The last movie you saw...

[maxpayne2409]

well at least he knows his place in the world, as the non gaming manbearpig

[dinky]

there was a buy 1 get 1 free sale going on on select tv series and an oliver stone boxed set. I got the only 2 seasons of dead like me</i> for $50. caddyshack</i> for $6.99. the man who wasn't there</i> and t2</i> for $7.99 (last two were used). I also saw the "new" boxed sets of x-files, which are indeed $44-$54 each. so I still feel good about getting them used for $30 - prolly watched once. the original boxed sets are still $100+. not sure what extras I don't get. fortunately, I no care.

also got jp3</i> and the big easy</i> for $5.99 (used) from another place in the mall.

all of this cuz I wanted a sub for dinner.

(they had great deals on dawson's creek</i> - every season I think at 2 for 1 - but then...it's dawson's creek</i>

both outer limits</i> series for the same deal. thought about it. maybe pairing the new series with the oliver stone set. maybe next time if I have the funds. still working on point pleasant</i> atm anyway.

[spudthedestroyer]

I watched Excalibor, the old British King Arthur movie with Patrick Stewart et al. I thought it was rather interesting and enjoyable myself. Unlike hollywood Arthur shite, it was very dirty and 'gritty', a lot more blood and fighting than I was expecting, and a nice quota of limb hacking. The plot gets a bit messed up, they stick too closely to the arhur myth at the end though I think. Whilst being fair to the source is nice, i think it cost the movie a bit much and at the end it feels like a sequence of necessary plot points it has to get through, rather than a fine composed and paced movie.

That said, it still works pretty well, even though it covers a lot of time. I think one thing is for sure, the arthur legend is enough for a couple of films, i mean as disney showed with the sword in the stone film, you can make a film on a microcosm of the story, so doing the whole thing faithfully in one movie is a tad ambitious.

Anyone else seen it? The old 80s one?

[spudthedestroyer]

dead like me for $50

oh dear, you don't like that shite do you? I watched a couple of episodes when Sky 1 was bumming it as they do "the best droll shite from the states", etc. as if because american audiences like it (ie. joey) that's a selling point. It was so lame i thought, nothing happens... its so a little teenage girl's program. Did you keep the receipt?

[dinky]

That said, it still works pretty well, even though it covers a lot of time. I think one thing is for sure, the arthur legend is enough for a couple of films, i mean as disney showed with the sword in the stone film, you can make a film on a microcosm of the story, so doing the whole thing faithfully in one movie is a tad ambitious.

they way you keep talking about it, it's like there's just one story. are referring specifically to geoffry monmoth(sp?)? the french guy's mort d'arthur? the once and future king? one of the other famous stories in the past 500 years? I say this because "the arthur story" is a composite of many stories. it's a whole cycle of stuff like the trojan war cycle of myths. and I'm not sure if you have just one particular "epic" in mind or every (canonical) thing ever written.

edit: yes, I've seen it. not recently. loved it. loved all that stuff. but was also 10 at the time. it's only a $5 dvd new though. I keep looking at it and passing it up.

dead like me for $50

oh dear, you don't like that shite do you? I watched a couple of episodes when Sky 1 was bumming it as they do "the best droll shite from the states", etc. as if because american audiences like it (ie. joey) that's a selling point. It was so lame i thought, nothing happens... its so a little teenage girl's program. Did you keep the receipt?

what I really find interesting about your disdain for the show is that it's the kinda thing people who aren't</i> americans love. it's irreverent and wacky and all, but understated. you'll note it was cancelled cuz americans didn't watch it, btw.

[spudthedestroyer]

not just americans, americans and foreigners alike

@arthur thing, around here there's one particular complete story and where it differs in in the little bits; like the robin hood thing. The disney cartoon where the king is a lion and robin hood is a fox was more accurate to the version i was told than the Kevin Costner version The bit about Arthurs parentage is a tad different, but its the same basic story. I only ever heard the one version, but then in hollywood movies they keep messing it up, so i'm guessing they've got some others.

Then again, you may have seen that the british take the piss out of hollywood movies and they way they always f*ck things up. If it were a hollywood arthur movie, I bet arthur would be irish (actually come to think of it, its usually Connery who's a f*ckin scot )

[spudthedestroyer]

btw, monty python and the holy grail is still the best arthur story.

[maxpayne2409]

btw, monty python and the holy grail is still the best arthur story.

it is indeed, that film rules

spud have you ever seen that sketch on monkey dust where they took the piss out of hollywood movies where england was invaded by the nazis who instead of being after the jews they were hunting down the irish, and the lead actor is a badly overacting american soldier who tells teh irish to be quiet and lay low til the tanks pass and instead they party adn drink and shout "we love the crack too much you see" and they are stereotypical irish (small, curly hair, wearing green suits with black buckle boot/shoes) too funny and deadly accurate to how hollywood fucks up history in movies

[dinky]

to be fair, drama has been "fucking up history" since its inception. if you think that hollywood is american-centric (which it is, I'm not arguing that), then you might also look at greek tragedy & comedy (the origin of drama in the west). that stuff is so pro-athenian, it makes hollywood look rather tame. and then there's basically the same thing on elizabethan stage with the "history plays" of marlowe and shakespeare (certainly you've read some of them?). again, not arguing that there's a lot of myth-making going on in stuff like braveheart and u571 and patriot, but it's hardly new hat either. cast the first stone and all that. is the fact that one was stage and the other is film an important difference? what is an important difference? I suppose it's only different if you feel slighted by it (being non-american?), but iunno. I'm much more perturbed by the newsmedia myth-making that goes on all over the tv and newspapers of today than what hollywood churns out.

[maxpayne2409]

[rant]

i have indeed read lots of shakespeare (mostly in school homeo & jippyet was utter shit but julius caesar and macbeth rule) never heard of marlowe though, i havent seen braveheart or the patriot (im guessing you mean the one with mel gibson not seagal?) i guess i dont have as much of a problem with history thats mega old and the facts are passed down by word of mouth or scattered about over bitty (not breast milk) documents that get mixed up and misconstrued over time so aren't 100% accurate anyway then i do with recent history like U571 where the facts and historical knowledge is still present in the people who were there and documents made at the time, i guess what im saying is at least stories based in the time of alexander, or troy etc can never really be 100% accurate because of the passage of time and the mistranslation over time, then something just over 60 years old where people who were there are still alive where theres no excuse for getting the facts wrong, replacing british soldiers for american soldiers just to appeal more to american retard cinema goers

[/rant]

anyway moving on, watched national treasure and one plus point is it was nowhere near as utterly dreadful as sahara that came out at same time based around the same basic idea, plus nic cage is always a better (for better read "has better screen prescence) then matthew mccoughenay (sp?) although the sight of nic cage running always makes me laugh, he runs like such a girl (or a fat bloke)

anyway national treasure wasnt so bad but i didnt expect much due to the slating you lot gave it so it really couldve been any worse then i was expecting lol, it did have twinges of indiana jones to it which was fun

[spudthedestroyer]

I think the difference was Shakespeare didn't take a british myth, twist it into an an antibritish piece and then try and sell it back to the british. Back then huge mythos is expected, the right wing dictatorship and the restricts on information are obvious reasons for some of the traits of his plays. His plays were either directly for the crown court audience or plagarised off of existing myth. i mean king lear's plot is exactly like the existing myth he just lifted it and injected a few solliloquays (Lear is another arthur like myth or man story of course).

Hollywood picks up a british myth, or when its at its worst recent history, twists it to a us-centric, injects 50cc of pro-irish nationalism (given the cultural connotations over the british) and then tries to sell it back to the british audience. The last bit is a real problem, its incitement to riot (read on ). This is done in ever increasing abundance, which is why there's a huge backlash in parodies of "jerry brokheimer" productions, like monkey dust did (every other episode its got one in infact).

i don't know whether to laugh or cry most of the time. I find it amusing with the robin hood, etc. (Its amusing to see talking animals beat a costner film in terms of "accuracy" ), but with the ones where they erase recent history, i dunno not only are the films generally very crap... its rather offensive i imagine.

A classic example was with Objective, Burma! (1945), where they replace all the british and australians who had died in droves with americans, releasing immediately after the actual events, releasing their version to the same people that had just been fighting there. All of the changes were for absolutely no reason either, just us-centric world view and its not like it was in dispute.

The movie was pulled from release and banned in Britain after heated protest from British veteran groups and the military establishment. As the Burma campaign was a predominantly British and Australian operation, the picture was taken as a national insult and highlighted the resentment that many felt was another America winning the war single handedly. Incidentally, American writer 'Lester Cole' who co-wrote such a patriotic flag-waving script would be branded an "Un-American" communist, becoming one of the Hollywood Ten just a few years later.

As for the film:

The film was nominated for three Academy Awards for 1945:

I think that about sums up the important difference about the Hollywood model.

I don't recall shakespeare ever doing anything like that he was racist and he stole bits and bobs, but he didn't shit where he ate as far as i'm aware (as tony soprano so aptly said a few episodes back) in the plays he actually wrote... most of them he plagarised an existing myth and I'm quite glad he did, because for myths like King Lear he seems to have got it pretty much spot on the existing myth.

Of course taking any fact from drama is silly, but i don't think the defacation of recent events is very clever.

The irish thing is obviously just a association with US vs British colonialism. I'm still waiting for Ghandi where the Americans liberate India via militrary action

Personally its not the creative license (well its not that, its a propaganda piece), its the fact that they then release it in the country they've just screwed over

@max, did you see Churchill: The hollywood years? its not very funny but there's a few bits in it that make you smile, like the "Dick Van Dyke Street" with the riverdancing Irish

[maxpayne2409]

ive got churchill the hollywood years on dvd (i didnt pay for it though it was a gift from a friend) yeah i remember dick van dyke street, the funniest bit i remember was the reeves and mortimer parts as the camp/gay palace servants

"oooh me in kamp f, sounds like a gay love story"

[dinky]

first off, I get the don't shit where you eat thing. and yes, I understand that. but a lot of the stuff you mentioned was never history anyway. troy? that's myth we get truth from. arthur/camelot = myth we get truth from. robin hood - I think that's also myth we get truth from (rather than historical).

now Richard III, Henry IVs. Henry V. marlowe's Edward II (which eeirily agrees with braveheart on the English issue) were actual dramatizations of history</i> ala u571 & braveheart. the greeks did "history plays too" (still called tragedies), but the only one we have is called Persians. the rest are like twisting arthur stories. the "origin" is more art/poetry than fact/history to begin with.

obviously, shakespeare, marlowe, sophocles, aeschylus, euripides all got exported (and gained great fame) outside of england/athens. so the simple fact that hollywood (which is in the US) is making us-centric movies doesn't much (in itself) affect how posterity values these things. believe it or not, I'm not bring this all up to argue why you should love Saving Private Ryan, but I does raise some interesting questions about how the other famous "history plays" were received in their time and how the became so popular outside of the narrow political propaganda that they were obviously written within.

[spudthedestroyer]

Hehe, having two answer/debate with two people at once? i'll skip all the stuff directed at max. /me jumps over another troy reference

The problem, as I covered a bit up about the times in which they are written with your examples of classical literacture is your picking out monarchs that are way above the factual knowledge of the peasants, and that were written under brutal dictatorships. They were commisioned long after the people had died for the royal court exclusively of the monarch nemisis familes or their immediate successors; the export to other playhouses is just testiment to how well they were written, not the intended audience.

Take one example, since its a real big propaganda piece and almost entirely ficticious. Richard III, written between 1591 and 1593, Richard III died in 1485. There was a hundred years of disinformation after he died by following monarchs of rival families. Shakespeare wrote the play for a Tudour monarch, whereas Richard III was a Stewart monarch (I don't expect you to know much about british history, even the friggin brats these day don't know anything, think Redneck vs Osama Bin Laden kind of motif in terms of family rivalry). If he'd have written it true to Richard III he'd have probably been imprisoned for treason.

That's just one of your examples, your other examples you can follow to similar accord. Writing material was a lot more dangerous back then, it shouldn't be now unless you live in similar conditions (ie. communist china, etc.). You have to remember at that time, if Shakespeare wouldn't have pandered to the royal court, who commisioned his plays, he's have been done away with.

With Richard III, there was a 100 years of cover up and an anti-stewart dictatorship so the production of a propaganda piece was of course expected. The thing is, the plebs really didn't know what was going on, and as is my understanding, a damaging portrayal of Richard the III has persisted. I can understand propaganda pieces when the times and events produce it, but i find it very difficult when i see it in an open press nation (who am i kidding right? )

What's changed over the centuries is freedom of information, the plebs now have ready access to education and a birrage of factual information.


Personally, I normally laugh at the changes made to movies, its kind of sad to see how lame and patriotic hollywood is in its film, always patting themselves on the back. Its just the model of taking a british war victory (and since we went round rodgering the fuck out of innocent nations theres a lot ), stripping out the british and then replacing them with americans is a tad frequent these days, and its becoming increasingly so. When lots of people died too... its kind of, well you know. There's no reason for these changes in these cases, its not like they will be executed, or the american government is a right wing dictatorship. They just seem to take the excuse to piss off a lot of war veterens whenever they get the chance. I mean they don't even wait until they are dead these days

With the mythology ones, its just the injection of the plucky irish thats the key to seeing what the thought process of the whole thing is.

[dinky]

iunno. I really liked u571. and I think...yes...I prolly wouldn't like it if it was a buncha brits. being that I knew nothing about the enigma code (other than a forgotten blurb in history class that it was broken by the brits) I would have believed we did crack the code by comendeering a german sub - then the blurb at the end told the real history, and I was like "oh. good movie though."

the patriot I hated, but mostly cuz in the big climactic battle, you get mel (the messiah) gibson impaling people with an american flag like some revolutionary war version of captain america. that's just bad movie-making imagery though. hell, until people raised heck about that real life character he played, I thought he was an invented character.

braveheart felt a lot like king lear to me. I mean...some sort of loose historicity, but more like camelot than history. I guess that's cuz I know nothing about the actual history of the period though. (until I had to study edward ii)

anyway, the political restraints during the context(s) of production is an interesting variable that I can look into. so I'll follow that thread.

watched sopranos</i>. liked it. that ER lady looked hot. almost makes me wish I watched that show in the past 10 years.

[maxpayne2409]

really liked u571. and I think...yes...I prolly wouldn't like it if it was a buncha brits. being that I knew nothing about the enigma code (other than a forgotten blurb in history class that it was broken by the brits) I would have believed we did crack the code by comendeering a german sub

which is exactly why americans are viewed the way they are, everything has to revolve around america lol i still love the whole "if you dont support the war then you dont support american troops, and if you dont support the troops that means your a terrorist" line bush delivered....erm yeah great logic georgie porgy, obviously what he meant to say is "if you dont support the war you dont support the troops, and if you dont support the troops you are infact not retarded enough to classify as an american citation..*in earpeice* "thats citizen sir"

[dinky]

yeah. I'd say the country is quite divided on that atm. and bush seems to (finally) be losing support (4-8 years too late). unfortunately, people did and still would vote for him just cuz, for example, they hate hillary or rudy guiliani or they served in some sort of war/military engagement, and therefore that line you quoted/paraphrased is somehow true. anyway...there are a lot of bumperstickers that read "support our troops: bring them home" too.

[spudthedestroyer]

@shakespeare, Its not like shakespeare didn't take digs at the current injusticies with his plays, he was just firmly a royalist and wrote for the monarch which means historically when you look at his plays, particularly the ones about previous kings, you have to remember that he probably hated their guts

I mean its not like us brits aint got our own propaganda machine going on, but take Zulu. We didn't replace the Welsh regiment with an English one, which hollywood probably would have done.

As for u571, I can't stand it myself, not only is not particularly good, but its infuriateling insulting.

Anyway, enough of hollywood vs history, watched robot chicken. Loved that ep, season 2 hasn't been quite as good but I liked this episode, probably the Idle Hands pisstake and the addition of Bruce Campbell... oh and the car chase! love that game

[maxpayne2409]

ah glad u said robot chicken reminds me ive got it to watch, watched american dad 2x01 the other night, it was so so not great as it focused too much on roger and i HATE roger

[dinky]

is there any way to align the pic in my sig next to the text? I tried the simple html code, and that definitely doesn't work. last time I tried tables, it fuct-up the font something fierce.