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Movie Distractions
I’m sitting here watching Elizabeth, The Golden Age while the snow falls and the dogs snooze. I can see why Cate Blanchett was nominated for her starring performance and why the film won awards for costume design and art direction. But, I’m totally put off by Mary Stuart’s thick Scottish brogue. Mary Queen of Scots was raised in France (her mother’s birthplace) and was a French queen at one time. She almost certainly spoke French and, if anything, had a French accent. It’s very distracting to someone even marginally familiar with the history.
James Delingpole and Toby Young discussed the odd and unlikely appearance of a Sikh soldier in the movie 1917 portrayal of WWI and the Western Front.
What do you find distracting in otherwise good movies?
Published in General
It would be transgressive to see some white guy cast as Alexander Hamilton.
I notice that almost always when characters are carrying luggage, you can tell there really isn’t anything in it, it appears too light. A woman can be carrying a huge suitcase and not struggling at all. She’s won’t even be weighed down on one side. Seems like a simple thing to do, to actually put something in the luggage.
I love Firefly and Serenity dearly, but the physics are horrible. You’d think they could have hired a freshman physics major to tutor them a bit.
Once someone pointed out empty coffee cups I now notice it too. Same thing, the cup moves too easily. Put some water in it and seal the top so it doesn’t spill.
I stopped watching Sharknado 4 when it turned out the Sharknados were being caused by magic instead of climate change (which was admittedly already fairly annoying)
Teeth that are perfectly white and perfectly straight.
I agree. Spectacularly bad is right. But for me it’s probably that I’m so familiar with differing Southern accents. Other places, I just recognize the Hollywood version and not the real thing.
YES. Forrest Gump was bad. My major complaint about that movie was the pronunciation of his name. In Alabama, at the time, most folks would say “FAHR-rest,” rather than “FORE-rest.” It was very off-putting for me.
He’s from Texas. His accent is real. I recently watched Logan Lucky, a weird little movie set in North Carolina, starring Channing Tatum, Daniel Craig, and Adam Driver. They’re supposed to be country/blue-collar types. Driver’s accent is awful. Craig’s is not-so-bad. Tatum’s is perfect. He’s from Alabama/Mississippi, so it wasn’t a stretch.
Sikhs did fight in Europe during WWI.
Especially in period pieces.
Yabbut, I think James and Toby’s point was it was unlikely you’d see one Sikh in the back of a truck with a bunch of Anglos rather than a unit of Sikhs fighting together. It was a PC attempt to nod to the Sikh contribution to the Allied effort which only really provided a distraction.
Except that there actually were Indian troops who served on the Western Front. Per Wikipedia (here), 130,000 Indians served in France and Belgium in WWI, with 4 divisions sent almost immediately, arriving in late September 1914. They participated in many of the major battles.
The Indian Army involvement on the Western Front was only a small part of the Indian contribution. Over 1 million Indian soldiers served, though for obvious geographic regions, they were principally deployed in the Middle East and Africa.
Indian Army units were generally a mix of British and Indian sub-units, and I think that they generally had British officers and noncoms.
The Sikhs and the Gurkhas, both small minorities within India, seem to have been over-represented. Both are quite distinctive and cool, with the Sikhs having their turbans and the Gurkhas having a wicked hooked dagger called a khukuri.
The Gurkhas, in particular, were noted for their extraordinary bravery. As an Arizonan, I tend to think of them as the Apaches of the British Empire.
I regret having but one Like to give to Mate De’s comment.
The girl power stuff is getting really tiresome for me, too.
I also like Black Widow, but her fighting prowess is not plausible to me. Neither is Hawkeye’s. As far as I know, they don’t have any real super-power back story. They’re just supposed to have super ninja skills, I think, which is fine until you want me to believe that they can jump out of airplanes without a parachute or survive the complete destruction of Avengers HQ.
Perhaps they’ll fix this in the new Black Widow movie. All that they really need is for her to have received some sort of super-juice like Cap or Bucky.
Amen, amen, and AMEN! THANK you, @amyschley!
Sikhs were serving in France in WWI. I am a very harsh critic of that movie but that detail is the least of my criticisms. I was distracted by the fact that nothing in the movie made any sense at all.
How did they come across a British convoy behind enemy lines? That a Sikh was in the convoy was a much smaller discrepancy.
Just remember that Hercules was a nice guy who had to fight once in a while but not in a mean way.
Xena was a bloody, no holds barred killer of all. She had to be a woman or the networks would have choked on it.
The soldiers int he Indian Army units didn’t speak English and it was a requirement for the officers to speak the needed language(Ghurkali, Urdu, etc. depending on the unit they belonged to and most British officers spoke more than one of the Indian subcontinents languages in order to be able to work with other Indian Army units as needed). The Units had British officers but usually only the senior officers (British Company commander with all Indian platoon commanders for example) with around a dozen English officers for a battalion of 800 men, if an infantry battalion – cavalry units had a lower headcount). The mixing of Indian Army and British Army units started at the Brigade level – one British Army battalion and the rest Indian Army, etc.
It appears you are not watching too many British films then.
Yes but Medusa was pretty bad kick butt. And the Sirens turning a person into stone might not be gory, but not too pleasant either.
People playing musicians, and not taught how to fake playing. I saw a movie a long time ago that had a string quartet in it, and the players were just waving things around, with incorrect hand positions and bows obviously not touching strings. Made me gag.
That’s actually one of the great strengths of Amadeus. They actually gave the actors piano and conducting lessons, and a music school analyzed the movie to discover that every note you see played is the one you are hearing. Frankly, the best clue that F. Murray Abraham isn’t a real conductor is that his conducting is too … ideal, without the weird quirks that real conductors have.
Ha! I confess I almost never watched either show.
The parking place. How is there always a parking place right out front? Movies or TV, that spot is always there when needed by the star. If only that happened in real life . . .
I’ve just discovered Karolina Zebrowska on YouTube, she talks about this a lot https://youtu.be/irGJJ1vtNR4
Any movie with a rocket launch where the characters are hundreds of yards or even a few miles from the rocket, but the sound of the rocket occurs at the same time you’re seeing the flames.
Which also of course goes for explosions in war movies, etc. Sound travels a lot slower than light does.
Also on the rocket thing, the countdown goes to zero and *then* the engines start firing, with actual liftoff a few seconds later. Anyone who’s ever watched an Apollo or Shuttle launch knows that the engines fire several seconds in advance with “zero” being the moment of actual liftoff.
On a completely different note, the movie Midway (the 2019 version, not the mid-70s one) showed the Doolittle raid on Tokyo with three B-25’s flying in formation over the city. Didn’t happen – each of the planes was on their own. They didn’t have sufficient fuel to take the time to form up after takeoff from the carrier.
(US) Civil War movies where the soldiers are all guys who are really well fed, if you catch my drift. The 1993 Gettysburg was a particular standout in this particular problem, since they used several thousand volunteer civil war re-enactors, and those tend to be overweight middle-aged guys, instead of the malnourished kids and young guys of the actual war. Still a really good movie though.
I can forgive the overweight soldiers just for practical reasons, however that movie was based on an abomination of a book, “Killer Angels.” It’s the only time in my life where I stood up half way through reading a book and tore it in half*. The portrayal of Lee was so anti-historical and insulting to the real man that I just couldn’t take it any longer.
Say what you will about motives or morality of Lee, there is no disputing that he was famously polite. In particular when J. E .B. Stuart showed up late to Gettysburg the book and the movie have Lee meeting with Stuart in a building where he’s yelling at him and pounding the table. In truth, the actual scene consisted of Lee very laconically replying, “They are an impediment to me now,” and walked away after Stuart bragged about all the wagons he captured as loot. Eyewitnesses all wrote that this low keyed rebuke devastated Stuart. This is a key part of understanding Lee and how he was such a powerful leader that a rebuke of this nature was so important to his lieutenants.
So, fat soldiers are fine by me to an extent, but misrepresenting the fundamental nature of the most important historical character is unforgivable. Besides, it’s also a very biased yankee book.
*I keep all my books and have a reasonably large library with every book cataloged and kept on its annointed shelf so I can find them easily when I feel the need.
I’m having a problem here. A good number of actors have a southern accent for free, say Billy Bob Thornton, Tommy Lee Jones (if Texas accents are southern, which is debatable), Mary Steenburgen, Andy Griffith, Ned Beatty (who is still alive), innumerable character actors since talkies began. Maybe my ear is poor, but not native born southerners like John Malkovich, Kevin Spacey, Kathleen Turner, Meryl Streep seem to do OK. I’m certain any British actor can do a fair one.
One problem might be that there are a lot of southern accents. I remember a friend who had a tidewater Virginia accent talking about working at the University of Georgia (northern Georgia) and remarking on the unintelligibility of people from southern Georgia. This being my native accent (lost long ago like a bad habit) I could only agree with her; my people are hard to understand.
A couple of generations back, I think weak southern accents were the norm. I was looking at the trailer to the Paul Newman/Elizabeth Taylor Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Funny. And Vivian Leigh may have been a fine English actor, but Land Sakes! I’m pretty sure Scarlett O’Hara’s accent never existed in the wild. But in those days it was pretty much a stage accent, like Stage Irish. Everybody was in on the joke.
I remember some friends complaining about the horrible fake British accent that actress who played Daphne on Frasier had. Then I pointed out to them that she was British…