Can a movie present itself as historical, grossly distort the facts, and still be considered good art?
Name a movie about history that doesn't grossly distort the facts. I doubt you could name one; I can't. I can think of some fictional stories where the historical background is 'pretty good', but beyond there, there's nothing that I can recall. Hollywood isn't about facts.
max
['So the movie sounds par for the course.']
Oh good, I'm glad we get to have a thread about this movie.
Walking out afterwards, my overwhelming reaction was "I hope I don't live to see someone make a film like this for Cheney."
It's such a compassionate look at Nixon (and Frost too, but he matters less to me because I'd literally never heard of him). Forget excuse-making or playing with chronology or plot, it's just breathtakingly generous.
I'm broadly OK with an artist doing that, as long as nobody pretends it's noble or objective. In other words, I didn't feel especially betrayed by the movie, probably because my expectations were lower to start with.
I did think it was wrong that (given all of their obsession with detailing how much the interviews were costing and whether the TV program would ever make money), the filmmakers did not reveal that in real life, Nixon got a percentage of the profits. Talk about having an incentive to manufacture drama.
But yeah, I shudder to think of the day that someone does the same for our current VP.
To add to max's 1, the canonical Nixon era movie in my household growing up was All the President's Men, which I probably saw a dozen times by age 15. Just because I happen to agree with many of its biases doesn't mean that it didn't rearrange and subjectively reframe events in its own way.
It doesn't matter whether the Queen actually cried and thought of Diana when she saw a beautiful stag about to be killed by hunters ...Drew
I definitely interpreted that scene differently than Drew, but I had a great deal of sympathy for Elizabeth in the movie, monarchist that I am.
In other tangential trolling, saw The Other Boleyn Sister this week, and it sucked sucked sucked compared to the Showtime series.
The Village takes care of its own. People in poor neighborhoods can be compassionate and forgiving about a local kid who gets busted for this or that, and Villagers are compassionate and forgiving about paranoid criminal liars who are responsible for millions of deaths (counting Vietnamese).
The poor guy. It could have been me.
Did it show Anne's supernumerary nipple?
I think the answer to the last question (Can a movie present itself as historical, grossly distort the facts, and still be considered good art?) is yes, which is what made watching W. doubly frustrating: I spent the duration gnashing my teeth over all of the inaccuracies and chronological snafus while chiding myself for allowing that to distract me from appreciating the film for its own sake.
But in the end it was still a crap movie.
I have a recent book over there written about dialogue in film, written because most other film academics barely give a shit about the words.
Film is about images, moods, tones, emotions. You are better off watching tv news & debates with the sound off. Any movie that depends on words or "facts" or even narrative will usually be weak.
I liked The Queen because it is about feelings and attitudes. There is barely any story there.
Would My Dinner With Andre work with the sound off? Surprisingly well, I think.
So this is basically a version of Ray?
BR got me the dvd of the actual interview, but I havent yet watched it.
The victors get to write history, don't they?
Are the victors now the people with access to publishing?
Would My Dinner With Andre work with the sound off?
I think so. The last time I watched it I spent a lot of time just appreciating how well constructed it was in terms of visuals and pacing.
I think it would only work sans sound if you were already familiar with the movie, however.
6:No. I think Portman & Johansson are still negotiating on the edge of nude scenes. They are sometimes nude, but hidden. Likely gonna cost buchu money, or really great art.
The difference between showtime's ~15 hours on the story, in a context of 30-50 shown hours in what 3-5 years of work, compared with the filmmakers 90 minutes filmed in two months, showed the advantage of the long form. Showtime may have had less money for costumes (?) but had years more time.
The only advantages I would give the movie was locations, and Bana is just more regal & imposing than Rhys-Meyers.
The supernumerary nipple was up the neck from the real nipple, so it could be a real tease.
Good grief, did EVERYONE go to Frost/Nixon last night?
I didn't think the movie was all that generous to Nixon: it portrays him as racist, anxious about his masculinity, a bit inclined to stare at pretty women, geographically ignorant, and generally rather pathetic. It encourages us to feel somewhat sorry for Nixon, but certainly not to regret that he was removed from the presidency.
Also, this remark from the Boston review annoyed me:
"Allow some of us to suggest, however, that there's a difference between imagining what Queen Elizabeth or Idi Amin might have said behind closed doors and fiddling with recorded testimony about one of the greatest political crises in American history."
Conceded regarding a figurehead such as Queen Elizabeth II, but Idi Amin was pretty damn important to people who care about what happens outside the U.S. Even Nixon wasn't as evil as Idi Amin.
And the idea in the HuffPost piece that Henry VIII wasn't related to contemporary politics for Shakespeare seems absurd -- Henry VIII was the father of Shakespeare's royal patron, Elizabeth I, and the legitimacy of her claim to the throne was very much still in question throughout her reign. The assertion that Elizabeth was a bastard under Catholic canon law, and thus not a potential heir, was the basis for Mary Queen of Scots's pathetic attempts at a coup.
Watched a "Making Of" Frost/Nixon the other night, and then did some Web surfing on it.
1) Frost had an 18-year occasional affair with Carol Lynley.
2)Michael Sheen, whom I remembered well as Blair in both The Queen and The Deal, both I think decent historical movies, and looks pretty much the same as Frost...was Lucian the Werewolf!
3) I don't remember the interviews, but it wa a lost decade. Never cared that much about Nixon. It is more the nature of my politics that I despised the fuckers who voted for Nixon more than Nixon himself.
Natalie Portman was nude in Darjeeling Limited, right? I guess it wasn't straight-on.
I didn't think the movie was all that generous to Nixon: it portrays him as racist, anxious about his masculinity, a bit inclined to stare at pretty women, geographically ignorant, and generally rather pathetic.
1. The racism is pretty subtle, and a lot of people don't perceive sexism or geographical ignorance as character failings.
2. Pathetic is in the eye of the beholder. Some of what I took Becks to be reacting against (not to speak for her) is the idea that if you showed this movie to a bunch of high schoolers who had never heard of Watergate, they wouldn't come away with a sense of what actually happened or why it was bad.
To me, one of the significant moral costs of the staged scene (SPOILER) is that it builds sympathy for Nixon among audience members who may feel similarly shut out of the world of elites. If your guiding assumption is that being the Leader of the Free World implies some significant moral responsibility, then it's profoundly irresponsible to let that leader off the hook by oh-so-sympathically illustrating the psychological issues that led him to use his bully pulpit to obsess about his enemies and send governemnt spies to keep track of them.
I knowsomeone who really dislikes the Movie Elizabeth, because they fudged the history so badly. She said that it was particularly annoying, because the actual events were so much more interesting.
Docudramas usually irk me when I know something about the subject and often get me reading about something new if I don't. I have real concerns with how poorly remembered even recent history is, so almost anything that gets people thinking about the past seems useful.
The requirements of a 2-hour drama with a plot are really severe, as others have said-- maybe the way to look at stuff like this or like Oliver Stone's movies is as trailers for something longer. I liked Last King of Scotland, personally, though i left me with no illusion of understanding much about Idi Amin.
Can a movie present itself as historical, grossly distort the facts, and still be considered good art?
We give thanks to Ron Howard for saving us from the deeper reaches of this question by so consistently making unambiguously bad art.
My own gut opinion is yes, a movie can do those things. Now I'm going to go and think about why I think that.
My gut response is that blurring contemporary history is more forgivable, presuming that it's in the service of art, not propaganda. I suppose that last is very much in the eye of the beholder, but I'll presume that you all take my meaning: if the history is being skewed to further storytelling, or even the unities (if you will), that's fine, and very distinct from simply trying to make a historical personage look better.
Probably the place where I want to see history most honestly portrayed is the mid-distant past, where there are still (a few) living witnesses but the majority have no direct memory. That's where effective but distorting art can really change the meaning of events after the fact, and have a real impact. F/N isn't going to trick many people into thinking Nixon was an OK guy, because all but the youngest grew up in the aftermath of Watergate; but a lying movie about FDR right now could have huge effects on, for instance, the next couple years in Washington. Movies about the Founders or more distant historical figures may as well be Greek mythology - we're all familiar with the characters, but you can play with the narratives to make whatever point you wish, and it won't change the underlying cultural understanding of events (not that you can't push at the edges, but I suspect the cause and effect is generally reversed: a generation ready to hear about how the Founders were all bastards will find art portraying them as such).
Apropos the other discussion happening in this thread, I could not for the life of me understand the relevance of the Caroline Cushing character, until I realized that she was functioning entirely as visual relief from having to stare at four such supremely unattractive men. Fashion is subjective, blah blah, but seriously, why did anybody ever think the '70s looked good?
Speaking of films--and another historical one to boot--has anybody seen Milk?
Frost always interviewed the Presidents. There's definitely one with him doing Herbert Walker Bush. For the past several years he's hosted "Breakfast with Frost" on Sunday mornigns on the BBC.
Okay, I'm wrong about that. It seems to have ended a year or so ago, but he's got an interview program.
My friends over at Language Hat sneered at me for my use of Scarlett Johansson in an instance of the direct intuitive apprehension of a hotness than which no greater can be imagined.
I guess I'll have to go back to "I know that this is my hand.....and that this is my other hand". B-o-o-o-ring.
F/N isn't going to trick many people into thinking Nixon was an OK guy, because all but the youngest grew up in the aftermath of Watergate
Strongly disagree. Many of the 30-somethings I know think Nixon was an OK guy, and most of the teens and twentysomethings have no real opinion beyond a vague sense of him.* In a country of 300 million that is skewing younger, that is a LOT of people.
*No, I am not claiming that my circle of contacts is perfectly representative. But note that I am not talking about friends.
She said that it was particularly annoying, because the actual events were so much more interesting.
I think this is usually the case - has anyone ever made a film of Homer* that was as interesting as the original? No, they always change the stories and make them less interesting. Some of this comes from the inherent difficulty of putting a long story into a format that really is the equivalent of a short story, but it also comes from the fact that what's interesting on-screen isn't always the same as what's interesting in written narrative, whether historical or fictional. The "more interesting" stuff that always gets dropped or dumbed down is most interesting when you have the backdrop of lots of knowledge that can't be expressed in a 2 hour flick.
* Moby Dick springs to mind as well
Queen Christina killed Descartes by commanding his attendance in her unheated chamber at 5 a.m. in the middle of the Swedish winter. She thought that this was normal. Descartes was a weenie and went and died.
That's a movie I'd go see. Not in the Garbo movie, or the part with Christina hunting bears.
Strongly disagree. Many of the 30-somethings I know think Nixon was an OK guy, and most of the teens and twentysomethings have no real opinion beyond a vague sense of him.* In a country of 300 million that is skewing younger, that is a LOT of people.
My point is that F/N isn't responsible for this; 28 years of media/Republican messaging is.
Clinton should have boycotted Nixon's funeral.
You mention W but forgot JFK. It's the greatest offender of the three by a long shot.
if you showed this movie to a bunch of high schoolers who had never heard of Watergate, they wouldn't come away with a sense of what actually happened or why it was bad.
It's not a movie about Watergate, is it?
What I really hate is when they rebuild the story of some enormously interesting person around a relationship, which often is an imaginary or conjectural one.
"Thoughts of Melisande would interrupt Aquinas's train of thought almost daily to the end of his life."
"'If Ursula had loved me, my life would have turned out entirely differently' said Immanuel Kant....."
If you want to make a point about current politics, make a movie about historical politics. If you want to make a point about semi-recent history, make a movie about that history. If you want to make a point about historical politics, write a book.
32: Agreed. If you want to make a movie about conventional relationships, either pick a person with conventional relationships, or make some people up.
Re: Nixon's reputation
I was in college when he died, and I thought that he was a decent foreign policy person who had rehabilitated himself. I've learned more about him in the intervening years and seen how the Bush tactics stem directly from his.
My point is that F/N isn't responsible for this; 28 years of media/Republican messaging is.
I don't totally disagree, but there is a strong social effect in being one of the first/few mainstream movies on a topic, such that a lazy h.s. history teacher is highly likely to show it. I think it's appalling that Oliver Stone's JFK is the one assassination movie that people of my generation are likely to have seen, and I'm not exactly thrilled that Mississippi Burning is the civil-rights one.
Spike Lee was smart in getting out in front of the curve with Get on the Bus, and not letting another filmmaker reframe the story of the Million Man March. There is a high cost to being the second movie on any given political/historical topic, expecially given the way movies in the US are financed and distributed.
Clinton should have boycotted Nixon's funeral.
Amen. I remember seing the profile shot of all of the still-living presidents lined up, and being outraged by the news anchors' complicity in not just avoiding speaking ill of the dead, but actively rewriting history. Bah.
29: Agree. The GOP has been trying to rehabilitate Nixon for years, with the result that close associates of his are major players in the conservative movement, and his strategy built around resentment and bigotry is the prevailing approach to GOP campaigning.
Cheney had a front row seat for Watergate, and it's evident in everything he does.
17:The short prequel in the hotel. Online or DVD only?
25:Johansson hottness is entirely wasted as she plays the chaste moral sister (in the movie interpretation). Johansson felt wasted generally.
Portman was excellent, Oscar quality, but the movie like gave her 15 minutes from the trial of Catherine to the beheading and you were spinning like a top trying to find the character within all the changes.
And Portman was sexy smart strong desperate but her gamin quality and ? hurt her. She wasn't regal, couldn't dominate a room.
The movie also emphasizes the feminist themes of women as property and pawns to the extent that the female characters are weakened and victims. A questionable theme, I think, Anne Boleyn was very powerful as mistress & queen, and Henry was succeeded with a gap, by three women.
I can't entirely blame the GOP for the whitewashing phenomenon, however (true as it is that Nixon-era staffpeople enjoyed a recently revitalized role, the bastards). Nevertheless, there's a prevailing sentiment that if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything. Perhaps an overstatement, but anger and shrillness are generally deprecated, such that condemnation is viewed as a somewhat distasteful harboring of grudges. So you get younger people preferring to shrug their shoulders.
It's not a movie about Watergate, is it?
Yes and no. (Spoiler alert)
It's about David Frost paying Nixon a lot of money to get hours of interview footage in the hopes of eliciting a memorable TV moment. Watergate plays a signficant role because it's the event considered by Frost et al. as most likely to galvanize such a reaction.
The film depicts Frost's advisors as being much more focused on the interviews as the trial that Nixon never had, meant to elicit the admission of guilt that the American public needs. Frost himself comes off as primarily interested in a dramatic, headline-grabbing story and lots of high ratings. It is implied that as a Brit he is less emotionally connected to or betrayed by Nixon/Watergate than the Americans.
However, if one were shown this movie and did not know anything about Watergate, one would likely come away with a much different and milder sense of what had occurred.
It's not unlike how I felt about Life is Beautiful -- a movie that can feel emotionally wrenching and powerfully poignant in almost every frame if you know what happened in the Holocaust, but would slide along much more superficially to an audience member who doesn't have any of that history to draw on.*
*Tangentially, and if you doubt such people exist, try summarizing Hitler and the Holocaust to a teenager whose Mexico City high school apparently didn't cover WWII.
Christina was certainly not a pawn. The Swedish royalty had consistently progressive ideas about gender roles and arranged marriage (which they opposed). Usually they ended up marrying their Danish, Polish, or Schleswigian cousins anyway.
What I really hate is when they rebuild the story of some enormously interesting person around a relationship, which often is an imaginary or conjectural one.
This compression problem has effectively been solved by the advent of a new genre: the high-quality cable drama. Movies no longer have to attempt to do "grand sweep" type of narratives; indeed, the mandate for movies over 90 minutes long has diminished considerably. If you want to do the Odyssey, do it as an HBO series (or whatever network), just like you'd do for the emergence of order out of chaos in an illegal frontier settlement. What you do with a movie in specific now remains to be seen, but I think we're more likely to see it from someone like the Coen Brothers than someone like Martin Scorsese.
I reserve the right to do a blog post about this topic.
SPOILER QUESTION RE: SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE
I was planning to see Slumdog Millionaire, but was just told secondhand that it includes a scene of a child being tortured. (The woman the report came from said she needed $150 worth of therapy to deal with having seen it.) How bad is it?
*Please don't be specific* in what happens unless you post a warning. I'm just looking for a general answer about its tolerability, especially from parents.
it includes a scene of a child being tortured
There are two. One during a police interrogation and another of a younger child in another context. They are relatively brief but quite intense. I covered my eyes.
I would not take an under-12 child to see this movie, and for people 13 and over, I would warn them about it in advance. However, I'm kind of conservative on these issues.
****
SPOILERS ABOUT SPECIFIC CONTENT:
1. A teenager is punched, slapped, and shocked with electricity during a police interrogation.
2. A small child is purposely blinded (after being chloroformed first) because orphan kids sent out to beg will make more money if they have a visible disability.
42:My thought as I wrote 38.4 was the early reformation might have been, to an extent more than is usually acknowledged, and of course limited by the patriarchy, driven by women to a degree disproportionate to their power. The Showtime series doesn't show this very well, but I think that Anne Boleyn (Sidney Schrama, I think) was a major figure in Henry's heresy, as object of desire and as a theological interlocutor.
The egalitarianism of early Protestantism would lead to a weak proto-feminism and mild empowerment of women, followed by the inevitable backlash.
43:Cable longforms have their own kinds of limitations. Sex, soap opera, sensationalism and artistic freedom. The Tudors is not great history, and Thomas More is treated very badly, by choice of the producers. In this version he is more a martinet who enjoyed burning people, but lacks any wit or charm.
Is Man For All Seasons acceptable as history & art?
I saw an episode of Leave It To Beaver the other day, and Wally was studying for a history test that covered WWI and WWII. It struck me that that was such recent history during the 50's.
It feels like there was some sort of line drawn after WWII where people declared "history" vs. "present", because it seems strange that high school students today would be studying Bush Senior's administration without calling it "Contemporary History" or something. History still ends in the 50's, and Modern History picks up in the 60's, (and we still pretend the Cleavers are how the present ought to be.)
ToS: sort of like a half-witted Leona Helmsley in the throws of alcoholic dementia.
Quick, think of something superficial and mean spirited. That shouldn't be too taxing.
I find it unlikely that someone without some interest in history and politics would see Frost/Nixon. The biggest names in the movie are Frank Langella and Oliver Platt. I'd never heard of Langella until the stage version of F/N became successful (and never saw him perform until "Man for All Seasons"), and Oliver Platt is B-list. There's only one pretty woman, and she keeps her clothes on while on camera. There's no cool CGI, action sequences or anything else to get the attention of the kind of person who watches movies but knows almost nothing about Watergate. So I don't really worry about this being misinformation on Watergate, because I don't think people who are very ignorant about American history and politics will go to see the movie and get misinformed.
In contrast, in another thread I complained about 300's massive failings and overt bigotry of almost every kind (homophobia, racism, treatment of the disabled...). I saw the movie with a friend who isn't particularly interested in classical Greek history, but does like action movies based on graphic novels. My friend is in his 30s, but his taste in this respect is shared by lots of younger and less educated moviegoers whose entire knowledge of the events very likely is drawn on the movie. It made $456 million, which is a good sign that it was seen by tens of millions of people, whereas Frost/Nixon seems unlikely to make back the budget while still in theaters.
What I really hate is when they rebuild the story of some enormously interesting person around a relationship,
Shakespeare in Love was a lot of fun.
I will likely never watch Frost/Nixon just as I didn't watch the original interviews.
I commented over at Yggles about Suzman yesterday trying to show my political perspective. Let me see, how do I do this without invoking Godwin or dimming Obama's rearview sunlight?
Did FDR set a tome for the country, lead the country. Was it FDR & 10, 000 other lefty/liberals? How much did Henry Wallace determine Agricultural policy, and how important was George Marshall to the peacetime military? Was there anything you can call a tone nationwide, or maybe a tone of optimisitic communal experimentation and a tone slavering rightwing resentment?
Did Nixon do bad stuff, or did he give orders and tens, hundreds, thousands of other people do bad things. IIRC, Mitchell acted independently in many cases. Did he set the tone, or fit into an already existing atmosphere? Does Rick Perlstein understand absolutely everything about that era?
See, I just don't view power that way. A bunch of people wanted to bomb Cambodia and Nixon signed on. To say "Nixon bombed Cambodia" means we fucking eventually get Bork, Cheney, and Rumsfeld.
The biggest names in the movie are Frank Langella and Oliver Platt.
Michael Sheen was Lucian!!! Philistine.
If you want to do the Odyssey, do it as an HBO series (or whatever network), just like you'd do for the emergence of order out of chaos in an illegal frontier settlement. What you do with a movie in specific now remains to be seen, but I think we're more likely to see it from someone like the Coen Brothers than someone like Martin Scorsese.
If you do a blog post, don't embarrass yourself. The Coen Brothers already adapted the Odyssey for the big screen.
Frankly, ever since I wrote that comment I've been thinking about Aquinas's Melisande and her influence on his Summa. I bet there are traces of her divine presence throughout, like Laura and Beatrice and those other Babes. A job for Kotsko, obviously.
"But....but.... Tommy, isn't there more to life than those dry old books?"
"Melly, I can't explain it. I can't help myself. I have been called by God>"
"God -- or some misogynist old Demiurge? Some Demiurge sent from Hell to drive all happiness from the world".
[She gasps, realizing that she had moved the battle onto Thomas's home turf. She starts weeping uncontrollably.]
"On the supposed Demiurge
I. 1
I. 2
I. 3
Objections
I.1a
I.1b
I.2
I.3a
I.3b
I. 3c
Objections countered
I.1a....."
[Pan to Melisande's tearstreaked face, sound asleep]
[20 years later]
As for the Demiurge....
Can a movie present itself as historical, grossly distort the facts, and still be considered good art?
I think that this question is a great one; for me, it depends on how "historical" the movie purports to be. Shakespeare in Love, while using real people and real elements of history, never posed itself as the truth. A much worse movie (and one that bothered me endlessly for its inaccuracies, despite being based on a myth) was King Arthur, the one with Clive Owen. That movie billed itself as the true story behind the Arthurian legend, and then featured Kiera Knightley running around with a bare midriff in the snow.
I haven't seen Frost/Nixon but my impression from the advertisements is that it attempts to bill itself as the latter sort of movie, a docudrama. I think that means it has a greater responsibility to not alter the written record of the interviews in order to remain good art, and since it clearly manufactures its pivotal moment, that diminishes its value in my view.
I'd never heard of Langella until the stage version of F/N
Langella played Skeletor! Have no care for movie history?
Langella was a decent Zorro, a better Dracula than Oldham, and with Blythe Danner did the best Seagull I have ever seen. Not that I have seen many. Doomsday Gun is an interesting performance.
57: Indeed! Never heard of Frank Langella ?? Dracula, baby. Someone else had never heard of David Frost.
Sigh.
(/end fake old person pursed lips and shaking of head)
Bob,
I think you are illustrating a generational and cultural gap (I'm 27 and until four years ago never lived somewhere with a significant live theater scene), but this just makes my point for me, as much more of the Watergate-ignorant populace is like me than like you.
Langella played the villain in Dave, a sort of retelling of the Mr. Smith Goes To Washington story with Kevin Kline. The fact that I liked this movie probably speaks pretty poorly of my character and judgment. But I did.
You couldn't make a movie about an idealistic guy going to fix Washington any more.
37: Cheney had a front row seat for Watergate, and it's evident in everything he does
I cannot help but think that as Nixon walked to the chopper, somewhere in the darkened hallways of the White House Dick Cheney shook his head, spit, and whispered: "Pussy."
From one of the greatest blog posts evah, "L33T Justice" at Kung Fu Monkey.
You couldn't make a movie about an idealistic guy going to fix Washington any more.
I mean, Obama campaign commercials aren't movies.
44: Slumdog Millionaire is awesome, but it's got a fair amount of violence (aside from the two scenes Witt mentioned). If you've seen Shallow Grave or Trainspotting, it's at about that level.
Woah. Here I've been assuming PG was PGD. Is PG not PGD? Are we not Men?
Got a new book over there Pictures & Tears:A History of People Who Have Cried at Paintings ...James Elkins, really more generally about emotional responses to art.
I saw The Seagull on PBS in the late 70s. I have seen the Redgrave/Warner one, but Redgrave is a little too reserved, dignified, and experienced.
After 30+ years, remembering Blythe Danner as Nina brought tears to my eyes. Maybe a little drama queenish, but that is in character and narrative and echoing the mother and part of the tragedy.
I then went off to my study and shot myself.
Very apropos for Bob to reference Masters of the Universe in this thread, as any He-Man aficionado worth his salt would gripe that the film version egregiously distorted the original cartoon.
Witt & Josh, thanks for the info. I initially didn't want to see Slumdog Millionaire because I assumed Trainspotting levels of violence, but then heard such good things about it that I reconsidered. But I don't do violence well (shockingly so, in fact. I'd rather see a double feature of High School Musical 3 and Marley & Me than lots of blood.).
I'm sure you're less pitiful nose to nose, ToS.
Slumdog Millionaire is playing at my neighborhood theater, which is four blocks from my place. This is the same theater that gave top billing to No Country for Old Men for close to three months.
you know tosser, if you worked on it to be a little less b-list hollywood obvious, the tough guy schtick would be one of your better giggles. as it is, it just about almost makes it to lame.
yeah, i'm procrastinating at the level of to talking to half-assed trolls. better go do something useful.
The only way to get rid of the Troll is to get a commenting system like the one on Wordpress, which moderates the first comment from someone but then lets them through once they've been approved -- or I assume blanket moderation of every comment would work, but that seems like the worst possible policy for a blog like this.
Failing that, my policy was to delete all his comments as well as those who respond to him.
26: Many of the 30-somethings I know think Nixon was an OK guy, and most of the teens and twentysomethings have no real opinion beyond a vague sense of him.
Some of that because of able assists from folks like presidential "historian" and preening fucktard, Michael Beschloss*:
Richard Nixon spent the last 20 years of his life arguing, like the Ancient Mariner, that he had done little wrong. He said that he had not deserved removal from office and that accomplishments like the opening to China were more monumental than what he called ''a little bugging.'' He predicted to friends that 50 years after his presidency, the Watergate scandal would have shriveled to ''a footnote.'' On that, the jury is still out.
*I'm picking on Beschloss today because was one of the "intellectual" leaders in the Clinton Scandal/impeachment freak show. Beschloss even added his own fatuous quote to Sally Quinn's Rosetta Stone of Establishment Washington Clinton Derangement Syndrome**, "The founding fathers let us down," adds Beschloss.
**Which will be the defining document of the American establishment and media political scene for 1998 AD +/- 6 years. It's worth rereading from time-to-time; it actually gets better with age.
52:Did FDR set a tome for the country, lead the country. Was it FDR & 10, 000 other lefty/liberals?
It was FDR and the 300! At Thermopylae! Against Hitler and some shifty hook-nosed... hrmm. Waitaminute. That's not right. Oh, yeah! They were at Thermopylae against Hitler and the half-million shifty, slant-eyed, hook-nosed, yellow-skinned CLONE HITLERS! Play-calling by the Pope, color by Churchill.
max
['I saw it in a movie! I'm sure of it!']
huh. I remember that movie too, max. Until now, I always thought it was just some dodgy acid.
Never seen it. Don't care, despite the cultural establishment loving it so much. Nixon was a tyrannous cunt, you need a movie to know that?
The rest, tiresome compulsory telly nostalgia, much favoured of the cultural establishment in the UK. Frost got to fly weekly on Concorde from New York to London to go to BBC editorial meetings, on expenses. Can you guess why people voted for Thatcher?
Speaking of "holiday" movies, if anyone is contemplating seeing The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, I'd recommend reading the short story instead (available here online). A nice enough little fable by Fitzgerald overworked into The Notebook morphing into Forrest Gump rams the Titanic with a derivative hint of Edward Scissorhands and a malodorous whiff of Bicentennial Man thrown in. Not to forget a gratuitous Katrina plot element! What could go wrong? Caveat: My eldest son (with whom I usually agree on such matters) thinks my rejection of the movie is just me being an embittered and cantankerous contrarian asshole so take my opinion with a grain of salt. (In turn, I think that he is simply unwilling to rethink David Fincher.)
The comity of the grave, we hope.
@76
I also thought Benjamin Button was a rehash of Forrest Gump. It's a reasonably entertaining story about someone to whom interesting things happen. The people are far more beautiful than those in FG, which is nice, but ultimately the problem is the same - things happen to people, but no one seems to actually do anything. The twist ended up being pretty uninteresting, and the lame attempt to make the audience care about it fell flat. The Katrina thing was silly, but so minor that it really had no impact on the movie for me, one way or another.
All in all, a fine brainless holiday movie.
I am tired of beautiful people.
Last night the lady & I were taken on a tour of Jordan by the 5xth Consecutive Hashemite King. As he got on the motorcycle, he was accompanied by his late teenage son, two other children, and his wife.
"OMFG" we said in unison. Paz Vega or Penelope Cruz?
After the show, we both went to Wikipedia to study the geography, demographics, politics, int'l relations and economics of Jordan. "IT?", we said, wondering about covert cooperation with Israel.
I bet y'all thought I didn't know how to party.
I am tired of beautiful people.
Frost/Nixon -- the perfect choice!
Seriously, though, has anyone seen I've Loved You So Long? I liked it a whole lot. Beautifully nuanced and subtle, and even the two points of emotionally manipulation/plot convenience didn't bother me. Kristin Scott Thomas is great, of course, but the casting in general is just excellent. Every one seems effortlessly like just the right person to have that role.
I don't know what's wrong with me. This is like two or three French films in a row that I've liked.
Modern History picks up in the 60's
I always thought that modern history started around the time of the French Revolution.
I'm pretty sure this distinction already exists, but I'm not sure what terms people usually use, so I'll just use these: a "period film" is a film set in some past time, possibly includes real people/events, but not meant to be a retelling of those events or of the actions/lives of the real people involved in those events. A "historical film" is like a period film, except it is supposed to be a retelling of etc. blah blah.
I think most people would agree that you're a lot more likely to find good art among the period than the historical films. History is usually pretty unsatisfying at the level of individual people/characters involved in particular events, because they don't bother developing at the same pace; lots of small figures flow in and out of the main course of events; lots of activities attributed to main characters were delegated to more people than can fit in a movie, leading to composite characters; after and sometimes even before the end of the events, main figures go off on their separate ways, making resolutions more difficult. So you get a lot of historical movies ending with a sense of incompleteness, followed by a bunch of text saying what happened to selected people. Or you get totally BS resolutions. Or you get both. (I prefer the incompleteness + text, if I'm choosing.)
I like period films more or less like I like any films, but most historical films leave me thinking that if I'm interested in the subject, I should just look it up because the film was too obviously making things up to take anything (historical) away from it.
Since we're on about film, I'll mention I just finished In the Company of Men (recommended by bob, if memory serves). Kinda seemed like an American Psycho Lite, with some other stuff going on, too. My drive-by review.
Also, if you're going to have a dickhead in your movie, name him Chad, so everyone knows he's going to be the dickhead. They got that part right.
"Can a movie present itself as historical, grossly distort the facts, and still be considered good art?"
Can a play? Questions about the historical accuracy of Shakespeare's histories (or lack thereof) have made for many a thesis over the centuries, but not too many question their artistry.
85:Yeah, I like the work of Neil Labute a lot. I like a lot of stuff, but it is refreshing to see unmitigated misanthropy on screen sometimes.
I think the Christian Bale character is a failed sociopath who has to compensate woth fantasy. Eckhart is a competent sociopath.
84 is pretty good.
I like The Mission, and Herzog's Aguirre...
I am also thinking My Darling Clementine versus the "more accurate" Tombstone movies. I don't much mind "historical" movies/fiction as long as the purpose isn't to accurately historical events but to use history for artistic purposes.
Tale of Two Cities, War & Peace, Stendhal.
OTOH, Career success and personal satisfaction are socially accepted values, and the Eckhart character just doesn't balance them with empathy and honesty to the degree most of us find acceptable. So sociopath may be wrong.
One of the interesting questions is about forgiving the "nice guy" who has his own kind of cruelty and solipsism.
Shape of Things is sort of a gender reversed Company, not quite as good, but with Rachel Weisz and some interrogation of academic values.
Has anybody ever linked to Maryann Johansson around these parts? Here is her review of Twilight
She strongly recommends Definitely Maybe with Ryan Reynolds as a great romantic comedy, so unless I find a zombie...wait, Diary of the Dead...
88: Herzog's Aguirre
Yes, I think that is a great example of a good period piece per eb's definition. (Plus one of the great opening scenes in cinema.)
Frost/Nixon wasn't a very good movie for a number of reasons. The mockumentary stylings served to tell things that would have been better shown, especially by way of explaining stakes that the movie never made very well felt.
I thought there were two elements that would have been great departure points for a good movie about Nixon. The first was the imagined phone call -- as anyone who's read two reviews of Nixonland knows, that monologue captures the resentment in Nixon's mindset that would dominate conservative politics for three decades on. Someone above worried that that would engender sympathy for Nixon -- well, that's the prime emotional connection that Rush et al engender, and it's vital to have critical artistic takes on it.
Second was the recuperation of Nixon's trial into depoliticized emotional catharsis. The gotcha moment turns from the hoped-for trial into a televised Oedipal turnabout. And that substitution of pathos for politics becomes elemental to television. Yes, they got their moment -- Bad Dad revealed with feet of clay. But the constitutional crisis is completely evacuated.
||
I bowled tonight, for the first time since a week before I met AB, almost exactly 9 years ago. I once again brought shame upon my ancestors (good bowlers, every one).
OTOH, I had an awesome semi-drunk ride home, poweringslow-and-steadying up a 1.4 mile hill that is, thankfully, rather less steep for the last half mile or so.
|>
Also, semi-on topic, Berube writes about Button-as-Gump.
94: And from that thread, a really great direct exploration of that idea.
Bob,
I think your first interpretation is what LaBute was getting at. There are the guys who are actual sociopaths (misogynsits, if you like, but I think he indicates that it's not really gender specific) and the guys who wish they could be. Oversimplified, of course, but the kernel of truth contained therein is interesting.
I imagine that the real sociopaths treat the wannabes really horribly.
As he got on the motorcycle, he was accompanied by his late teenage son
Did he sling the corpse over the back of the bike?
I didn't see Frost/Nixon, but immediately hated it just from seeing the preview -- it stank of sententious overinflated Oscar bait, with extra points for being about one of those historical moments "liberal" baby boomers use for wankery and self-congratulation. Watergate was a skirmish, the wrong side won the war. Actually, the whole over-inflation of Watergate is itself a sign of the dominance of the imperial presidency model.
"Tropic Thunder" was a terrific recent movie, guess its out of the theatres now, go rent it.
64: PG is pretty clearly not PGD.
very true. I thought of protesting when s/he first appeared, but that would have been lame.
Watergate was a skirmish, the wrong side won the war.
The war is over? I'm not so sure. I think Becks's point is that F/N is just another battle, or at least ammunition, in a conflict that's still raging.
Even at the time it struck me during Watergate that the political groups that had seemed so formidable in 1970-1972 were not players at all. It was a constitutional crisis, and the radical couldn't do a thing. (President Ford had been appointed VP, and VP Rockefeller was appointed too. This was really extraconstitutional.)
012: There may be hard documentation of this somewhere, but in any case I'm circumstantially convinced that shortly after Watergate the media honchos got together and said "Never again! No more anti war stories in the media during wartime, and no more Presidents brought down by the media." Whether this was done by the media people themselves or by outside pressure from advertisers and finance, or whether people in finance bought up media for the purpose of gaining control, I don't know.
1979-1982 I was involved in opposing America's dirty proxy wars in Central America, and the big American media flatly refused to cover stories that everyone in Europe knew all about. (Before the internet).
67,69: I can handle violence on screen when it's a sensible tap on the gulliver to sort someone out, I but was offput by the immoral squalor of Trainspotting.
I'm kind of looking forward to a campy made-for-cable TV VH1 style behind the scenes of W's Whitehouse.
The war is perpetual, I guess. But if you view the underlying issue as the autonomy the President would have to run the national security state free of criticism (with the break-ins as a very amateurish response to such criticism), then the Presidency looks very powerful today in ways the Obama administration is unlikely to roll back. And that's in no small part due to alumni of the Nixon White House. One can argue the Presidency is still significantly less powerful than the unquestioned dominance of the early 60s, though.
In terms of F/N being ammunition, I tend to feel that most discussions of Watergate induce complacency around these issues by turning things into a psychological drama, safely in the past, where the good guys win.
104.2 is what I was trying to get at with 92.3, except PGD used real words.
No, Wrongshore, you stated it better in 92.3. "Depoliticized emotional catharsis", "bad Dad revealed with feet of clay", that nails it.
|| Fantastic . Nothing you didn't already know at some level, but really a superb demolition. Check it out. ||>
110: Actually, I had not known that Bill O'Reilly was actively involved in the coverup of the "alleged" El Mozote massacre, which was the biggest of the stories I was talking about in 102.3.
A link that everyone should read.
from the link in 102, on O'Reilly's reaction to El Mozote:
By any standards, even O'Reilly's, this was pure evil. O'Reilly was there. He saw it face to face. And it made no impression on him at all, for the childish, contemptible reason that this particular slaughter of women and children was committed by people on the team he happened to support. So much for the O'Reilly theory of morality. He has none, and more importantly, he doesn't want to know.God, I'd love to see him confronted on this in some forum where he isn't able to turn of other people's mics.
Also, if you're going to have a dickhead in your movie, name him Chad
By convention "Chet" would also be acceptable, would it not?
I'm involved in running a cinema, so I've become fond of the term. Wait, was that a troll? Except for the orthography, I enjoyed it. One has to agree Oliver Stone is a hack, though I suppose the insight is banal by now.
F/N sounds to me like an instance of a dangerous form, the Actor's Movie. When an historical figure is portrayed in a self-consciously masterful performance, it's easy for the viewer's admiration for the player to be transferred inappropriately to the character. In short: to seem to understand all is to tend to forgive all.
I'm not convinced that's a wholly negative tendency, as I distrust the urge to respond to those who dehumanize as a means to power by dehumanizing them; nevertheless, it's a pitfall. I like to engage the dilemma using the power of cinema, which to me means the power not just to see pretty pictures on a screen, but to see pretty pictures on a screen in a socially mediated environment. Seeing JFK in my moonbat college town had a cathartic effect on me every time I heard someone in the audience (in addition to me) snort, snicker, or groan in dismay.
Unfogged seems to of went and died, so I'm watching the paint dry here.
There are a thousand or more wonks and geeks watching the paint dry.
119:Emerson, I honestly believe that in some insane spirit of Obama comity the Senate may seat Coleman no matter the vote count.
I can troll and fill a cinema thread as nauseum, if you want activity for it's own sake.
Two For the Road was my movie last night.
I could discuss Hepburn's penchant for screewing all her leading men, or her decision not to wear Givenchy and other breaks to her image ("bastard", a nude scene that was cut)) in her next-to-last (last?) movie or Finney's pretense to hooligan brutishness (like, Connery or many English actors, a "me no effete twit" thing?), or Donen's amazing median shot length of 4.4 seconds, or William Daniel's career.
Or that I cried again and why I don't go out much. Born labile, and not something I cared to defeat.
I could quote extensively from Pictures With Tears, which is a serious and passionate book from an established critic. James Elkins.
Skimming thru, there is a section about Elkins spending two days in a Rothko room doing everything he possibly could to move from intellectual appreciation to some emotional reaction and failing.
Elkins's dilemma in 122 is the reason I never apologize for my "guilty pleasures" among cultural artifacts, which have precisely the opposite effect on me.
I think the new rules are that you have to like the things you like. "So bad it's good" is not acceptable: you must face up to the fact that it's not bad, however terrifying that may be.
122.2: Interesting -- I have the same problem with Rothko. There's a Rothko room at the Phillips in DC (4 paintings, one on each wall, if I remember correctly), and sure enough, I stood there. And stood there. Nothing, beyond an intellectual consideration: small room, pieces overwhelming. Smells heavily of paint. Oppressive, maybe. Intended to be experienced on a human scale? Hm hm hm. What does this guy want from me? And so on.
Ah, here.
Rah? The opposite effect is what -- having an emotional reaction?
Right, so I realize the thread has moved on to art (and actually I have a comment about that), but I have another Nixon-related question.
In Frost/Nixon, some character makes the comment that due to the presidential pardon, Nixon can never be tried. But this isn't really true, right? The presidential pardon can only cover federal crimes. It can't cover state crimes or civil actions.
So why didn't some enterprising young crusader (or more likely, crackpot) file such a suit against him? He lived 20 years after leaving office, it's not like there wasn't time. There must have been a milion different angles you could have come at it from, if you applied the law creatively enough. Some might have gotten thrown out, or ended quickly on summary judgment. But why didn't somebody at least try?
Or did they, and I'm just ignorant of it?
While the other is percolating, the art question:
In the French movie mentioned above, there is a moment when Kristin Scott Thomas stares at a painting in a museum. The scene is of a group of mourners and it's kind of dim, with the exception of one mourner, a motherly-looking woman, who appears to almost leap off the canvas, bathed in light.
Was this some kind of tricky camerawork/lighting, or is the painting really that awesome?
(Note: Another character in the film speaks the artist's name and says he was "well known in his time but now almost forgotten," but I can't remember his name and am not sure they ever name the painting itself. Helpful, I know.)
re: 121
Not to sound like a national stereotype or nuffink, but I think you'll find Connery isn't an English actor.*
* and was a bit of a prick in several different ways, but also, pretty genuinely, not effete. Ditto several of his contemporaries.
126: I think this is the case that kept Nixon out of civil trouble:
http://law.jrank.org/pages/12898/Nixon-v-Fitzgerald.html
Can a movie present itself as historical, grossly distort the facts, and still be considered good art?
Given the liberties that Shakespeare seems to have taken with the truth in the Henry VI trilogy and Richard III, I'd say the answer is yes. I'm relying on Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare as my primary reference for the comparison, since I don't have a lot of independent knowledge of the period, but it looks like S. massively distorted the truth to produce more effective anti-Yorkist propaganda. E.g., in actual history, Richard was the loyal, hard-working brother during Edward's lifetime, while Clarence was the relentless opportunist who betrayed Edward openly once and may have been plotting against him again at their final falling-out. Rather than Richard secretly murdering Clarence to place himself closer to the throne, Edward brought Clarence to trial and demanded (and got) his condemnation, while Richard openly denounced the whole proceedings. Etc.
Do people still think of Shakespeare as historical? During his time, sure, but historical didn't mean quite the same thing it means today (at least to historians).
128: ooh, yes! Did you see the movie? How did you know how to find it?
And seeing the caption reminds me that in the movie I think someone actually does say "Pain" (not "Sorrow") is the title. That would be a more accurate translation if this were Spanish, but I don't speak French -- can anyone confirm?
I searched for the movie, found some reviews, saw it was set in Nancy, looked for Nancy museums, found one for fine arts, found that painter's name and some of his work, searched for the movie title with the painter's name, found a french review/discussion that mentioned the painting's title, and voila. As far as I know "douleur" literally means "pain" but I don't really know French.
And the link in 130 is fascinating. Thanks, biohazard.
I wonder if anyone tried to sue Nixon in civil court prior to 1982? That write-up claims that the suit in question wasn't even filed until '82, and was decided by the Supreme Court that same year, which seems like unheard-of speed to me, but perhaps when it's a precent-setting presidential case they're willing to expedite things a little.
Also, the write-up says that presidents get immunity but aides don't. What about vice presidents?
132: Asimov notes that even Sir Thomas More's massively anti-Yorkist account acknowledged Richard's role in opposing Edward's condemnation of Clarence. So it's not like this was an obscure fact in Shakespeare's time.
The list of steps outlined 135 are why I asked the question rather than poking around myself.
(Although sometimes it's easier: today I answered a question that was, in total, "There's this TV series...it's about a historical figure?" in three seconds flat. It helps when HBO runs full-length bus-shelter ads.)
The list of steps outlined 135 are why I asked the question rather than poking around myself.
It didn't take long to go through them, though. I also found that the director of the movie has written a book about that painter. Knowing that would have made the search a lot easier.
My language was inappropriate, but it was part of extended joke.
My question was whether that generation of actors overcompensated in some way. The word "brutish" was used in print for Finney in complaints about teaming him with Hepburn.
It wasn't that long ago that I saw Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (again), and Finney in the last scenes feels like a different person than the brawler of most of the movie. Of course that is part of the plot, but there is also a complaint that the contrast is too strong for believability.
I have an impression that a group of young British/Irish/Scot/Welsh/whatever actors of the early 60s, that have become icons since, deliberately posed as drunken prole brawlers offscreen. In order to tweek the NatTheatre Olivier Crowd? For the same reason "Kitchen Sink" Cinema became hip?
138: But we think about history (and, I would think, art) differently than people thought of history in Shakespeare's time (which may just mean that we're less forgiving towards evidentiary or objectivity problems): awareness of those historical distortions would not necessarily have led to aesthetic objections to the play back then in the way that awareness of distortions in currently/recently produced historical-based art lead to aesthetic objections today. (Or maybe they did; I'm really just guessing based on my understanding of the history of history.)
Shakespeare works as an example of good art out of bad history according to today's standards if Shakespeare's art still presents itself as historical today. I'm not sure that it does - it's all artistic drama to me (falling into the "period" category) - but that may be just me. So I'd put it down as good art (or bad or whatever, depending on the play.)
I'd judge a film about Richard III made today differently than Shakespeare's play (or a film based on it) because I don't expect the same historical sense out of Shakespeare as I do of a filmmaker today. (Again, that may just be me.)
(This are lots of parentheticals in this comment.)
I have an impression that a group of young British/Irish/Scot/Welsh/whatever actors of the early 60s, that have become icons since, deliberately posed as drunken prole brawlers offscreen.
As do Welsh financiers. And Californian trolls.
Of all those rough-looking guys, Bronson was the most real. He left school to work in a coal mine, etc. And as I've told you before, was an ethnic Lipka Tatar.
In the old days it was relatively rare for anyone to think about history factually, anyway. Even for the educated, The Moral of the Story tended to swamp accuracy of detail.
In the middle ages stories about encounters between individuals who lived two centuries apart might be taken seriously.
I guess many of the actors were working class from regional backgrounds. LEA Grants to the RADA. From Wiki, RADA:
(I started with "Kitchen Sink" and Angry Young Men"
1955 -Sir Kenneth Barnes, knighted in 1938, retires and John Fernald is appointed Principal. The number of students is reduced and entry becomes more difficult. During the late 50s and 60s the growth of the LEA grant systems ushers in the 'new wave' of actors including Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay, Glenda Jackson, John Hurt, Michael Williams and Anthony Hopkins.O'Toole was a classmate of Finney.
At the point I went to the RADA site to search alumni by year I decided I was getting crazy.
To go way back upthread, I think mcmanus is quite right that the currently prevailing feminist-inflected theme of women as property doesn't really "get" it when it comes to upper-echelon women in the Tudor-Stuart period.
It's not that those women weren't living under a patriarchal regime, of course, which they absolutely were (which women today in the affluent west are not, and yet male domination is still a going concern: but nowadays it's much more of a fraternity than a patriarchy...).
Basically, if gender is your main analytic tool for an exploration of power dynamics, you will undoubtedly uncover much that is/should be of interest, but you will also run the risk of missing the forest for the tress. Some of these women were powerful players indeed (no, not in their own right, exactly, but then, neither did their fathers and brothers play the game just in their own right, either, and that's just the point: when the exercise of power and it succession was all about blood and kinship, it wasn't about individual effort, or anything like that at all), and I'm pretty sure that Elizabeth I was no slouch (not that I don't recognize the claims of Mary Stuart, of course...).
Also, at the level of high aristocracy and royalty, everybody was a pawn in the marriage market, everybody, whether male or female, was just another potential move on the chessboard.
BUY This artwork printed on Bags, Throw Blankets, Pillows and more
there are people who would want that image at 128 on bags, throw blankets, pillows
strange
149 is funny to me because when I read that same sentence, I thought, "Huh, the movie said this artist wasn't very famous. But you can buy his pictures as a tote bag?!"
Everybody can be famous nowadays; it just takes a little bit of digitization.
i meant who would want funeral pictures as a throw blanket? very cosy
not me, even if by someone very famous
I guess many of the actors were working class from regional backgrounds.
Yeah. In a lot of ways I don't think the 'prole brawler' thing was necessarily a pose. Exploited and exaggerated by way of comparison with what had gone before? I don't doubt it.
Don't know about the rest of them and not sure either went to RADA, but both Richard Harris and Oliver Reed were definitely middle-class. Although it is perfectly possible to be a drunken middle-class brawler and the type is not even uncommon (both were big rugby fans).
Peter O'Toole (basically a racetrack Gypsy as far as I can tell) and Richard Burton (from one of those Rhondda villages that are basically exactly as if someone had taken one of the toughest slums in Glasgow, then put a mountain every two streets) were very much the real thing though. Hopkins was proper Welsh working class, but from much further down the valley in Margam, not in the really Third World bit.
re: 145, I've actually been fighting a bit over the holiday period. I occasioned to bring in the New Year in an Irish pub in Kentish Town, where it was necessary to bend a chap's finger backward in order to calm him down and persuade him to release his grip on the landlord's tie. And while out for my morning jog the day before yesterday, some middle-aged twunt who should have known better decided to make a pantomime of stretching his arms out to block the pavement and not let me through, and got a dead arm that I hope will still be aching today for his pains. Ahhh urban life.
148: and that's just the point: when the exercise of power and it succession was all about blood and kinship, it wasn't about individual effort, or anything like that at all), and I'm pretty sure that Elizabeth I was no slouch (not that I don't recognize the claims of Mary Stuart, of course...).
This point, or something like it, is something I remember trying and failing to get across to people in college (the failure was mostly through incoherence and factual ignorance). Discussion of powerful premodern women (I think the primary conversation I'm remembering was about Eleanor of Aquitaine) tends to treat their power as fluky and arbitrary because it comes through dynastic lines as the result of a series of accidents, and concludes that they somehow didn't really exercise the power they appeared to. And of course, everyone with power in that era, male or female, acquired it through family relationships as a result of a series of accidents -- you needed a slightly lower-odds set of events to end up with a woman in power, but the difference wasn't about the personal qualities of the individual or about what they did with the power.
Interesting; Elizabeth was taught in British schools as having been one of our most exceptional monarchs ever, and in particular, it was a commonplace of 2nd form history that she had been very clever and politically astute in the way that she played her various lovers off against each other and never got married (marriage would of course meant that her husband would be king).
Come to think of it, I don't think I ever encountered Elizabeth I in any academic context. I didn't have a single class in secondary school that started before the Treaty of Westphalia, (barring the sort of classes that go back to Cro-Magnon man but don't actually have any particular historical events in them), and college classes either ended before the Renaissance, or picked up with the French Revolution.
re: 154
I didn't know that about O'Toole.
Re: fighting.
I came pretty close in Paris over New Year. Twice. Within about 20 minutes of each other.
Some prick deliberately sat/stood on my wife, I asked him not to [really quite politely in the circumstances], and then he thought long and hard about whether to have a square go [he gave me one of those 'death stares' that are supposed to be intimidating]. He decided not to.
Second, as we were walking away, some other guy literally grabbed her [my wife] by the throat and tried to drag her into a group of blokes [he hadn't seen me standing behind her, and I assume he thought she was on her own]. Again, he fucked off after a stern look and a few words.
Both guys really deserved more [the second guy deserved a proper fucking doing] but given that they were both with fairly large groups of mates the certain consequence would, at best, be me in hospital.
re: twunts. Yeah, I've done similar. People who try playing pavement chicken find that walking into 15 or 16 stone of bloke is roughly like walking into a wall ...
re: 156
Ditto, only with a bit more sympathy for Mary Stuart in Scottish high school history classes ...
some other guy literally grabbed her [my wife] by the throat and tried to drag her into a group of blokes
Yow. That's seriously fucked up.
Discussion of powerful premodern women (I think the primary conversation I'm remembering was about Eleanor of Aquitaine) tends to treat their power as fluky and arbitrary because it comes through dynastic lines as the result of a series of accidents, and concludes that they somehow didn't really exercise the power they appeared to.
They (who?) have been doing that since Hapshepsut. I am thinking it is easier to be down on a dead woman than a dead man (which also happens) for purposes of then-contemporary politics.
Anyways, I certainly got quite a lot of Elizabeth and Mary, along the same lines as D2 and ttaM; I don't recall Matilda being presented as a shrinking violet either. If anything, women (Lucretia Borgia comes to mind) tended to presented as nasty rather than weak.
max
['To be unfair, Mary really was a nutter.']
Yeah, I'm griping about half-remembered conversations fifteen years ago. What I'm thinking of is a vaguely feminist, or at least gender-studiesy, analysis that looked at female historical figures through the lens of sociological forces and how they were traded like property, looking at them as objects rather than actors, and then didn't apply that same analysis to male figures, if you see what I mean. It's a reasonable mode of analysis, but the application of it was, at least among the people I remember being irritated by, not evenhanded.
It's funny that the working class guy formula that works pretty well for actors also gave us Engelbert Humperdinck and Tom Jones.
In the middle ages stories about encounters between individuals who lived two centuries apart might be taken seriously.
I had breakfast this morning with a great-great grandniece of the man shown on the 5 sfr coin, supposed by some artist to be representative of William Tell. She told me there may never have been a William Tell.
Edward II's wife Isabella was also no slouch, even if she was French.
re: 159
Paris was, easily, the most menacing New Year I've ever spent. Didn't leave me with much of a favourable impression of Parisians, it has to be said. There were a fair few tourists about but the people behaving like pricks were local.
There was quite a bit of street violence, and I saw several people burned in the face with fireworks that idiots were chucking about the place. Also, French riot police are pretty scary.
I was in France for about 3 hours last week; long enough for someone to punch in a window of the rental car and take my daughter's camera. Yes, yes, it serves me right for not securing it, but I'm not about to rob completely some Metzer of his agency.
I saw Milk last night and mostly liked it. Dianne Feinstein was only given one line, "Please don't make a scene today, Harvey," and her nastiness and alliance with White was not played up well enough.
Sean Penn did a good job with the acting, but I was kind of angry that in their little blurbs after the film, they chose to perpetuate the Twinkie defense myth.
Catherine de Medici, Regent of France. Marguerite of Valois.
In the Showtime series, although Henry can mistreat Catherine horribly, there are serious consequences due to her family, connections, threats to property settlements & treaties. As nobility, she could petition the Pope. Was she a player? Well, Henry felt he needed to cut off some of her correspondence. She also had a domestic popular constituency. Henry probably lost some ability to levy taxes and raise armies by marrying Boleyn. The possessions across the channel were officially lost under Mary, I think.
Isabella of Spain? Feels to me like a specific period around the early Reformation.
Jonathan Israel, in his sociology of the early Enlightenment, writes of a period of relative liberation. Women were allowed to read. (Kidding, much stronger than that at the radical edges) Quashed.
I know of some German-Jewish salons around 1800, Idealism/Romanticism, that were squashed with the defeat of Napoleon and return of the heirarchy.
Always more complicated, exception,s etc, but I do see a pattern.
re: 171
Yeah, I remember that from Israel's book.
[FWIW, the couple of scholars I know who specialize in that period think that Israel's take on the period is idiosyncratic (to say the least).]
the couple of scholars I know who specialize in that period think that Israel's take on the period is idiosyncratic (to say the least
Anti-semites! Just kidding. Mostly.
1) Jim Kalb on the future of conservatism, and liberal vs conservative approaches to reason. Via the Blowhards, where I see Emerson commenting. I hold grudges, and won't comment there. It was hard to resist the Asia Argento thread.
2) OpenLeft have discovered Jonathan Haidt Several articles.
3) The Lady & I just had a conversation about why Sean Pertwee & Vinnie Jones are rarely in a movie together. Mysterious islands, indeed.
Did you like Donnie Brasco? Goodfellas? Raging Bull?
How about Caddyshack (wasn't that true?).
Your final question must be answered yes. We see the movies, like them, then the sourpusses roll out and tell us they are inaccurate historically, and we go "hey, that sucks" put it in our brains and still appreciate the movie.
Remember when some goofball got all over David Sedaris cuz his "memoir" wasn't true?
I believe his response was, duh.
Matt, is there a useful distinction between fiction and propaganda?
oops, should have added: I'm just curious, I don't know enough about this film or the history behind it to judge what it is, so I'm just asking. It seems this is what the complaint boils down too. Certainly Nixon (and others) spent decades trying to clean up his image, so is there a distinction of this type to be made?