Céline

I strongly appreciated this biopic about Céline Dion the singer. Maybe it's because I don't like her music or her personality, so that I wasn't expecting much from this movie when I started to view it.

The fact that the actors do not look like the real persons is a very good point: whenever a film tries to mimic known figures, the viewer is distracted by any little detail that doesn't match. Here, we don't have to track these unimportant visual details, so we're much involved in the story itself and the psychology of the characters. Also, the songs are not the original versions from Céline Dion, everything has been redone with talent, it's brilliant.

There's a chance a part of the story was romanticised and some mistakes and omissions were done, but I don't care about that. A biopic is not supposed to tell every aspect of every moment in the life of an historical figure. At the end of the movie there is a text that boldly explains that this story is about Céline Dion and that she didn't participate in any way in its production. I find this to be a courageous attitude from the producers, given the number of movies about real people who try to disguise it with the usual warning "any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental" because they just don't want to be sued for public defamation (The Social Network is a famous example).

(Please note that I watched a version dubbed in French for the French public, so that any consideration about erroneous accent was hidden in the version I watched. Also I don't care that the international part of her career was almost eluded, I don't consider Céline Dion to be representative of French culture)

TL;DR This movie is not hand-tailored for the typical Céline Dion fan (and I like that).

It has always been much easier to criticize things than to build them. I find the degree to which some have criticized this film to be amazing . I thought the film quite good. You cannot expect real people to be captured exactly in film, as exact clones do not exist, and all biographical films are by necessity small sketches, as time is so short. This is a very warm story about a great family and a girl who worked her butt off and captured a dream. Perhaps it would have been more technically accurate to tell the story in French, as the first half of her career was all in French, but then 95% of her fans would not understand it. The actors did a marvelous job of showing us this family. Read the book for detail. It is good, and it was written in French, so you can get the detail there. It would be sad to miss this story. It makes your heart glad.

Just goes to show- if you're a celebrity and you don't take the time to write your own biography, then someone else will do it for you! It won't be accurate, but you'll get one.

Not one word of French which was odd and none of them even had an accent! I thought she could barely speak a word of English. To this day she still has a very strong accent. This woman who played her had no discernible accent at all. The sudden blond hair style at the end was a bit off putting and the actress didn't even resemble Celine at all. Pretty young woman tho.

Not sure what was up with Rene's hair. He starts out with a really bad toupee then he's bald. They tried to do details and it was a huge faux pas.

It was a wham bam trip down memory lane.

What a disappointment this movie was. The casting was terrible! There was absolutely no resemblance of the characters to the people they were portraying. Where on earth was the French Canadian connection? Not one accent? We all know where Celine was born and raised and yet her entire heritage was completely missing. It made no sense whatsoever to cast the movie in a way that did not recognize her background. I can understand that whoever backed this movie may have been concerned about too much French Canadian or too much emphasis on the Francophone accent but let's face it, without it the movie bombed anyway.It was a sham. I'm not criticizing the acting - each person would likely be fine in any other roles. I particularly liked Enrico Colantoni as Rene. I'm not surprised the movie wasn't endorsed by Celine Dion. The producers and the director, the casting company were so far off the mark. The time line was off throughout the movie as well. I don't have an ounce of Francophone in me and it made me feel embarrassed for Celine and her family.

This film is a disaster, especially if you are a true fan of Celine. Virtually none of the people presented really look like their real-life counterparts. The Dion family is almost completely misrepresented. The mother looks like an upper-middle class suburbanite. Most distressing are the vocal renditions, not only missing the mark in duplicating what was actually there, but doing it in a way that is hardly worthy of comparison to the original, both as a little girl and as a star. I hope they paid Celine plenty for this joke. It will serve her poorly as a memento. I especially disliked the songs done as a teenager. Some of them are exceptional, but not these. Unfortunately, this may keep people from going back and actually listening to the originals, which were great. Finally, her French is almost completely overlooked. Most of her early songs especially were in French. She didn't even know any English until she was about 14/15. Her Anglo-style persona just isn't her!