If you list off the years in which the events of Elizabeth really happened, it looks something like this (with parentheses for the fuzzy dates):
1555
1554
1555
1558
1559
(1568)
1559
1579
(early 1560s)
(early 1580s)
1582
1570
1581
1560
1571
1586
1569
1572
. . . not quite what you’d call chronological, ne?
With Elizabeth: The Golden Age opening today, I have decided that now is a good time to post about Shekhar Kapur’s first installment, the 1998 film Elizabeth. Researching Midnight Never Come gave me an interesting perspective on it; I can now recognize what is and is not historically accurate in it. (Short form is: much of what happens is true, but not in that order and at that time.)
So for the curious, I offer up this glossing of the film’s historical accuracy, with footnotes and educational precepts for the wise.
(I shouldn’t have to say it, but I will: here be spoilers aplenty. Don’t read on if you don’t want to see them.)
First, a note on the visuals. Kapur’s commentary track on the DVD is very interesting, and chock-full of information on such things. He recognizes that the Elizabethans did not in fact live in bare stone rooms (they preferred wood well-padded with tapestries and rush matting), and also that fashion did not follow precisely that trajectory. Those elements are as they are for thematic reasons.
Now, going more or less sequentially through the film:
Cut for stupidly long length; don’t say I didn’t warn you about that, either
I would have posted this earlier, but LJ and the lack of power and so on. Y’know.
If you were one of the people who hated the trailer for The Dark Is Rising, I invite you to clean your palate as I did, by re-reading the book. (It’s this month’s recommendation.)
If you, like me, are excited by the prospect of the upcoming Beowulf movie — if Neil Gaiman’s description of it as “blood and mead and madness” sounds about right to you — then you might want to check out the clips from the score that are available online. (YouTube clips, alas — not audio files. Oh well.)
Three notes into the first clip, I thought, “this sounds old-style.” And it lived up to that expectation. I don’t mean it as an insult; I mean that I immediately thought of Lawrence of Arabia and similar kinds of movies. Mind you, I love a lot of more modern scores, but this one has a grandiosity that’s really appealing. If the clips are representative of the whole thing, I will certainly be buying this one.
And in the meantime, I can look forward to the movie.
(Non-gratuitous icon post, btw. I’ve been meaning to get me a horn icon for a while.)
The ending of a story is inextricably tied up with the rest of it. It flows from what precedes it, but it also shapes and reshapes everything that precedes it. The ending of a story can tell us what the story means — it can give meaning to all that precedes it.
If you’re already familiar with The Sixth Sense and Casablanca — or if you don’t mind having their endings spoiled for you — you might want to check out Slacktivist’s post on endings. Normally I read his journal for his ongoing dissection of the Left Behind books (as an evangelical Christian himself, he finds the books not just bad with respect to plot, character, pacing, and prose, but morally and theologically abhorrent). You can see a bit of that peeking through where he talks about the Book of Revelation as an ending, but mostly this post is about narrative, the job an ending is supposed to do, and what happens if you replace it with another ending.
Good thoughts, says I. And it reminds me of one of the challenges inherent in playing RPGs with an eye toward the aesthetics of plot and character. Unless you script everything that happens and leave nothing to chance — and sometimes even if you do — you will occasionally find yourself in a position where some event doesn’t fit, where the story takes a turn that you would not have put in, or would have revised back out again, if this were a story you’re writing. But RPGs don’t allow for revision; every gaming group I know tries to avoid redlining unless there is absolutely no other choice. So sometimes what you end up with is a fascinating exercise in interpretation: how can you view and/or explain those events in such a fashion as to arrive at a meaningful ending? How can you use an ending to resolve conflicts or disappointments lingering from before?
Endings matter a lot to me. I’ve said before, I don’t mind seeing/making characters suffer and fail and lose what matters to them — in fact, I often enjoy it; yes, writers are sadistic — so long as the suffering and failure and loss mean something. They have to contribute to a larger picture, whether that picture belongs to the character in question, or other people on whose behalf they have gone through hell. But random, meaningless suffering, or suffering whose purpose is to show you there is no meaning . . . no. I’ll do gymanstics of perspective to avoid that, to arrive at an ending that gives a different shape to what has gone before.
How about you all? What are your thoughts on endings? If you’re a writer, do you know them when you set out (which probably makes arriving at meaningfulness easier), or do you have to create them as you go along? If you’re a gamer, how do you feel about retiring/killing off characters, or ending games? How about the alternate endings Slacktivist talks about, where a different resolution gets tacked on?
I read what looked like pretty official confirmation the other day, that they’ve started filming another Indiana Jones movie.
On the one hand: yay! More Indiana Jones is generally a good thing. (I say “generally” because of Temple of Doom.) They’ve been talking about doing this for literally over a decade, and it’s kind of impressive to see it finally become reality.
On the other hand: they’ve made changes.
I had heard a rumour some time ago that they were going to deal with Harrison Ford being older by moving the series forward a decade or two. According to what I read, this is true; the movie will take place in the 1950s. And I’m not sure what I think of that.
Maybe my knowledge of pulp is limited, but to my mind, the 1950s is not the classic pulp adventure era. Also, no more Nazis; will it be communists instead? How will that change the flavor of the movie? (Especially since these days we tend to look on communists with pity rather than fear.) And then a more nit-picky detail, but one that will bug me: while archaeology in the 1930s was not like it is in the movies, archaeology in the 1950s is even less like that. I mean, Christ, by then you’ve got Binford on the horizon. The “grab the gold statue and run” era is more nineteenth century than twentieth, anyway, but by the 50’s you’re about to hit the era of “archaeology is a science, dammit,” complete with charts and graphs and equations to prove it.
In other words, there are issues of logic and colonialism and politics and so on to consider that I can generally let go of in the pulp genre — but moving the setting to the 1950’s may make that harder for me to do.
It may be great. I’d be thrilled if it is. But I am a little leery. Anybody have more information on the production?
A recent discussion with vschanoes over on ellen_kushner‘s journal resulted in me watching Aliens again tonight. Aside from all the other things the movie does really really well (seriously, it isn’t just a sci-fi action/horror movie, it’s a well-constructed sci-fi action/horror movie), I was reminded of how well it handles Ripley as a strong character.
Hell if I can remember where I saw this, but somebody recently was talking about the way a lot of movies seem to mistake “strong woman” for “woman who kills things.” The two aren’t mutually exclusive, of course, but the latter does not define the former. Ripley isn’t strong because she uses a gun to kill aliens; she’s strong because she picks the gun up and learns how to use it. She’s strong because her reaction to problems is to find a way to handle them. Her nerve isn’t unshakeable — we see her scared, more than once — but fear doesn’t stop her, and ultimately, her psychological resilience is her true strength. The willingness to pick up that gun, or get in the loader, or go back down into the facility because Newt’s down there somewhere and might still be alive; to go with the colonial marines in the first place because the only way to get rid of her nightmares is to face them again. That resilience is why she survives, when a lot of more physically badass marines bite the dust.
(Yes, from another perspective she survives because she’s the main character, and those marines aren’t. I’m speaking from a position of in-story logic. And she’s the more interesting main character because of that logic.)
Which of course means you can have strong female characters in stories with no violence at all. They just attract our attention more when the situation is extreme. Picking oneself up after a bad divorce is one thing; facing down an alien queen is quite another.
Ripley and Sarah Connor are similarly cool characters, and I don’t think it’s an accident they date to around the same time. I just wish it seemed less like Hollywood forgot what it knew back then.
300 is as splendiferously outrageous as I could have hoped. Very very stylized, of course, but that resulted in some awesome images (of which the iconic “shoving the guys over the cliff” one is my favorite) — I’m very interested by the effect comic books are having on cinematography, most obviously in comic-book movies, but sometimes in other movies, too. And on a script level, the Spartans had more of a sense of humour than I expected; normally I think of them as kind of being like Viking-era Norse without the tendency to get drunk and laugh at doom.
Also, the fight choreography was beeyootiful. And I realized, during a discussion last night, that my appreciation of both dance and fighting is partly visual, but primarily kinesthetic. That is, while some of the beauty I respond to is based on the lines and framings creating by the body in relation to its environment, I think more of it comes from the sensation of movement itself, my ability to imagine the flow of dance moves/strikes/whatever. I tense up when I’m watching a fight, not because it makes me nervous or afraid, but because my muscles are making miniscule little twitches of response to the movements I see. There can be an aesthetic quality in the kinesthesia, just as there can be an aesthetic quality in visual presentation — or aural, or tactile, or whatever. And this is why fights are pretty to me: not because of the violence they inflict, but because of the beauty of their flow.
I suspect that people who have studied dance or martial arts are more likely to nod in agreement at this.
Anyway, 300 = awesome. Bloody and violent, and don’t ask what atrocities it commits upon the actual history of the battle, but that really isn’t the point; the point is to celebrate the national psychosis of Sparta, and a breeding program designed to produce the toughest hard-asses in all of Greece. And in that respect, it succeeds admirably.
On the heels of yesterday’s failure of a workout, I read this article about the training the actors and stunt crew of 300 went through for the film.
It’s pretty awesome.
And now I feel like a lazy slob.
Under no circumstances would I want to be in the gym 10-12 hours a day, five days a week for four months . . . but it does make me feel pretty pathetic about my own workouts. I would make a very bad Spartan. I do give a big thumbs-up, though, to a training regimen that, in both physical and social terms, seems pretty well-designed to produce modern-day Spartans. I’ve talked with any number of people about how the cast of Firefly used to hang out in the galley of the set when they weren’t filming, and it shows; they’re comfortable there, and have a camraderie with each other, that you only get by such means. Similar idea here. Blood, sweat, and tears, and at the end of it you’ve got Spartans.
Cool.
Grar.
So very nearly good. I can forgive it things like architectural features apparently drawn
from about 1500 years of Mayan history. I can, if I try very hard, dig up a Mayan city still
occupied around, y’know, that time. (Though they could have made my life far simpler
in that respect by filming in Nahuatl instead of Yucatec. Then I wouldn’t have spent five
minutes after the credits snarling and flailing about Aztecs.) I could maybe even let go of
the weirdness of a large Mayan city apparently being surrounded by hunter-gatherers at no more
than two days’ distance. (What, did they all survive off that one cornfield?) And hey, some
of the things I thought were inaccuracies turned out not to be!
But grar.
I debated long and hard whether or not I wanted to see this movie, given Mel Gibson’s
personal disagreeability to me, given the potential (and, I’m afraid, actual) colonialist
overtones of the story. In the end I went because I’m a Mesoamerican geek, and because I
wanted to tell Hollywood there’s at least one more person in the world who will happily watch
movies in obscure Central American languages with actors nobody’s ever heard of. And I don’t
regret going, and I really almost like the movie. But it isn’t what you’d call the best
representation of Mayan culture; the aforementioned hunter-gatherers make it look more
primitive than it needed to, and it doesn’t give the context that human sacrifice
needs. (Okay, so my article is Nonfiction Lite, but it sums up much of what I would
otherwise have to repeat here.) Few people watching that movie will know or care about the
cosmological framework in which sacrifice generally fit, nor the ways in which the epidemics
that appear to have preceded the physical arrival of Europeans on the mainland sent
people into a frenzy that was to normal behavior as the apocalyptic cults and flagellant
societies of plague-era Europe were to normal Christianity before everybody started dying.
Few people will think to make that comparison to our own history, and therefore to understand
how Europeans wouldn’t come off so well were we to make this kind of movie about them during
the Black Death. Instead, we get Noble Savages (the hunter-gatherers, whom I actually quite
liked aside from their anachronistic subsistence strategy) fleeing the pointless sadism of the
Evil City Folk. Things lack context, and sometimes sport inaccuracies while doing so. It isn’t a great combination.
And yet. And yet. The cenote outside the village, the jade in the nobles’ teeth, the
atlatl. The murals with elements taken from a site my sophomore
tutorial leader excavated. The actor whose profile is about the closest you can get to
Mayan without practicing cranial modification on an infant and then waiting twenty years for
him to grow up. There were so many details that were good, and Gibson filmed the movie in
freakin’ Yucatec. It came so close to being a film that would make me melt in geeky glee.
I just wish I didn’t have to feel so ambivalent about it.
Tonight, the boy and I watched the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society’s movie of The Call of Cthulhu. For those not aware, it’s filmed in black and white, 1920s silent-film style, which lends it a certain campy panache.
Two things fascinated me while watching it. The first was the care and attention to detail the film-makers lavished on their work. It’s not on the scale of the Lord of the Rings movies, but then again, few things are. But knowing some of the challenges of amateur cinema, I was all the more impressed by their success at creating a 1920s setting (let alone the Louisiana swamp scene or, you know, R’lyeh). They did a good job at, not just costuming people, but getting props and sets and the like to look sufficiently period that I didn’t get jarred out of the story by anachronistic elements.
And it startled me, how well I felt the silent-film style worked for this. One of the special features (a hilarious making-of piece) detailed the corners it allowed them to cut; costume pieces didn’t have to match in color, for example, and the visual schtick means that when they represent with the ocean with some glitter-covered sheets being waved up and down, it looks appropriate. Beyond that, though, I think it might be the perfect way to film Lovecraft — as odd as that may sound. Not only is it the style of the period in which he was writing, but in a sideways manner, the very cheesiness of it keeps the horror elements from feeling as cheesy as they might have. Example: we never have to hear people swallowing their tongues trying to pronounce the unpronounceable. Example: when a character looks upon Cthulhu and dies of fright, his mind shattered, we don’t actually hear his scream (which could not possibly be as grotesque as it should be). Much like Lovecraft dodged descriptions of certain things by instead describing people’s reactions to them (thus leaving the things themselves up to our imaginations, which can make them scarier than words ever could), the silent style leaves more unsaid. No, Cthulhu isn’t as mind-shatteringly horrifying as he ought to be, and if you stop and look at him he’s a slightly jerky stop-motion figure, but I almost think it would work less effectively if he were some slick CGI creation. It’s easier for you to look at that figure as a signifier for the concept, and to fill in the requisite gaps.
It’s a short film (47 minutes), and certainly not perfect, but we enjoyed it quite a bit, and the making-of feature was fabulous. And you can watch it with the intertitles translated into twenty-four languages, including Euskara (better known as Basque)!
I generally go to see comic-book movies with friends who read many comic books, so as someone who has read very few at all (and essentially no superhero ones), I often find myself with a different perspective than those sitting next to me when the credits roll.
I couldn’t tell, from the snatches I overheard, whether the consensus among said friends was that they liked it or disliked it. Personally, I liked it.
Having said that, its biggest flaw was its density. That clip you’ve seen in the trailers, of Juggernaut smashing through one wall after another at high speed, is a good metaphor for the script. Virtually every quibble I had (with one very spoiler-y exception; ask me about it in person) grew directly out of the speed with which the story slammed through its component parts. Some of that, I think, can be attributed to the shift in personnel between the second and third movies, and the concomitant shift in narrative focus. Had they continued on with the elements they’d set up in the first two films, I think they would have been fine;
conversely, had they been setting up the elements of this third film during the first two, again, I think they would have been fine. As it was, much of the material in the third movie was starting from a dead stop. Is it any wonder the acceleration required to get to the end was so extreme?
I really think I want there to be an extended edition on DVD. My opinion is that this was a good movie, but it could be better than good with the right insertions. More stuff with this character, more context for that decision, and some actual denoument — it would be interesting to see.
