It’s fun when people make vapid lists of stuff on websites
like Yahoo!, because a lot of times, while they’re making fun of other stuff,
they’re creating lots of opportunities for other people to make fun of them. (I’m
sure I do this a lot on here, too!) So in this list of movie stills and quips,
this author (uncredited, apparently) complains that Abraham Lincoln, Vampire
Hunter is not historically accurate enough (How do they know? It’s probably a
vampire trying to make us think it’s all lies, when it’s really all true!), and then s/he moves on to moan
that Nicolas Cage’s silly medieval plague movie Season of the Witch is historically inaccurate because he’s supposed to
be a knight coming home from the Crusades, and he returns to find an epidemic
of the plague (!), and that didn’t happen at that time, so the movie is wrong. (The
major plague was later, but there may have been other, smaller outbreaks of
other illness epidemics that we never heard about because it killed all the
literate people who might have recorded it, for all we know: so there!) Um, one
of the greatest movies of all time uses this very same plot device: Ingmar
Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. Now,
I’m not trying to say Season of the Witch is on the same level as The Seventh Seal (far from it!), but why is it
fair for Bergman’s movie, and not for Cage’s? Just because one is great and the
other is lame? That’s no excuse! (Or do they think The Seventh Seal sucks too for the same reason?)
Additionally, this author says this plague date error is
like making a movie where the Stuxnet virus is infecting the Luftwaffe. Um,
that’s a grossly misleading analogy. The difference in technology and
lifestyle, in addition to medical care, between 1272 and 1348 is practically,
if not completely, negligible! But with
as fast as technology is moving along these days, and has been for the past
century or so, the same time difference makes a huge difference in lifestyle now, in addition to the fact
that the Stuxnet virus couldn’t harm WWII-era airplanes: they had no computers
to infect, silly! (And from what I understand, the Stuxnet virus is kinda
specific in what it attacks: as in I believe it just goes after centrifuges and
whatnot, and not airplanes.) So while the time difference may be applicable for
comparison (for example, saying: “That’s the difference between 1936 and
now!”), the analogy used here doesn’t really work. If the author was trying to
make a really silly analogy for comedic effect, then that would be a wonderful
joke, but I’m afraid it’s more likely that this author is just either unaware
of the problem with the analogy, or else s/he’s trying to twist and exaggerate
their argument in a dishonest manner. And when writing about Nicholas Cage
movies, the most important issue in the world at present, it’s simply
reprehensible to exaggerate facts! Shame on you, sir or ma’am! You discredit us
all with your vile slander of Nicolas Cage’s art! (Just kidding!)
And continuing on, this author complains that Quentin
Tarantino’s WWII film Inglourious Basterds
is inaccurate because it shows a movie theater owner killing Hitler and the
Nazi high command in an explosion at her movie house during the premiere of
some propaganda film lauding the heroic exploits of some Nazi soldier who has
bad manners. (Actually, this is an exaggeration on my part here, as this part of the article was missing! So I'm crediting the author with revealing the big historical inaccuracy here, although they miss some rather big ones in other movies later on.) Oh, but the author is wrong here, for newly-released secret files
demonstrate that Hitler was indeed killed by a cute French movie theater owner,
and they hushed it all up so that Halliburton could make more money fighting
the war for longer! (Oh, and I guess they replaced Hitler with a double or
something, and that’s why the German war effort went from success to failure so
quickly.) But while that last bit was a dumb joke, the truth is that a French
actress saved almost all the important pre-war French (and other classic) films
by smuggling them past the Gestapo in a baby stroller under some blankets, and
had she been caught, she most certainly would have been executed, so while
French movie people may not have killed Hitler and ended the war early, they
saved many of the classic international films we know from the Janus
Collection, etc. And that’s true! So they literally saved the
world: the world of movies! And in this regard, they defeated the Nazis, who
were trying to destroy all these movies. (This stuff became the Cinémathèque
Française, protected by Henri Langlois: hero of modern culture and film
preservation!)
Oh, and then… Oh, then this author claims that: “Director
Roland Emmerich is usually a stickler for realism (see: sending a computer
virus via Macintosh to aliens in “Independence Day”).” Um, is that a joke or
something? (It must be! But given some of the claims elsewhere in the article, I can't be sure...) That’s one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen in a movie! I mean,
the idea of a computer virus is fun and all, but do the aliens really use a
Macintosh computer to run their space ships? And do their systems run on
English-language alphabet code? And do they really have the same kinds of
computer interfaces as us? (Etc., etc.) I’m sorry, but while the idea is good,
we’d have to know their computer code to be able to write a virus, and we’d
have to have all their stuff. Sure, we’ve got an old spaceship of theirs, but
with all the computer software updates we get here on Earth all the time, I’d
have to believe that the alien invaders in Independence Day would surely be using an upgraded computer system
(hardware and software!) by the
time they invade Earth in that movie (They’re probably up to OS 1000.3 by
then!), seeing as how that Area 51 space ship crashed like 50 years earlier! So nice concept, but compatibility issues
surely would have prevented its feasible application realistically speaking,
don’t you think? (I can’t even get a 10-year-old PhotoShop file to open in
PhotoShop anymore, so imagine what dealing with this alien computer virus
compatibility issue would have been like with only a 50-year-old version of
their software to base it on!) Plus, flying that little space ship up to the
mother ship and it being accepted as normal? Given the time difference, even
without considering our relative paucity of technological advancement here on
Earth compared with these aliens’ probable rate, that would be akin to someone
trying to land a WWII-era plane on a modern aircraft carrier (contemporary with
this movie), and expecting nobody to notice it was out of place: ridiculous!
But don’t think about that…
Okay, so this whole point about Roland Emmerich was only a
way for the author to lead into their piece bashing 10,000 B.C. for its inaccuracies about wooly mammoths building
pyramids and such, and that woolly mammoths weren’t found in deserts, etc.
Well, for one thing, maybe the woolly mammoths rebelled and tore down all the
pyramids they built, and that’s why we think they didn’t build them, even
though they really did (!). Plus, of course you don’t find mammoths in the
desert: they prefer lounging at the beach, and that’s where they went after
mutinee-ing from their construction jobs. (I’m getting tired of being serious.)
Plus, what about climate change? We keep hearing about all the massive changes
we’ll see in just 100 years, so how can this author know or claim deserts weren’t lakes
or fertile valleys, or even frozen tundra 10,000 years ago? Even whale bones
have been found in deserts, and what probably happened is that whales ate all
the mammoths in the desert once they quit their jobs building pyramids (the
unions protected them from the whales while they paid their dues, but after
that: forget it! Oh, and the whales got a taste for mammoths when the mammoths were hanging out on the beach before they got the job building the pyramids, and then the whales decided to go looking for them because they're so delicious! And that's why scientists are thawing out mammoths and eating mammoth steaks and stuff: because they found out from studying whales that mammoths are delicious. See?). But they were there, building pyramids, all the same, I
assure you! (After all: Independence Day is a Sci-Fi/Fantasy movie, so it’s fiction; but 10,000 B.C.: that really happened!) Oh, and then they go on to
say that there were no pyramids before 2,500 B.C. But that’s not true, because
the mammoths tore them all down, like I said. (And then they got eaten by
whales in the desert; it's just that they weren't deserts yet back then due to climate change and everything. It’s true!)
Next the author criticizes the movie 300, and in this criticism of stylistic elements, s/he
fails to mention the main problem with 300: the inaccuracy in fighting tactics. The Spartans fought in a phalanx,
which means that they came close together to form a sort of an armored wall,
and they stabbed from above their shields with long spears. This was basically the ancient version of the armored vehicle, like a tank, only made up of guys. Only when the
phalanx was broken did they engage in hand-to-hand individual combat. I’d say
that’s a bigger inaccuracy. But then again, we wouldn’t get to see all them
macho dudes flexing the whole time in slow-motion and stuff if they were accurately fighting Spartan-style. Oh, and in 300, the actors all have short hair, and the Spartans
had long, long hair; and it was noted in the history how the Persians ridiculed
them for combing it all out before the final day of fighting. That’s also a big
difference from history. And for me, mostly all of this stuff done for cinematic
license is fine, except that I really think they should have worn the right
clothes, had the right hair-length, and fought in the phalanx for the first two
days and even the third, up to where Leonidas was killed. (And that's just because it gives us a false impression of things for them to act totally differently in strategy while involved in the staging of an otherwise historically accurate {for the most part} event.) But here I agree with
everything else this author says. (Hey: there’s a first time for everything!)
In Apocalypto, the
author says that it’s inaccurate about the sacrifice stuff, and that the
conquistadors made for unlikely saviors, but s/he fails to mention that the
conquistadors landed during the reign of the Aztecs, and that most of the Maya
had died out or disappeared by the time period in this movie, so certainly
their glorious empire was a thing of the past by then in any case. (There was some civilization left, but I doubt it was anything like what we see in the movie whatsoever: that would be more like what the Aztecs were up to, I would think.) So that
seems like a rather more glaring inaccuracy to me. (Oh, and the Maya didn’t
sacrifice any people to Kukalkan? That’s not what Kukalkan told me! The
feathered serpent god told me that’s as clear a case of heresy as he’s ever
heard.)
For Memoirs of a Geisha, the author complains about some
stuff regarding the “mizuage” not necessitating “getting… intimate with a
client” (Mine did! But I guess I was tricked into it huh? Maybe the movie showed
this part so that new Geishas would be tricked into thinking they had to do it
so that the film crew could sign up? No? Maybe?), and the “Studio 54 drag show”
look of the dancing routine (she looks plenty feminine to me, actually), but
s/he fails to mention the rather glaringly unlikely blue eyes our Japanese
heroine sports. Oh, and the movie’s star, and our titular Geisha, Ziyi Zhang,
is Chinese, not Japanese; so that seems like kind of a big inaccuracy to me,
but perhaps not to our author. (A cursory glance at IMDB might have revealed
this, had s/he bothered to make one {although I knew this off-hand due to the
casting controversy}. And this reminds me about another lazy failure to check
IMDB in another article, this one surprisingly by the chief movie reviewer from
New York magzine: This guy, David
Edelstein, in his piece about Spaghetti Westerns from the June 4, 2012 issue
{p. 60}, credits Franco Nero for the movie The Great Silence; but a quick check of IMDB would have revealed that
Italian actor Franco Nero does not actually appear in that movie at
all {!}, but rather, that this wonderful
role of the hero “Silence”, one of the greatest characters in the entire
Spaghetti Western canon, was instead played by the French actor Jean-Louis
Trintignant, who gives a magnificent performance! {And it may have been his
only Spaghetti Western, too; but this, I don’t know for sure.} Perhaps this
critic, David Cassidy, or whatever his name is, merely misremembered this fact
from the last time he saw the film, but he robbed Trintignant of his
well-deserved accolade by not bothering to take the 20 seconds it would have
taken to look it up on IMDB and check it for accuracy, which is a crime akin to
knocking down someone’s mailbox, or perhaps even worse than that! {Maybe
Trintignant will come after him with guns a-blazing for this slight?} Oh, for
shame, Pauline {Kael}! {<Just kidding! David Cassidy, um, I mean, Edelstein,
did it. But he coined the term “torture porn”, so he deserves some slack for
that, I guess. Also, I probably make silly mistakes like this all the time on
my blog here, but this is a blog, and not a major publication, so it’s not like
it matters here as much.})
In The Last Samurai, our stalwart author makes trivial
complaints (<I'm kidding here.), but leaves out the most infuriating part of the whole movie (I'm serious here.): the
end of the big climactic battle sequence. So everybody gets killed except for Tom Cruise in the climatic battle? And with everyone getting
mowed down by machine guns and whatnot? Um, unlikely, to say the least. (Maybe
Tom has a “no deaths” clause to his contract? That would explain how he
survives all those very-nearly-lethal scrapes in those Mission Impossible
movies!)
Then our author criticizes the Mel Gibson movie The Patriot
just because it takes a few little historical liberties. (Traitor! You’re not
supposed to point that out!) Plus, America may have lost that battle in real
life, but if we’d had Mel Gibson’s angry ranting at the Battle of Guilford
Court, surely America would have been victorious! (He’d scare anyone away
nowadays!)
The author’s pretty good on the Gladiator commentary, from what I’m aware of, except that s/he
leaves out the quite interesting fact that the real-life Commodus apparently
enjoyed competing and fighting in the arena himself (particularly interesting
when considering the plot of this movie and the selection of this emperor for
use in this story, and also especially considering that the movie version of Commodus is quite craven, and dies in his first fight in the Colloseum, whereas the real-life Commodus always survived his fights in the arena, and also killed many wild animals all by himself, including many lions): an activity viewed as the lowest-of-the-low in Roman
society back then. But he was the emperor, so… (Oh, but isn’t it funny that he
was killed in his bathtub? He probably smelled so bad, I’d think they would
have actively guaranteed him absolute safety while bathing, just to encourage
it! In fact, maybe he wasn’t killed in the bathtub so much as his killers
dumped his dead body into one to try to clean it off from smelling so bad, or
else he was killed by accident while resisting taking a bath, and his lifeless
body merely fell in the tub afterwards. {Oops! Splash!})
And finally, we come to Braveheart. (What does this author have against Mel Gibson?
Might he have said something to offend her/him? I find that hard to believe!
{Hee hee.}) The author here complains that in the movie, William Wallace
seduces Kind Edward II’s wife, Isabella of France, and the conceived child
becomes Edward III, while in actuality, Isabella was only 3 years-old at the
time. Well, this is merely a misunderstanding of facts by the filmmakers,
perhaps. William Wallace charmed the 3-year-old Isabella with a stuffed animal
puppet and a squeaky toy, and the baby was just a doll Wallace had given her to
play with that the movie misinterprets as an actual, real-life baby. But this
one was a “Baby Alive” doll, so it seemed alive, I guess, especially to people
back then. Plus, it was wearing a crown, since it was a gift to a queen, so it was an honest mistake to think
it was the prince. Maybe if this author had read some history, s/he would have
known that! (This is well known to scholars.)
(Oh, and apparently this article was written by someone
named Jonathon Crow. But that didn’t load initially when I read this piece, and
I don’t feel like going back and fixing it all now, so sorry Jonathon. But I’m
attributing it here, and below is a link so everyone can read it {until Yahoo!
removes it! They keep doing that with their stuff.} And I am just funning this author, so no offense, I hope! He missed some stuff, but nobody can think of everything, so no surprise there. But I loved reading his article and writing this one! Can you tell?)
Oh, and hey: Where's 2010 in this list? In that movie, the United States and the Soviet Union work together to fly to Jupiter and sort out what happened with HAL from 2001 (Another movie that's historically inaccurate: We never went to Jupiter in 2001!). There wasn't even a Soviet Union anymore by 2010, so that's a pretty big and glaring historical error there, wouldn’t you say? I mean, seeing as how we’re apparently counting Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter in the list, we may as well include all movies that have specific historical elements or references, right? And for that matter, I'm not so sure our Founding Fathers did all that public singing and dancing like they show in the movie 1776, either!
Oh, and hey: Where's 2010 in this list? In that movie, the United States and the Soviet Union work together to fly to Jupiter and sort out what happened with HAL from 2001 (Another movie that's historically inaccurate: We never went to Jupiter in 2001!). There wasn't even a Soviet Union anymore by 2010, so that's a pretty big and glaring historical error there, wouldn’t you say? I mean, seeing as how we’re apparently counting Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter in the list, we may as well include all movies that have specific historical elements or references, right? And for that matter, I'm not so sure our Founding Fathers did all that public singing and dancing like they show in the movie 1776, either!
Here’s the historical tale of trivial pursuit:
