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Thanks for this. I saw “The Killing Fields” in a theater when it came out. It played Lennon’s Imagine at the end as if it was the solution. Instead, it was part of the problem.
One critique of the Ken Burns Vietnam War series pointed to the sound track advancing a clear, one-sided message.
You don’t mention “Trumbo.”
The film received generally positive reviews, with Bryan Cranston being nominated for several awards, including the Academy Award for Best Actor,[6][7] although the film itself was criticized for historical inaccuracies and misportrayals of people and events.
And
Other critics raised similar historical concerns. While the film portrays Trumbo as “a New Deal liberal hero defending civil liberties”, Ron Capshaw in The American Spectator stated the real Trumbo was an outspoken supporter of Soviet-style communism, including the brutal regimes of Joseph Stalin and North Korean dictator Kim Il-sung.[9] The conservative Pat Buchanan questioned the appropriateness of portraying Trumbo as a “martyr to the first amendment” while overlooking his support for regimes that actively suppress free speech.[10] Armond White of National Review went a step further, accusing director Jay Roach of “unrestrained partisanship” for whitewashing the dark history of communist ideologies to invent a hero that supports Roach’s political views
Trumbo, of course was a dedicated communist. There are several good books about Hollywood and communism.
https://www.amazon.com/Red-Star-Over-Hollywood-Colony%C2%92s/dp/1893554961/
Louie Zamperini’s story was amazing. He survived 47 days in the ocean then he was tortured for two years in a Japanese POW camp. When he got home he was on a path to do what the ocean and Japanese couldn’t, destroy himself. Then, something happened, nothing worth going into, but he led a good life after that. Yeah, the first movie could have given a little more attention to his post-war life.
Much like her book Seabiscuit, Hillenbrand’s Unbroken reads more like a novel than a history. She is an excellent writer. I was blown away by the turn in Zamperini’s life, and when I learned that the film version completely ignored his conversion, I knew not to see it.
Cliff,
Your comments are so much in need of consideration. Thirty or forty years ago this critical attitude would have simply been considered the intellectual norm. No college-level course would consider not presenting multiple sources and critical reviews. No one would have actually taught ideological boilerplate straight up and continued to have their reputation (much less their job) intact.
We should be constantly reviewing the materials presented to the young. When we find narrow ideological views presented without balance we should be demanding that alternate materials be given equal treatment.
When a movie fails in its basic responsibility to tell the story as it happened, it must be criticized.
Regards,
Jim
Even Gandhi discounted the centrality of his religious faith, as I recall.
There’s a false assumption that our role models must be exactly like us. As Candace Owens said, she doesn’t need Black History Month because her history is American history… white people included.
All movies fail that responsibility. It’s in part due to movie people not knowing anything but the insides of their own minds (which is pretty much just one collective mind) and partly because film is a very limiting medium. Even in the best of hands it can’t tell a story well.
Ret,
You are right that cinema never is quite up to a full text’s quality. However, when cinema descends to a level in which it is a whitewash or just a puff job then criticism must be leveled at it. Cinema reaches too many people to just let it ride.
Regards,
Jim
The Johnny Cash movie Walk the Line focused on his years of addiction, then near the end they show him walk into a church without much explanation how much his life changed due to his faith in Jesus.
Some meet the test. Willie Wyler knew what the war was like. He made “The Best Years of Our Lives” and spent the rest of his life deaf from filming battle scenes from the bomb bay of a B 25.
It just would not do to even mention Billy Graham, let along show his early crusades as a positive, life changing force.
Hillenbrand’s own story is remarkable.
I didn’t mean you should stop the criticism. I’m glad somebody does it, but I’m done with American film myself.
I’ll have to take your word for it. I’ve been burned too many times myself. It’s too much work clearing the false information out of my head afterwards.
That’s why I don’t watch Biblical movies. I don’t want to confuse dramatizations with real words and history. The more the details matter, the harder an event is to dramatize.
I do, however, enjoy fiction written around historical reality. Ben Hur and Gladiator are a couple examples. The latter is set with a protagonist who well represents the Roman ideal leader and an antagonist who barely scratches the surface of monsters like Caligula.
That’s a good point. Movies about historical persons and historical events are the ones that I especially can’t stand. I also don’t read historical fiction, because it’s always anachronistic.
I should see if I can stand Ben Hur now. I enjoyed it when it first came out, back around 1960. My main memory is of the girls in the theater oohing over the cool hubcaps on the chariots. Hubcaps were an important thing to American teenagers then. But I was just starting my curmudgeon apprenticeship back in those days, and probably wasn’t bothered by any historical misrepresentations.
I think that was Joaquin Phoenix best movie (not that I’ve seen many ). Hard to believe that it was done 19 years ago. I have walked by the pub that Oliver Reed died in. It’s in Valletta and is now renamed “Oliver’s Last Pub.”They had to shoot some scenes with a double as he died during the filming, arm wrestling a British sailor.
Clifford, great post.
I have one quibble. I do not think that Starship Troopers was juvenile. I think that it was the most adult of all of Heinlein’s work. It is important in the idea that high school students should be taught “moral history,” and the challenging idea that citizenship should be earned.
Great reviews and points @CliffordBrown. In my old age I find movies generally flatten things. Most everything is simplified, history is more black/white, there is little if any nuance. It is so sad that for some – especially young people – history will be a movie instead of the real, complicated, conflicting stuff that it is. I’ve taken to generally watching small movies in the sense that they are about a very limited moment and so can delve a little deeper. For instance, Parkland. Yes, yes, yes very disappointed with Ken Burns and especially the Vietnam series. These documentaries will be used in classrooms and are so shallow. Why not interview Amity Shaes on FDR for the Roosevelt series? Couldn’t he have one person who might have a different viewpoint? And he get’s federal money to boot. Sorry off the soapbox. Again thanks for the post.
One movie in a historical setting that I didn’t find too offputting was Black Robe. I’ve spent a lot more time with that era of history in more recent years, but still don’t think it did a bad job. It probably wasn’t as respectful of the nuances of the Jesuit motivations as it should have been, but it would probably be too shocking for moviegoers to see an accurately nuanced portrayal of religion, especially Christianity. I don’t remember anything particularly offensive about this one.
I loved the movie “The Immigrants” by Ingmar Bergman. It seemed so realistic to me.
Another movie that I thought did well on the realism scale was “Das Boot.” I saw it in a theater in Palo Alto Calif the week it came out in the early 1980s.
The film was a portrayal of life on a Third Reich’s German U boat, and focused on the multi faceted character of the submarine’s captain.
It was so realistic, compelling and traumatizing an experience that the next morning, when I found myself waking up in my own bed, surrounded by sunlight and cheerfully chirping birds outside my window, and not inside a sub being bombarded with flak and torpedoes, I thanked the Lord for being alive when and where I was. And not 40 years earlier in the Germany navy.
While “the book” is almost always infinitely better, this story was almost scripted to be a great movie. But why cut material to fit formulaic and marketing criteria and add a middle man between me and the full story? In this case I found the happy medium to be in the format of the audiobook (~14 hours). It is well worth the time invested.
@TheReticulator and @CarolJoy: I would put both Das Boot and Black Robe forward as good movies that can really fully cover and focus on a subject. Great examples of good films.
“Juvinile” is a term of art. We would now see the term “YA,” for “young adult,” instead. The target audience, as understood by the author and his publishers was teenagers, especially teenage boys.
I remember being surprised and grateful the filmmakers allowed that much religion in the movie. Hinting at the role of religion is better than ignoring it altogether.