fact, I consider FUFA DOS a genre.

I talked about this while reviewing another FUFA DOS film on this blog, the Francis Bacon biopic Love is the Devil.

The problems are all in the writing/direction, which just patterns itself along the infamous formula FUFA DOS. (FUFA DOS = Fucked-up Famous Artist Does Odd Shit). It's the formula everyone uses, from Milos Forman to your nearest British director.

Okay, okay, I admit it's boring to devote the film to how an artist made breakthroughs in pictorial representation, how technically she or he achieved this. And people want tragedy, the myth of the tragic artist, apple carts being upset and hands put through windows and all that shit.

Nobody's going to make a biopic about the quiet artists. Even when say it's one of the best artists.

But the Francis Bacon one was just so over the top. In one scene at a boxing match blood splatters across Bacon's face and he clearly loves it, and you just expect him to lick it away with his tongue and say "Oh yeah, baybeee!" in that Mike Myers voice.