Main Menu

Last movie watched...

Started by SmallBlueThing, 04 February, 2011, 12:40:44 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

JamesC

Quote from: manwithnoname on 22 January, 2018, 11:21:53 AM
Quote from: TordelBack on 22 January, 2018, 11:13:11 AM
Quote from: JamesC on 22 January, 2018, 10:51:22 AM
Quote from: manwithnoname on 22 January, 2018, 10:44:57 AM
Would you have preferred a nicer war-time PM, but ended up losing the war?

^^^Achtung! - Ridiculous flame-bait question -  :lol:

The 'useful monster' defense has a lot of merit, but I think most of us who exist outside the UK's group-think hegemony would just be happier if Churchill was viewed with any kind of nuance at all, and that just maybe the experiences of non-English non-white people might be worth including somewhere in the non-stop hagiography .  It is possible to acknowledge, even revere, his critical contribution to defeating the embodiment of evil, and also view him as a prime example of blinkered imperialist thug. (Of course many narratives start from the position that the Empire was a universally good thing, selflessly bringing enlightenment and democracy to the fuzzy wuzzies and muck savages, so there is quite a hill to climb there).

The Darkest Hour is a film about Churchill during a specific time period in World War 2, so it was probably rather hard - and also fucking pointless - to shoe-horn any kind of "blinkered imperialist thug" messages, or hand-wringing "But hey, just wait a minute, man" narrative about the British Empire into the film.

And, happily, they didn't.

But your question isn't about the film - it's about Chruchill's status as PM and whether the other poster would have preferred to have had someone else in the role.

TordelBack

Quote from: Smith on 22 January, 2018, 11:39:35 AM
@Tordel Maybe its not much of a defence,but its a movie,not a documentary.

Of course, and it is a pretty entertaining flick, but as with Braveheart (although not necessarily Darkest Hour), it's likely to be the only contact a lot of people have with the historical events - and people - it purports to depict.  There's something pretty unsavory about having scenes like Dev sobbing behind the turf stack, or Kitty Kiernan waving a revolver around, or the IRA using car-bombs in 1920, when it's entirely fictional and distorts general understanding of the people and the time.  Omissions, simplifications, conflations, these I can understand - but were pure fabrications and outright lies things really necessary to tell an exciting story?


And very few things are worse than Braveheart.

TordelBack

#11837
Quote from: manwithnoname on 22 January, 2018, 11:21:53 AM
The Darkest Hour is a film about Churchill during a specific time period in World War 2, so it was probably rather hard - and also fucking pointless - to shoe-horn any kind of "blinkered imperialist thug" messages, or hand-wringing "But hey, just wait a minute, man" narrative about the British Empire into the film.

I'd take your point more seriously if he wasn't on the £5 note and regularly voted 'greatest Englishman ever', or if there was ever a film presenting him in any other light. If people want Churchill to be presented the embodiment of all that is best about England, that's fair enough, but you can expect some push-back.

I haven't seen the film, and so almost certainly shouldn't comment, but from reports it seems to be yet another chapter in the uncritical glorification of a questionable man.

manwithnoname

Quote from: TordelBack on 22 January, 2018, 12:03:12 PM
Quote from: manwithnoname on 22 January, 2018, 11:21:53 AM
The Darkest Hour is a film about Churchill during a specific time period in World War 2, so it was probably rather hard - and also fucking pointless - to shoe-horn any kind of "blinkered imperialist thug" messages, or hand-wringing "But hey, just wait a minute, man" narrative about the British Empire into the film.

I'd take your point more seriously if he wasn't on the £5 note and regularly voted 'greatest Englishman ever', or if there was ever a film presenting him in any other light. If people want Churchill to be presented the embodiment of all that is best about England, that's fair enough, but you can expect some push-back.

I haven't seen the film, and so almost certainly shouldn't comment, but from reports it seems to be yet another chapter in the uncritical glorification of a questionable man.

I'm not sure there would be a massive audience for a "Churchill: THE MONSTER WITHIN" type of film.

Perhaps a documentary would have less of a problem with the total lack of commercial potential, or maybe a self-published book?

Maybe even a Twitter campaign to get him removed from any UK currency and replaced with, I dunno, someone really nice and peaceful.

The Legendary Shark

I don't fancy the Churchill films for the reasons already stated. I think the only way to watch them is as mythology or fantasy, the way I decided to view Dunkirk. The danger of these films is that they promote state propaganda as actual history and reinforce the idea of fealty to leaders no matter what. One can't have world wars without states.

I know most people think I'm full of stomm on this issue and to a certain extent I know I am. I was raised suckling at the tit of British and American propaganda, my formative years blighted by the portrayal of savage and bloodthirsty Red Indians threatening fine, upstanding cowboys. It was horrible to realise that one of my favourite films growing up, Zulu, was about an indigenous people giving their all to repel a technologically advanced and quite ruthless invader. How can one cheer the bravery of a small contingent of outnumbered, surrounded and isolated Redcoats after realising they were the ones in the wrong? But my indoctrination into the British Myth runs deep and this film is still a guilty pleasure for me. If nothing else, I can watch it and think, "thank God I don't buy into this imperialistic state bullshit any more" and look on all the combatants, on both sides, as disposable pawns pressed into the service of bloodthirsty leaders.

[move]~~~^~~~~~~~[/move]




Professor Bear

Damn, if only I'd stated that Churchill had won the war.  In the first sentence of my review, perhaps?  That would have been a good place for it.

Quote from: TordelBack on 22 January, 2018, 11:13:11 AMIt is possible to acknowledge, even revere, his critical contribution to defeating the embodiment of evil

Yes, but "what about", TB?

Darkest Hour's problem isn't that it refuses to acknowledge Churchill's racist imperialism specifically, it is that it is almost entirely uncritical and thus rings false, descending into parody.  It affords time to treat his enemies critically - even the King gets several scenes to be portrayed as an indecisive coward - yet the film's subject escapes such scrutiny, his only foibles being to illustrate that he is misunderstood by anyone who isn't a rich white conservative, and those rich white conservatives that plot against him eventually come to be browbeaten to his way of thinking rather than won around with reason or (possibly more relevantly in such a glamorous and romantic story) patriotism.  It isn't that this is a problem with the depiction of Churchill (although it is), it's that this is an objective narrative failing of the film, and it's a shame, because it does actually do something different in at least being critical of the British upper classes during wartime, something we see precious little of in any media - the narrative tending to default to "we were all in it together", which is a touching notion that is sadly very, very far from the truth.

Theblazeuk

#11841
Who said it!? Hitler or Churchill????

Quote"They needed to recognise the superiority of race."

QuoteI propose that 100,000 degenerate _____ should be forcibly sterilized and others put in labour camps to halt the decline of the _____ race.

QuoteThe unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the feeble-minded and insane classes, coupled as it is with steady restriction among all the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks constitutes a national and race danger which is impossible to exaggerate. I feel that the source from which the stream of madness is fed should be cut off and sealed before another year has passed

QuoteI am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes.


Take a guess! If needed you can check out those 'self-published books' and 'documentaries'!

Feel like I'm in the wrong thread here but it's a fair discussion of the complete white-washing of Winston Churchill. Let's see the story of the plucky pashtun resistance fighter against the brutal collective punishment of a foreign force, eh?

GrudgeJohnDeed

I've not seen Oldman's Churchill film yet, but does a film about Churchill during the war have to be completely objective like a documentary and show every trait, every deed and misdeed? He is a hero even if he's a racist one by today's standards, I don't mind them focusing on some of the good things for a few hours.

Theblazeuk

I don't mind it either. But let's not pretend the bad things are ever focused on. As you can see here, even mentioning them will lead to the spontaneous appearance of a straw man, who claims that a less racist or murderous man would never have been capable of winning the war.

The obsession with The Great Men of History is fueled by the myopic, rose-tinted way they are portrayed.

Jim_Campbell

Quote from: GrudgeJohnDeed on 22 January, 2018, 01:43:57 PM
He is a hero even if he's a racist one by today's standards, I don't mind them focusing on some of the good things for a few hours.

I'd like to think that someone whose fingerprints are all over the Bengal famine would be reprehensible by any day's standards.

As I've already said on a parallel discussion on FB: Nice people don't win wars, I think. It's still startling to me that the British electorate was sufficiently sophisticated to recognise that although Churchill may have been exactly the right man to lead the country during the war, they sent him on his way the moment it came to choosing a government to tackle the aftermath.
Stupidly Busy Letterer: Samples. | Blog
Less-Awesome-Artist: Scribbles.

TordelBack

#11845
Quote from: GrudgeJohnDeed on 22 January, 2018, 01:43:57 PM
... does a film about Churchill during the war have to be completely objective like a documentary and show every trait, every deed and misdeed?

I dunno man, if there was a film about Hitler that only showed his role in energising political support for the wehrmacht through rousing speeches, and his role in the strategic brilliance of the almost-bloodless rebalancing of territorial losses through anschluss and blitzkrieg, and occasionally playing fetch with his dog, one might demand some balance.  Yes, yes, I agree, no justification for comparing Churchill to Hitler (unless you were watching your children starve in Bengal in 1943, or dying pointlessly on a Turkish beach in 1915, when it was probably much of a muchness).

Of course Churchill is a hero to many, and films have to pick their tone, their version of the story and push on with getting bum on seats.  Go, enjoy - as I used to enjoy his boyhood adventures in "The Happy Warrior" in Eagle, and recently his alternative-history role as a resistance leader in C J Sansom's Dominion

But it would be naive to expect everyone else to shut up about it.

GrudgeJohnDeed

Quote from: Jim_Campbell on 22 January, 2018, 02:03:20 PM
I'd like to think that someone whose fingerprints are all over the Bengal famine would be reprehensible by any day's standards.

Thats a tough one. As I understand it because of world war 2 Churchill prioritised feeding the armed forces at a time when there wasnt enough food to go round, which contributed to the famine. It may have been the wrong thing to do with hindsight, I'm not sure what impact that food had on the war effort. It doesnt make him a monster to me though.

It wouldnt be mentioned in a film set in 1940 though, of course.

Big_Dave

downfall didnt have context/backstory/nuance
just told story of those few days

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7PmzdINGZk

Professor Bear

#11848
Quote from: GrudgeJohnDeed on 22 January, 2018, 02:30:17 PM
Quote from: Jim_Campbell on 22 January, 2018, 02:03:20 PM
I'd like to think that someone whose fingerprints are all over the Bengal famine would be reprehensible by any day's standards.

Thats a tough one. As I understand it because of world war 2 Churchill prioritised feeding the armed forces at a time when there wasnt enough food to go round, which contributed to the famine. It may have been the wrong thing to do with hindsight, I'm not sure what impact that food had on the war effort. It doesnt make him a monster to me though.

Food was at subsistence levels in Bengal even before the war, but Churchill took it regardless and sent it to the Middle East where it wasn't actually required.  You can't even argue that he couldn't have seen this leading to mass starvation, because it's more or less what happened with the Irish famine, added to which he also directly prevented American and Canadian aid from being delivered to India once famine was known to be affecting the region.

Professor Bear

I will risk derailing the Churchill thread with film talk to say that I think Transformers: The Last Knight is a transcendentally bad film to the point that film school papers will be written about it in years to come.
It has some really great elements, though, particularly Anthony Hopkins getting to pay his bills by doing panto (he has a robot butler called Cogman), and the Cybertron/Earth scenes at the end looking dang Lovecraftian, eventually devolving into a robot dragon fighting alien robots on flying islands as the US military mobilise in force to shoot a million bullets at something offscreen and you realise holy fuck they made a movie of an Iron Maiden album, but it is 2 and a half hours long and really feels like it thanks to the episodic structure that I realised was so that the film could be watched in chunks on DVRs, or possibly to make it easier to splice in scenes to make the film friendlier for certain foreign markets.  It also has the effect of reminding me a lot of how utterly batshit insane a lot of the later Generation 1 Transformers cartoon episodes were, thanks to the way it just nonchalantly segues from King Arthur and Merlin using a dragon Transformer to form the Round Table, to Stonehenge being a USB port to link Earth and Cybertron together, to Bumblebee fighting the Nazis in WW2, to the Royal Submarine Museum being a Transformer - this is exactly the kind of nonsense you would expect to see in a 1980s cartoon show about toys that was being written by people who really knew they were slumming it but would never in a million years break the fiction by not doing the whole thing with a straight face.
Also funny is the little girl in it, whose character was - I suspect - given the actor's IRL name because Michael Bay couldn't remember the name of two female characters at once, and fair play, once you have that nugget in your head, good luck not noticing that Marky Mark's character states his name a lot in this film at the start of scenes, or other characters introduce him to other characters, almost like this was deliberately in there for someone's benefit.  This is the second TF film in a row where there's a jailbait kid knocking about telling people her age onscreen for some reason, and I'm pretty sure someone told Michael Bay that he had to put in a young girl into his movie because all the big sci-fi franchises were cashing in on the previously-untapped young female market, but unfortunately no-one stopped to consider who they were talking to and how he only knows one way to film female characters: bouncing towards the screen in slow motion, and this is like the second shot of the character, so if you're a dad with a young daughter, good luck not having nightmares at the world you've created for her thanks to your financial support of trash like this.
I have no idea why anyone thinks Optimus Prime is a good character apart from having a great voice, either, as he is as completely shite in this as he was in all the other films, as well as only in it near the end to take focus off other characters - though to be fair, none of the other characters get any development anyway.
I'll stop now.  Despite my high expectations, this film was terrible.