The "Torment a Historian" movie playlist thread

[doctorbadwolf]

Corman doesn't deserve to be compared to the likes of Uwe Boll or even J. J. Abrams! Yeah, the guy's known for B movie cheese, but he gave a lot of actors their first big break. He deserves credit for that at least.

Comet is playing this piece of crap right now:

Beowulf (1999)

A 1999 Science Fantasy action film based on the epic poem of the same name, starring Christopher Lambert and Rhona Mitra. Hearing about a monster bothering a castle, a hunter with supernatural powers named Beowulf goes there to ply his trade.

tvtropes.org

Ok, so that's literary, not historical, but it's still awful. I was wondering what the hell was going on with the old token black guy wearing glasses and rolling my eyes at the really out of place techno soundtrack. Then I read on TVTropes it's some kind bizarre post-apocalyptic futuristic thing. The hell?! Oh man, this thing is terrible, and it's weighted down with ansty 90s seriousness.

Christopher Lambert had a line that went something like "The monster grows tired of the game." Jesus. Do you know how hard it was for me to NOT make a snarky Highlander crack there?

I think I'm hearing this weird grinding rumbling noise. Must be Tolkien rolling in his grave.

Reminded by @DrunkonDuty 's mention of Versailles...

Pretty much anything based on stories by Alexandre Dumas, but especially the craptastic 2011 film "The Three Musketeers" with Orlando Bloom as the Duke of Buckingham and Mila Jovovich as Lady deWinter. Airships. Cart-wheeling rapier fights in which random slashes kill guardsmen outright. All of that on top of Dumas' usual historical inaccuracies...

I can't imagine historians caring about either of these, or movies like them, that aren't at all intended to be accurate to anything by the themes and tone of the movie they're trying to make.

Nothing wrong at all with a steampunk 3 Musketeers or a post-apocolyptic Beowulf, other than the poor execution of both movies in question as movies. Complaining that they aren't historically accurate to an alt history France that never existed and a post apocalyptic future? Might as well complain that magic isn't real when watching a fantasy movie.

 

[MGibster]

Now, if I was to start on "The Patriot" ...we'd be here all day. Where are all the black slaves? Where are the thousands of French Soldiers? Where's Baron Friedrich von Steuben? etctera, etcetera....

It's been almost 21 years since I saw the movie, but the lack of von Stueben wasn't a big problem as the movie focused on a ragtag group of militiamen who weren't part of the regular army. i.e. The exact type of soldier that Washington wasn't particularly fond of but whose efficacy became part of our national origin myth. You're right that it's tough to even know where to begin with The Patriot but let's have some fun.

1. As a general rule, the British were not a bunch of evil gits with a habit of burning a bunch of defenseless colonist in a church. As an American I'm certainly on the pro-revolutionary side, but even Americans at the time didn't typically think of the British as being all that evil. Both sides were keen to resume trade once the war was over.
2. "We're not slaves. We work this ground, as freedmen." Excuse me? You're in South Carolina circa 1776 and all these black workers are "employees" of a white landowner? That took me right out of the movie.
3. The militia were not all that effective against the British. They were poorly trained, poorly disciplined, and really couldn't stand up to regular British soldiers.

The sad thing is that The Patriot could have been an interesting movie. Ben Martin is reluctant to join the revolution for fear of returning to his barbaric ways during the French/Indian War. Seeing a former soldier return to his barbarous ways would have been interesting. Examining the cognitive dissonance involved in people crying about their freedom while keeping humans in bondage would have been interesting. Instead we got a lot of flash and little substance.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Well...considering the people who made the film...

 

[Bohandas]

Has anybody mentioned The Da Vinci Code yet?

It has the gnostics believing the exact opposite of what the gnostics believed, and more egregiously despite the film being set in the late twentieth century the main characters all talk about the Catholic Church as if it were still 1516.

EDIT:
And I think they stole part of the ending from Monty Python. Everybody gets arrested and the grail is found with the frenchmen from the beginning of the film.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

YEEEEEARS ago, I was watching TV, and an old action movie about Vikings landing in the new world, fighting the natives, etc. it was full of jarring oddities.

I don’t recall who was in it. One of the Vikings was a black guy.* Another wore a spiked helmet that looked like a Pickelhaube helmet from a Prussian/German WW1 movie. Also, the natives looked more Polynesian than any of the people you’d find in the coastal regions of northeastern America.





* yes, I know there were black and brown people in viking lands, both free and slaves, travelers and actual members of the society. Some even fully assimilated. But having exactly one in the movie without explanation is odd, to say the least.

 

[Ryujin]

YEEEEEARS ago, I was watching TV, and an old action movie about Vikings landing in the new world, fighting the natives, etc. it was full of jarring oddities.

I don’t recall who was in it. One of the Vikings was a black guy.* Another wore a spiked helmet that looked like a Pickelhaube helmet from a Prussian/German WW1 movie. Also, the natives looked more Polynesian than any of the people you’d find in the coastal regions of northeastern America.





* yes, I know there were black and brown people in viking lands, both free and slaves, travelers and actual members of the society. Some even fully assimilated. But having exactly one in the movie without explanation is odd, to say the least.

I had to give up on the TV show "Vikings" when, in the first episode, I noticed that one of the characters was wearing the same leather LARP vest that I own. OK, not at that exact moment, but it was the beginning of the end.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Just to get a taste of how bad things COULD get, here’s a clip from 1993’s mocumentary And God Spoke. The more you know about Hollywood, filmmaking, and Christianity, the funnier this movie is. Because the thing that the movie biz gets almost as wrong as historical dramas is Biblical dramas.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

BTW, that clip was picked because of its lack of cursing... The film has many gems, but language prohibits:

 

[Orius]

Has anybody mentioned The Da Vinci Code yet?

It has the gnostics believing the exact opposite of what the gnostics believed, and more egregiously despite the film being set in the late twentieth century the main characters all talk about the Catholic Church as if it were still 1516.

EDIT:
And I think they stole part of the ending from Monty Python. Everybody gets arrested and the grail is found with the frenchmen from the beginning of the film.

Yeah, I called it cheese a few pages back, but I'm not sure it qualifies as historical. The Templars got taken down because the king of France owed them a ton of money and it was easier for him to tear them down than pay them back. That's all there was to it.

YEEEEEARS ago, I was watching TV, and an old action movie about Vikings landing in the new world, fighting the natives, etc. it was full of jarring oddities.

I don’t recall who was in it. One of the Vikings was a black guy.* Another wore a spiked helmet that looked like a Pickelhaube helmet from a Prussian/German WW1 movie. Also, the natives looked more Polynesian than any of the people you’d find in the coastal regions of northeastern America.





* yes, I know there were black and brown people in viking lands, both free and slaves, travelers and actual members of the society. Some even fully assimilated. But having exactly one in the movie without explanation is odd, to say the least.

Black Viking is silly enough, but I've got one better. Back in the 80s, they made a sequel to The Dirty Dozen. One of the soldiers they recruit to infiltrate a German military position in the middle of WWII was black. Putting a black guy in a Nazi uniform is probably the most blantant, ridiculous, and out of place tokenism I have ever seen.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I had the same reaction to the (admittedly ahistorical) Wild Wild West with Will Smith. While there were indeed black secret service agents at the time, they were not going to be selected for the kinds of missions the show (& movie) depicted.