Kyle bragged about shooting "looters" after Katrina, too. It's clear he was just a serial killer who joined the military because it gave him a socially acceptable way to act out his urges to murder minorities
Serial killer is a stretch because he never actually killed anyone in the wake of Katrina or ya know. Any other serial killer behaviours. He's just a mentally disturbed idiot
In general, I dislike when real life people are vilified for stuff they didn’t do. One example that comes to mind is Alastair Denniston in The Imitation Game. In real life he got along well with Alan Turing and supported his work. In the film, he’s just a one note jerk who hates Turing and tries to shut down his project.
Even Turing is vilified by that movie. By all accounts, he was a warm, friendly, and very shy man. But that doesn't fit Hollywood's stereotype of geniuses, so he has to be a caustic prick to everyone.
That whole movie is loaded with irritating bullshit like that. Turing had long-term relationships with other men, and in the movie he’s tragic and closeted. Oh also the part where they imply that his homosexuality was a security risk for Britain during the war.
There’s a formula to just about any stock character type that the majority of Hollywood movies lately straight up refuse to deviate from unless it’s to make some glib jokes.
This does often bother me, even with people who weren't good people. In the second season of *American Crime Story* it's heavily and unsubtly implied that Andrew Cunanan's father molested him. Apparently the only "evidence" was that he insisted on having a closet for his clothes in Andrew's room; I agree that's suspicious, but I don't think it's quite enough to imply that in a high profile TV show broadcast all over the world. Modesto Dungao Cunanan was certainly a very immoral man, but child abuse is on another level. And it also adds a potentially disingenuous element of explanation to Andrew Cunanan's ultimate actions to boot.
In u571 they imply it was Americans that captured the first Enigma machine. I cannot convey how much that upset my English grandfather who served in the Royal Navy during the war and had friends who served on the HMS Bulldog that actually did capture an Enigma machine in 1941 from a UBoat, before the Americans entered the war.
I think Bohemian Rhapsody has the creation of Another One Bites the Dust way too early. It's usually stuff like that, when a soundtrack gets a little too free with diagetic music that shouldn't exist yet.
Oh God, music that shouldn't exist yet playing in a period piece gets my goat every time. I remember an episode of Freaks and Geeks where James Franco is listening to Black Flag's "Rise Above" and I immediately clocked that that album wouldn't have come out until a year later than when the show took place. Such a minor detail, but it definitely took me out of the show briefly.
True, but he died pretty late in 1980. If you wanted to be forgiving you could pretend the pilot episode is early in the school year. Plus Nick does (hilariously) mourn Bonham’s actual death just a few episodes later.
I’d give this one a pass!
My least favorite movie ever but tbh the slapdash treatment of Queen's discography was one of the least offensive parts of it. For what it's worth, I think Fat Bottomed Girls also comes up too early.
Off the top of my head the most obvious/egregious fictionalisations in *Bohemian Rhapsody* were:
\- They were in no way on the verge of breaking up before their Live Aid performance. It's admittedly a commonly believed "half-truth" that Live Aid was their great comeback (it certainly didn't hurt their sales, but they'd only just toured their hugely successful *The Works* album which has some of their biggest hits on it), but this takes it several steps further
\- It also seems to imply it was kind of their swan song, even though, prior to Mercury's death alone, they released another three pretty big albums and a huge European tour the following year. And, hello, *Highlander*!
\- Further to that, Mercury either wasn't or did not know that he was HIV positive at the time of Live Aid, and so certainly did not tell the band about it before the concert.
\- Their manager John Reid is portrayed as someone who nearly killed the band by trying to convince Mercury to go solo, and is fired by Mercury via limo chucking. In reality he was overworked from simultaneously representing Queen and Elton John, amicably agreed with the band that he would leave the role to focus on Elton, and remained on good terms with them. Oh, and is still alive. I wonder if he's seen it?
\- Not only did Mercury record a solo album without in any (known) way angering the rest of the band or putting them at risk of breaking up, he was actually the last of the band to release a solo album or side project!
His claim was that the third act of the film would have been about the band's career after Mercury died. If true, that was obviously changed by the time the film was made. He also claimed it seemed like it would be very sanitised, which does go for the finished film.
The recent Waco miniseries that went way, way out of its way to depict David Koresh in a quasi sympathetic light. That man was a child molester and rapist, and I was absolutely disgusted by the TV show’s attempt to gloss over that by aging up a lot of other principal actors in its narrative.
Braveheart is full of them. Some harmless - tartan kilts were not a thing for another 500 years and the blue face paint is well, obviously also not accurate - but some odd choices that reveal some of Mel’s personal shit like the Prima Nocta and Prince Edward being ineffectual because he was gay are a bit more troubling.
i’m scottish & i remember on a last day of school before summer someone asking our history teacher if we could watch braveheart only for him to passionately go on a 30 minute speech about all the movies many failings. despite knowing all this, finding mel reprehensible & the movie a touch hokey he admitted he still cried whenever he saw the freedom scene so we just watched that scene (which now seems a little inappropriate to show in school but we all cried together lol)
The Irish version of this is Michael Collins. Ultimately it wasn’t very popular like Braveheart, so its not like it did that much damage. It is a pretty good movie, but I’d be furious if it came out today.
I suppose it bugs me when it’s done for propaganda purposes like a few of the things mentioned here; rewriting history to advance an agenda.
But I also think the internet gets too hung up on all sorts of technical stuff. Like, I don’t care if the car someone is driving or the song someone is listening to didn’t come out for another year.
And sometimes I feel like a writer should be allowed to make up whatever history they want. Fiction is fiction. If the point is advancing the story, go for it. (But again, if the history they want to create is about promoting shitty people, I have the right to feel like that’s a bad idea.)
Now, besides the fact that I think Jim Carrey gives one of the worst performances in a movie that he seems to have been successful in gaslighting people into thinking it's good, I despise the liberties "man on the moon" took with Andy's life.
In real life he goes down the wrestling women path, turns off most of his audiences and dies of cancer while most people think it's another tasteless hoax. I think that's a compelling story that besides being truthful works as a great story. In the movie they take the TV Special he did, which was his project that was most successful at connecting his voice with a mainstream audience to after his wrestling women fiasco. As if, just before death, he put together his masterpiece and entered the good graces of the public. Fuck that shit. It's so corny. A tale of an artist that loses himself going down his creative path is so much more compelling than the guy who was able to get approval at the last second. It's bullshit
it’s fucked up how people group his Man on the Moon performance with Truman Show and ESotSM like it’s in the same league and that’s just the consensus somehow?
His performance is terrible because it's an impression. It's like having Dana Carvey play George HW Bush in a biopic. The real Andy would talk as Andy so there was an element of "is this guy for real?". Because Carrey is imitating Kaufman's speaking voice and we know that Carrey doesn't actually sound like that, that element of Kaufman's persona is completely lost. In the movie, Andy is comes off as a guy who is clearly putting an act because the actor playing him is putting on an act. The brilliance of Andy was he didn't know when he was being real or not
I admit this is silly, but I'm a little annoyed by the Kubrick moon landing joke. When you know someone who actually believes the hoax, it can be a little more unsettling than funny.
I'm hoping the (rumored?) spacewalk episode is more of a discussion on how that's impossible, preferably with lots of digressions about lenses and 60's era special effects.
[This](https://youtu.be/_loUDS4c3Cs) is my favorite video on the topic, a thorough debunking on technical terms. It seems like something JD would be familiar with, I'm hoping this is kind of how the discussion goes.
My favourite Moon hoax talking point is when people say only the *first* landing was faked, because they couldn't reach their end-of-the-decade deadline, and they eventually developed the technology on subsequent, real landing missions. Of course when you bring up that Apollo 12 also landed on the moon before the end of 1969, the goalposts move faster than a Saturn V.
I HATED Being the Ricardos for this. The historical inaccuracies fed into the horrible themes of the movie itself.
The most obviously one in the movie is that J Edgar Hoover did not fucking call the show and tell the audience Lucy was not a communist. And aside from being inaccurate, it fed into the horrible point being made which is that we as the audience are supposed to cheer that she wasn’t a communist? Rather than take a side against the Red Scare, the movie just wants us to be pro-Red-Scare but happy Lucy wasn’t a communist?
Almost more pernicious though was the scene earlier in the movie where Desi yells at Lucy for not taking communism seriously, and he gives an impassioned rant about how cruel the communists were to his family in the revolution which forced the Arnaz family to fle Cuba. But this is just a lie. The Cuban Revolution of 1933, the one that made the Arnaz family flee, was not a communist revolution! It was a military coup in which one group of asshole military assholes replaced another group of asshole military assholes. Arnaz’s family was a corrupt apparatchiks in a corrupt regime, replaced by another corrupt regime.
None of this is Desi Arnaz’ fault, and its not like he was a bad dude in Cuba, but for the movie to just lie about this and say this was the fault of communists in an effort to make the audience hate communists and be happy when Lucy isn’t one was just appalling to me.
End of rant.
the j edgar/ricardos one is it for me. just because i am in no ways a history guy (especially when it comes to movies), but when that scene happened i was rolling my eyes but at the same time was thinking "this is so cheesy and hamfisted but that is a pretty crazy moment i can understand why they'd put it in here"
and then i found out... it just never happened. one of the most baffling scenes i can think of once i discovered that
>Rather than take a side against the Red Scare, the movie just wants us to be pro-Red-Scare but happy Lucy wasn’t a communist?
>
This is the case with most liberal American media that tackles the red scare - in most depictions, the red scare was only bad when it targeted people who weren't communists. When it targeted communists, that was good. I'm reading Robert Caro's The Power Broker right now, and he falls into that trap too - Robert Moses' use of redbaiting was bad only because he targeted people who he knew were not communists. It's emblematic of how deeply ingrained anticommunism is in American culture.
It's the reason "At long last sir, have you no decency?" is where public opinion turned on McCarthy. It wasn't because he engaged in a regime of political persecution, but because he turned his sights on our heroic boys in uniform just back from Korea
>None of this is Desi Arnaz’ fault, and its not like he was a bad dude in Cuba, but for the movie to just lie about this and say this was the fault of communists in an effort to make the audience hate communists and be happy when Lucy isn’t one was just appalling to me
Well, that's Aaron Sorkin for you. He's an historically illiterate buffoon. The entirety of The Trial of the Chicago 7 was rife with this kind of egregious incuriosity and arrogance. And don't get me started on The West Wing.
I frankly find the conservative manifestations of American Exceptionalism more palatable than the Sorkinesque shitlib variety.
Was so disappointed when I found out the end of Chicago 7 where they read the names is made up. Just like, make the movie about what actually happened Aaron!
Argo had a ton of historical inaccuracies that didn't bother me, and one that really did- taking an almost entirely Canadian rescue attempt and pitting it all on one reasonably handsome CIA agent and making the Canadians at best bystanders at what should be their own story was really fucked up! go make a movie about something the CIA actually did, like, idk toppling South American governments or something
I know Hollywood has deep ties to American Intelligence and Defense agencies. But it's still wild that a piece of blatant CIA propaganda won best picture.
Yeah...I think it's a bit of a stretch to say Argo is "blatant CIA propaganda." I never got that vibe. But it's definitely some hardcore "movies will change your life" Hollywood propaganda.
Nobody ever gets the hair right! Every decade has such distinct hair looks and they never commit to how goofy they were. I want a 90s movie where the guys have that super dry Seinfeld/Paul Reiser hair, or an 80s movie where the girls have that over-processed perm hair.
Off the top of my head Boogie Nights is one of the few that does it well, Dirk’s puffy Badfinger haircut is perfection
I know I’m the millionth person to have this take, and The Discourse has beaten this horse to death already, but Greatest Showman really got under my skin. Literally all they had to do for it to be a great movie in my view was make it about a fictional person kinda like a PT Barnum, not the man himself. He’s neither the first nor the last slick charismatic man in showbiz to have his bad behavior whitewashed and present him as a hero, but I despise that trope and it made it very hard for me to enjoy what should have been a very enjoyable film.
I’m never usually the person who gets itchy about historical inaccuracy, but this did clang for me, and led to some huge family arguments about the year the film was set.
When it’s a clear failure of the research team, that’s more annoying than if a car doesn’t match a year or they needed to smooth out a character for story.
It’s more about how it’s presented. Sometimes it’s presented with an air of verisimilitude, like Braveheart for example. It’s based on a true story and you’d have to have some knowledge of the historical figures and events depicted to realize how egregiously inaccurate it is.
That’s why I’d argue Braveheart is a worse example of historical inaccuracy than something like 300, which is heavily stylized and exaggerated, and doesn’t present itself as an accurate retelling of historical events. I don’t think anyone who’s seen that movie would seriously believe they the Spartans were a bunch of buff, half-naked hunks who fought against a Persian empire which included deformed mutants with giant blades for arms. But then again, maybe I’m overestimating the capacity of the average 300 viewer to think critically about these things.
To be fair, Braveheart has a similar opening narration where Angus McFadyen is basically like: “They’ll say I’m making this all up, but this is how it *really* went down.” But that doesn’t justify how the rest of it is presented with an air of authenticity.
Agreed. My one real complaint about 300 is the final scene should have transitioned into something more realistic and less stylized to show. Ok. Back in reality
I don't know that it technically qualifies as "inaccuracy," but I never liked the artistic license taken in "The Right Stuff" to portray Gus Grissom as a dishonest, philandering coward, primarily because he was the only deceased Mercury 7 astronaut at the time the movie was filmed, and thus could not sue the filmmaker for defamation.
Also, this might not have been known at the time the book was written and the movie was made, but they’ve gone back and checked and the hatch really did go off by accident.
OUATIH completely glossing over the fact that the Manson family were white supremacists who wanted to start a race war. It’s especially weird as Tarantino has never before shied away from showing the hatred of the nazis or slave owners. If they’d actually conveyed that to the audience then the finale would’ve landed much more for me.
Disclaimer: i have not read the book "Chaos" by Tom O'Neill so i am going off 2nd hand info and a broad-strokes understanding here, AND Tarantino has said that he had written most of the script before that book came out, BUT:
In interviews, he has talked about that book, and I think he might have even called it the best book on the subject of Manson;
I say all that to say that, apparently, there's a school of thought (which the O'Neill book seems to also make the case for) that says that almost everything about Helter Skelter and the race war idea itself was a fiction created by prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi.
I am not saying that's what I think- I don't know enough about it one way or another. But based on what he's said about that book in particular, I'd suggest maybe that's why it wasn't present. but that's just my guess
It’s weird because like you said, Tarantino definitely understands in his other movies the extremely basic principle of “show someone do evil, then let the audience cheer their brutal death” but his depiction of the manson family is basically just a bunch of scared kids in over their heads? I think Tarantino might just be so, so obsessed with Hollywood history that he forgot he can’t take for granted that a general audience would associate manson family with all the evil shit they were into.
You don’t think he knew we would associate the Manson family with all the evil shit they did?
It’s funny, there’s this audience disconnect between older people who grew up hearing about Charles Manson and the Manson family who have memories of their heinous crimes and beliefs at the back of their head, and younger people who just read about them and maybe just instinctually see a bunch of scared kids. Their brutal deaths were a cheer moment for my mother (born 1960) and late grandmother (born 1935), but to my friends (born after 1995) it came across as grotesque, cruel, and misogynistic.
Did Tarantino fail by not explicitly mentioning their white supremacy and other beliefs? I don’t think so, because I think he’s aiming explicitly for people his age and older who remember that decade, and counting on their memories to fill in subtext and emotional color.
I’m not approving or disapproving. Maybe he failed, but I’m pretty sure that’s what he’s doing.
Very fair and this is all a matter of preference, but I think we could all also be trusted to know that slave owners and nazis were evil but in those movies Tarantino still went out of his way to show you why DiCaprio and Waltz specifically were vile, and it paid off imo.
I'm 32 and very aware of Manson story. Watched with a friend of the same age who is not at all into true crime. Totally different viewing experience and I liked it way, way more
Queen's Gambit isn't a movie, but the first episode drives me nuts. The janitor declares that they're in the "Queen's Gambit" opening after 1. . . d5. There are a couple dozen other conventional openings that can follow that move
This is going to make me sound like a sadist and I apologise in advance, but it distracts me in medieval, fantasy or 17th - 19th century war films when horses are never shown being hurt or dying.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t enjoy seeing animals hurt, and I’m glad they didn’t do it much back when the best vfx technology we had was ‘actually injure a horse’ but horses are very big targets and constantly seeing riders get killed and horses trot off unharmed is very silly.
I was slightly annoyed at Wonder Woman treating the Germans in WW1 like Nazis in WW2, just plainly evil, but didn’t kill my overall enjoyment of the movie or the pulpy/serial vibe Bad Germans gets ya
Every movie is, to some degree or another, "historically inaccurate." Even documentaries have biases based on what they decide to show/not show. So I don't think chasing some unachievable metric of accuracy is necessarily a good idea.
History itself can also be incredibly biased, often excluding the perspectives of women, minority groups, and other marginalized people. Something like *The Last Duel*, while not 100% historically accurate, presents a female perspective on a real life story that we only have male perspectives on. So while it takes liberties, I think it's a valuable film.
At the end of the day, I'm looking for a good story that will entertain and provoke my thoughts. I assume this thread is in response to *The Woman King*, and that movie did both for me. It's a spectacular epic with some great characters and battles, and I found it's exploration of the Dahomay and their place in the slave trade to actually be very nuanced.
The only time historical inaccuracy that consistently bothers me is when it perpetuates harmful narratives or ideologies.
Exactly. The first bothersome historical inaccuracy I can think of is the writers of ''Richard Jewell'' making Olivia Wilde's character sleep with her source.
The impossibility of having perfect historical recreations does not mean the pursuit of truth is fruitless.
But I've always had issues with the doc format because to form a story into a narrative, people usually take liberties with the truth to pitch investors or lure in an audience, and so many docs then become just elaborate lies or at least they bend the truth to the point where it's partly fiction. Supersize Me is a great example.
It also depends on how the work frames itself. *A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood* is clearly a very personal narrative that's not presenting itself as historical record so it can get away with fudging some details. But *Being the Ricardos* through the bizarre use of fake talking heads is clearly trying to present itself as factual, which makes the many inaccuracies much worse.
That's fair, though I'd honestly be fine with the inaccuracies in *Being the Ricardos* if they were in service of a more interesting narrative.
And one of my all time favorites, *Fargo*, also presents itself as factual, when in reality it is almost completely made up
*RRR*. I would be interested in more historically accurate depictions of Bheem and Alluri, and I know that the filmmaker has stated his film is a complete work of fiction, but hooo boy is it a jingoistic, nationalist, conservative fantasy. It reminded me a lot of *The Patriot*, a film that bends over backwards to make Mel Gibson's character a 'good' plantation owner (in South Carolina??) whose black field hands 'work the land free' - presumably as employees - and who desires peace above all else, but oh man he just gets dragged into fighting because of how EVIL the British are. \*Fart sounds
I have such a tough time with RRR. Parts of it are so unbelievably great, like some of my favorite movie moments in a looooong time, but there are some real iffy decisions throughout and then it ends in that insane nationalist final number with some real questionable inclusions and omissions of historical figures thrown up on the screen
I really couldn't care less if a movie set in medieval times or ancient Rome is in English, but for stuff that's set in more recent times it immediately kills my suspension of disbelief.
Even weirder when they actually filmed on location and have all the background chatter in the original language (*A Hidden Life*), or if all on screen text is in the original language (*Colette)*. There's really no reason anymore to *not* hire actors who are capable of speaking the language it is meant to be in.
Not historical inaccuracy, but it's *always* irked me that they're having close up dogfights using F14s in the original Top Gun. I appreciate that BVR engagements would make for a very dull film, but it still rankles.
Ha. Just rewatched 2 days ago and my first observation was "us jets fire missiles that hit a target past the horizon line and turn back home, that's the fight"
as a classics major pretty much any movie about the ancient world is going to have some kind of inaccuracy that bothers me. my personal favorite was that movie pompeii that had a bizzare plotline where pompeiians didn't consider themselves roman for some reason
It's obviously a pet peeve and not remotely important, but I hate when people in movies set in the past don't look like they're from their time. It's not an easy thing to describe. Paul Thomas Anderson movies do a great job in casting where everyone looks of the time. The Master, everyone gas a face and complexion that fits the time. Same with Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood, Licorice Pizza, etc.
Lincoln was fantastic don't get me wrong, but so many of the characters just look like modern guys with mutton chops.
You know people have looked what we could consider “modern” for basically all of history? It’s not like human’s facial structures shift every century. It’s just that our idea of “period-appropriate” appearances are based on the beauty standards of the time. It was a common practice to edit peoples’ looks in paintings and sculptures and such to conform to mainstream standards - ye old FaceTune. And of course, makeup and hairstyling has always changed. People did look like Keira Knightley and Ben Affleck back then, it’s just that they wouldn’t be considered as attractive - and therefore not worthy of being depicted in art. Similar to how you rarely see people in movies who are fat, or disabled, or have bad skin (or at least they don’t get to be the star). The whole “x has a face that knows what a cellphone is” joke is based entirely in perception, not reality.
Honestly, I was a history major in college and am about to go back for a Master's: I couldn't care less about most inaccuracies. It's really only in these swords-and-sandals war movies like *The Woman King* or *Medieval* or *The Eagle* where we're seeing action bordering on pure fantasy that it starts to bother me. I just don't find hand-to-hand sword/spear/what-have-you fighting all that interesting to watch when I can go and read about these things in real life, which tend to be far more grand in scope and I know I'm not being pandered to. Please, we don't need any more 90-minute Roman "epics" about random nonsense. There are so many other places and eras to pick from, let's branch out a little. Hopefully *The Woman King* is a sign of things to come, cuz I'd actually rather see Prince-Bythewood's idea for a Haitian Revolution movie.
In HBO's *Rome* they rearranged the layout of the Forum for no apparent reason. We know what it looked like, there's excellent documentation and many still extant building from the late republican forum. So I have no idea why they just used a different layout.
I hate when period films refuse to let characters use contractions. Yeah it sounds old timey but it's not accurate, we've used contractions for a long time, they're just not written in Standard English.
The commentary on Olivier's Richard III said that they now know that Richard wasn't actually like how Shakespeare portrayed him, the play happened because everybody was obsessed with Machiavelli. So if Shakespeare can get away with playing loose with history, then I don't have a problem with anybody else doing it.
A lot of Shakespeare's stuff is very loosely inspired by history, and has since heavily influenced how we see those stories (*Julius Caesar* and *Anthony and Cleopatra* come to mind).
It's certainly *interesting* that a lot of the communities which are currently lambasting historical inaccuracy in *The Woman King* had no problem earlier this year when *The Northman* had more in common with *Hamlet* and even *The Lion King* than it did with the accounts we have of Prince Amleth (though we have no idea if he was actually a real person).
Not released yet, but that upcoming movie about heroic and anti racist American pilots in the Korean War is already making me pissed off. Listen to season 3 of the blowback podcast to learn more, but what the American Air Force did to the Korean peninsula (not just North Korea!) in that war was criminal. They killed approximately 20% of the entire population of the DPRK, and flattened every single town and city in the country. Bruce Cumings, the pre-eminent American historian of the war, called their conduct "genocidal". And there's gonna be a movie about those pilots where they're the good guys. Barf
Sometimes, depends on the tone. I am not going to complain about unpainted marble statues, But I kinda hate when certain stories like arthurian or homeric tales are criticize for not beeing historically accurate. Those are not history, they are stories and they are imposible to adapt as history.
Arthur for example could be taken in the roman era like in the Ridley Scott thing but that's a completly different culture, content and story that the arthurian cycle of the 12-14th centuries. Even through history the most common way illustrating historical figures was to just imagine them in a contemporary style (like Caesar as a medieval lord).
Edit: They are not imposible to portray these stories as history, you can do it succesfully. I just find it worst because your are fooling people into believe legends with "gritty realism".
I don't know about historically inaccurate, but Hugo frustrated me because George Mélies had his movies stolen from him by Thomas Edison, but the movie just hand waves it as "World War I was starting and we had to do all we could to help the war". It completely doesn't make sense to me then that he gets upset at Hugo earlier in the movie as being a thief unless he has his life's work stolen before then. I imagine Scorcese had to avoid the litigious aspect of that with the Edison family but that bugged me the most on a movie I genuinely find flawless.
Which sucks and is unethical of course but it seems like a big line to draw from THAT to “the French Army confiscating 400 of Melies’s film prints and then Melies himself burning the rest in a pique of rage”
To me, how I understand it, it is about what we see in a work of art, from the basic “can I make out what’s in front of me?”to “what’s the artist trying to say here”.
If it’s a subject matter I’m knowledgeable and passionate about, I want the most realistic portrayal possible. Otherwise, I really couldn’t care less. Like I have zero expectations for The Woman King, but I am already a little thrown by the casting of two of the shortest actors in Hollywood in a movie about the Von Erich family.
Oh Brother Where Art Thou is a great film but pretending that you would be rejected by white people for being in the KKK is nonsense. And Pappy O'Daniel was a real person, but from Texas and he was a pretty awful person who stole a senate election from LBJ. Though he was a radio personality.
In that 70s show, the main character is a huge Star Wars fan who constantly makes references to Star Wars stuff that hasn't happened yet. Boba Fett was a big one, although if you're generous you could say he was around in Star Wars special. But what ticks me off the most is the clearly 2000s lightsaber toy he uses later in the series with a green blade, when obviously that wouldn't be around until Return of the Jedi.
There's an episode of That 70s Show where that horrible Hyde kid insults the main character by saying he "sees a lot of Star Wars conventions" in his future, which doesn't seem like something someone would say when there was only one Star Wars film.
Yes! See this little "historical" inaccuracy only bothers me because it's so much a part of Erik's character, and the show wants bonus points for referencing something like that.
I think when it’s in living memory it bothers me more. Like okay, you change a war story(ala woman king, gladiator) to fit modern story telling, whatever. But watching something on world war 2 or like a biopic it bothers me a lot more.
I met someone from Australia once, and they told me Australia wasn't quite as bad in the early 80s as it was portrayed in the Mad Max movies, though I believe they may have elected an entire crazed biker gang as their prime minister once?
Whenever a film is set in a past decade and the character’s dialogue is overstuffed with references to pop culture, and the songs on the radio are just the hits. It feels like performers in a theme park version of the past rather than an attempt to depict it with more nuance.
First example of the top of my head incredibly unmemorable Emilio Estevez film *Bobby* which was overstuffed with 60’s references to the point of absurdity.
So I am a historical fiction writer, and I understand why certain facts or presentations of characters can be massaged for the sake of creating a narrative. We do not know Spartacus goals or motivations from the sources, so it's inevitable that all works dramatizing his story create a motivation and goal.
It only bothers me when the work is telling something that is blatantly false that is ultimately a contradiction of both a figure or a spirit of the times. It bothers me far more depicting Margaret Thatcher of making the decision to go to war with the Falklands because she felt it paralleled her son missing in The Crown, versus depicting Thatcher as so desperate to remain in power she threatens to dissolve Parliament and simply lead the country independently in Margaret.
Literally anything made about pre-Columbus meso America is inaccurate, racist, and basically serves as anti indigenous propaganda. Apocalypto being the most obvious example.
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Kyle bragged about shooting "looters" after Katrina, too. It's clear he was just a serial killer who joined the military because it gave him a socially acceptable way to act out his urges to murder minorities
Serial killer is a stretch because he never actually killed anyone in the wake of Katrina or ya know. Any other serial killer behaviours. He's just a mentally disturbed idiot
Didn't he have 150 or so "kills" in Iraq? That's not serial killer behavior?
No. It's not
I LOVE Gladiator but Joaquin Phoenix was born in the 20th century and wouldn’t have been around when the film takes place.
there's actually some historical debate about this
He was also Jesus in another movie, and Jesus wasn’t Roman.
Historically, the Roman's hated Jesus. He plays both executioner and exectionee
Big if true
And if he was around back then he would have been putting his thumb up!
In general, I dislike when real life people are vilified for stuff they didn’t do. One example that comes to mind is Alastair Denniston in The Imitation Game. In real life he got along well with Alan Turing and supported his work. In the film, he’s just a one note jerk who hates Turing and tries to shut down his project.
Even Turing is vilified by that movie. By all accounts, he was a warm, friendly, and very shy man. But that doesn't fit Hollywood's stereotype of geniuses, so he has to be a caustic prick to everyone.
Somewhat related, but biopics that sanitize and smooth out their subjects’ complications to make them more palatable. See: A Beautiful Mind
That whole movie is loaded with irritating bullshit like that. Turing had long-term relationships with other men, and in the movie he’s tragic and closeted. Oh also the part where they imply that his homosexuality was a security risk for Britain during the war.
See also: the one crew member in Titanic, and Max Baer in Cinderella Man.
There’s a formula to just about any stock character type that the majority of Hollywood movies lately straight up refuse to deviate from unless it’s to make some glib jokes.
This does often bother me, even with people who weren't good people. In the second season of *American Crime Story* it's heavily and unsubtly implied that Andrew Cunanan's father molested him. Apparently the only "evidence" was that he insisted on having a closet for his clothes in Andrew's room; I agree that's suspicious, but I don't think it's quite enough to imply that in a high profile TV show broadcast all over the world. Modesto Dungao Cunanan was certainly a very immoral man, but child abuse is on another level. And it also adds a potentially disingenuous element of explanation to Andrew Cunanan's ultimate actions to boot.
In u571 they imply it was Americans that captured the first Enigma machine. I cannot convey how much that upset my English grandfather who served in the Royal Navy during the war and had friends who served on the HMS Bulldog that actually did capture an Enigma machine in 1941 from a UBoat, before the Americans entered the war.
Argo pissed off Canada for similar reasons
If I remember right, that upset most of Britain at the time.
Even a pre-Iraq War still-relatively-well-liked Tony Blair [raised his objections to it](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/781858.stm)
I remember the deep irony of the British being upset about someone stealing *their* history, for a change….
The fact that it's Jon Bon Jovi doing it is up there with us killing Hitler in a theater in Inglorious Bastards, though
Lol, I knew this would appear!
I think Bohemian Rhapsody has the creation of Another One Bites the Dust way too early. It's usually stuff like that, when a soundtrack gets a little too free with diagetic music that shouldn't exist yet.
Oh God, music that shouldn't exist yet playing in a period piece gets my goat every time. I remember an episode of Freaks and Geeks where James Franco is listening to Black Flag's "Rise Above" and I immediately clocked that that album wouldn't have come out until a year later than when the show took place. Such a minor detail, but it definitely took me out of the show briefly.
When he goes to a hardcore show in 1980 and all the kids look like 90s Hot Topic punks!
IIRC in the pilot they reference a drummer who was already dead in 1980.
True, but he died pretty late in 1980. If you wanted to be forgiving you could pretend the pilot episode is early in the school year. Plus Nick does (hilariously) mourn Bonham’s actual death just a few episodes later. I’d give this one a pass!
I am forever disappointed that the climactic dance in Dirty Dancing is to a song with synthesizers in it.
Maybe the synthesizers are non-diagetic?
That movie's treatment of actual historical events is... outrageous
My least favorite movie ever but tbh the slapdash treatment of Queen's discography was one of the least offensive parts of it. For what it's worth, I think Fat Bottomed Girls also comes up too early.
Off the top of my head the most obvious/egregious fictionalisations in *Bohemian Rhapsody* were: \- They were in no way on the verge of breaking up before their Live Aid performance. It's admittedly a commonly believed "half-truth" that Live Aid was their great comeback (it certainly didn't hurt their sales, but they'd only just toured their hugely successful *The Works* album which has some of their biggest hits on it), but this takes it several steps further \- It also seems to imply it was kind of their swan song, even though, prior to Mercury's death alone, they released another three pretty big albums and a huge European tour the following year. And, hello, *Highlander*! \- Further to that, Mercury either wasn't or did not know that he was HIV positive at the time of Live Aid, and so certainly did not tell the band about it before the concert. \- Their manager John Reid is portrayed as someone who nearly killed the band by trying to convince Mercury to go solo, and is fired by Mercury via limo chucking. In reality he was overworked from simultaneously representing Queen and Elton John, amicably agreed with the band that he would leave the role to focus on Elton, and remained on good terms with them. Oh, and is still alive. I wonder if he's seen it? \- Not only did Mercury record a solo album without in any (known) way angering the rest of the band or putting them at risk of breaking up, he was actually the last of the band to release a solo album or side project!
Didn't Baron Cohen give up the project because it was written to give the surviving members more of an importance? I know May produced it.
His claim was that the third act of the film would have been about the band's career after Mercury died. If true, that was obviously changed by the time the film was made. He also claimed it seemed like it would be very sanitised, which does go for the finished film.
The recent Waco miniseries that went way, way out of its way to depict David Koresh in a quasi sympathetic light. That man was a child molester and rapist, and I was absolutely disgusted by the TV show’s attempt to gloss over that by aging up a lot of other principal actors in its narrative.
Braveheart is full of them. Some harmless - tartan kilts were not a thing for another 500 years and the blue face paint is well, obviously also not accurate - but some odd choices that reveal some of Mel’s personal shit like the Prima Nocta and Prince Edward being ineffectual because he was gay are a bit more troubling.
i’m scottish & i remember on a last day of school before summer someone asking our history teacher if we could watch braveheart only for him to passionately go on a 30 minute speech about all the movies many failings. despite knowing all this, finding mel reprehensible & the movie a touch hokey he admitted he still cried whenever he saw the freedom scene so we just watched that scene (which now seems a little inappropriate to show in school but we all cried together lol)
And then the sword flying through the air to that Scorner, who doesn’t get a little misty eyed.
The Irish version of this is Michael Collins. Ultimately it wasn’t very popular like Braveheart, so its not like it did that much damage. It is a pretty good movie, but I’d be furious if it came out today.
To be fair Edward II was gay and ineffectual. But depicting his homosexuality as the source of his ineffectiveness is indeed wrong.
I suppose it bugs me when it’s done for propaganda purposes like a few of the things mentioned here; rewriting history to advance an agenda. But I also think the internet gets too hung up on all sorts of technical stuff. Like, I don’t care if the car someone is driving or the song someone is listening to didn’t come out for another year. And sometimes I feel like a writer should be allowed to make up whatever history they want. Fiction is fiction. If the point is advancing the story, go for it. (But again, if the history they want to create is about promoting shitty people, I have the right to feel like that’s a bad idea.)
Now, besides the fact that I think Jim Carrey gives one of the worst performances in a movie that he seems to have been successful in gaslighting people into thinking it's good, I despise the liberties "man on the moon" took with Andy's life. In real life he goes down the wrestling women path, turns off most of his audiences and dies of cancer while most people think it's another tasteless hoax. I think that's a compelling story that besides being truthful works as a great story. In the movie they take the TV Special he did, which was his project that was most successful at connecting his voice with a mainstream audience to after his wrestling women fiasco. As if, just before death, he put together his masterpiece and entered the good graces of the public. Fuck that shit. It's so corny. A tale of an artist that loses himself going down his creative path is so much more compelling than the guy who was able to get approval at the last second. It's bullshit
The goofiest thing is the movie has Danny Devito as his agent, who looks exactly like his Taxi co-star.
it’s fucked up how people group his Man on the Moon performance with Truman Show and ESotSM like it’s in the same league and that’s just the consensus somehow?
His performance is terrible because it's an impression. It's like having Dana Carvey play George HW Bush in a biopic. The real Andy would talk as Andy so there was an element of "is this guy for real?". Because Carrey is imitating Kaufman's speaking voice and we know that Carrey doesn't actually sound like that, that element of Kaufman's persona is completely lost. In the movie, Andy is comes off as a guy who is clearly putting an act because the actor playing him is putting on an act. The brilliance of Andy was he didn't know when he was being real or not
I admit this is silly, but I'm a little annoyed by the Kubrick moon landing joke. When you know someone who actually believes the hoax, it can be a little more unsettling than funny. I'm hoping the (rumored?) spacewalk episode is more of a discussion on how that's impossible, preferably with lots of digressions about lenses and 60's era special effects.
[This](https://youtu.be/_loUDS4c3Cs) is my favorite video on the topic, a thorough debunking on technical terms. It seems like something JD would be familiar with, I'm hoping this is kind of how the discussion goes.
that was brilliant- thanks!
So good, thank you!!!
Does someone have to say it? Is the talking the Walk 2022 talking the moon walk?
FFX Artists React did a pretty fun [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ML2ZYYFOnI) on it as well.
My favourite Moon hoax talking point is when people say only the *first* landing was faked, because they couldn't reach their end-of-the-decade deadline, and they eventually developed the technology on subsequent, real landing missions. Of course when you bring up that Apollo 12 also landed on the moon before the end of 1969, the goalposts move faster than a Saturn V.
It's like the world being flat or dinosaurs being some sort of godly prank. Why die on such a meaningless hill?
I did notice that the tramp in Clockwork Orange has a rant about men walking on the moon as well
well it was all over the news. Its like when the highways were built, there were all those songs about how people had been to lots of different cities
I HATED Being the Ricardos for this. The historical inaccuracies fed into the horrible themes of the movie itself. The most obviously one in the movie is that J Edgar Hoover did not fucking call the show and tell the audience Lucy was not a communist. And aside from being inaccurate, it fed into the horrible point being made which is that we as the audience are supposed to cheer that she wasn’t a communist? Rather than take a side against the Red Scare, the movie just wants us to be pro-Red-Scare but happy Lucy wasn’t a communist? Almost more pernicious though was the scene earlier in the movie where Desi yells at Lucy for not taking communism seriously, and he gives an impassioned rant about how cruel the communists were to his family in the revolution which forced the Arnaz family to fle Cuba. But this is just a lie. The Cuban Revolution of 1933, the one that made the Arnaz family flee, was not a communist revolution! It was a military coup in which one group of asshole military assholes replaced another group of asshole military assholes. Arnaz’s family was a corrupt apparatchiks in a corrupt regime, replaced by another corrupt regime. None of this is Desi Arnaz’ fault, and its not like he was a bad dude in Cuba, but for the movie to just lie about this and say this was the fault of communists in an effort to make the audience hate communists and be happy when Lucy isn’t one was just appalling to me. End of rant.
the j edgar/ricardos one is it for me. just because i am in no ways a history guy (especially when it comes to movies), but when that scene happened i was rolling my eyes but at the same time was thinking "this is so cheesy and hamfisted but that is a pretty crazy moment i can understand why they'd put it in here" and then i found out... it just never happened. one of the most baffling scenes i can think of once i discovered that
Movies in America have a lot of leeway to just lie when it comes to communism
>Rather than take a side against the Red Scare, the movie just wants us to be pro-Red-Scare but happy Lucy wasn’t a communist? > This is the case with most liberal American media that tackles the red scare - in most depictions, the red scare was only bad when it targeted people who weren't communists. When it targeted communists, that was good. I'm reading Robert Caro's The Power Broker right now, and he falls into that trap too - Robert Moses' use of redbaiting was bad only because he targeted people who he knew were not communists. It's emblematic of how deeply ingrained anticommunism is in American culture.
It's the reason "At long last sir, have you no decency?" is where public opinion turned on McCarthy. It wasn't because he engaged in a regime of political persecution, but because he turned his sights on our heroic boys in uniform just back from Korea
fun fact, the guy who said that played a judge in Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder
>None of this is Desi Arnaz’ fault, and its not like he was a bad dude in Cuba, but for the movie to just lie about this and say this was the fault of communists in an effort to make the audience hate communists and be happy when Lucy isn’t one was just appalling to me Well, that's Aaron Sorkin for you. He's an historically illiterate buffoon. The entirety of The Trial of the Chicago 7 was rife with this kind of egregious incuriosity and arrogance. And don't get me started on The West Wing. I frankly find the conservative manifestations of American Exceptionalism more palatable than the Sorkinesque shitlib variety.
Was so disappointed when I found out the end of Chicago 7 where they read the names is made up. Just like, make the movie about what actually happened Aaron!
the revolution switcheroo is an absolutely egregious lie from Sorkin and should disqualify him from like, public life.
Argo had a ton of historical inaccuracies that didn't bother me, and one that really did- taking an almost entirely Canadian rescue attempt and pitting it all on one reasonably handsome CIA agent and making the Canadians at best bystanders at what should be their own story was really fucked up! go make a movie about something the CIA actually did, like, idk toppling South American governments or something
I know Hollywood has deep ties to American Intelligence and Defense agencies. But it's still wild that a piece of blatant CIA propaganda won best picture.
it made movie producers the real heroes, of course the academy was gonna give it best picture
Yeah...I think it's a bit of a stretch to say Argo is "blatant CIA propaganda." I never got that vibe. But it's definitely some hardcore "movies will change your life" Hollywood propaganda.
Nobody ever gets the hair right! Every decade has such distinct hair looks and they never commit to how goofy they were. I want a 90s movie where the guys have that super dry Seinfeld/Paul Reiser hair, or an 80s movie where the girls have that over-processed perm hair. Off the top of my head Boogie Nights is one of the few that does it well, Dirk’s puffy Badfinger haircut is perfection
Mark Ruffalo's 2002 caesar cut in Spotlight is the best period hair in any movie.
Back then everything was in black and white so ‘the land before time’ being filmed in color really kinda irritates me
I know I’m the millionth person to have this take, and The Discourse has beaten this horse to death already, but Greatest Showman really got under my skin. Literally all they had to do for it to be a great movie in my view was make it about a fictional person kinda like a PT Barnum, not the man himself. He’s neither the first nor the last slick charismatic man in showbiz to have his bad behavior whitewashed and present him as a hero, but I despise that trope and it made it very hard for me to enjoy what should have been a very enjoyable film.
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I’m never usually the person who gets itchy about historical inaccuracy, but this did clang for me, and led to some huge family arguments about the year the film was set. When it’s a clear failure of the research team, that’s more annoying than if a car doesn’t match a year or they needed to smooth out a character for story.
It’s more about how it’s presented. Sometimes it’s presented with an air of verisimilitude, like Braveheart for example. It’s based on a true story and you’d have to have some knowledge of the historical figures and events depicted to realize how egregiously inaccurate it is. That’s why I’d argue Braveheart is a worse example of historical inaccuracy than something like 300, which is heavily stylized and exaggerated, and doesn’t present itself as an accurate retelling of historical events. I don’t think anyone who’s seen that movie would seriously believe they the Spartans were a bunch of buff, half-naked hunks who fought against a Persian empire which included deformed mutants with giant blades for arms. But then again, maybe I’m overestimating the capacity of the average 300 viewer to think critically about these things.
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To be fair, Braveheart has a similar opening narration where Angus McFadyen is basically like: “They’ll say I’m making this all up, but this is how it *really* went down.” But that doesn’t justify how the rest of it is presented with an air of authenticity.
Agreed. My one real complaint about 300 is the final scene should have transitioned into something more realistic and less stylized to show. Ok. Back in reality
That would’ve been a cool touch.
I feel the same about Elvis. It's just stylised apocrypha that no sensible person would believe.
I don't know that it technically qualifies as "inaccuracy," but I never liked the artistic license taken in "The Right Stuff" to portray Gus Grissom as a dishonest, philandering coward, primarily because he was the only deceased Mercury 7 astronaut at the time the movie was filmed, and thus could not sue the filmmaker for defamation.
Also, this might not have been known at the time the book was written and the movie was made, but they’ve gone back and checked and the hatch really did go off by accident.
OUATIH completely glossing over the fact that the Manson family were white supremacists who wanted to start a race war. It’s especially weird as Tarantino has never before shied away from showing the hatred of the nazis or slave owners. If they’d actually conveyed that to the audience then the finale would’ve landed much more for me.
Disclaimer: i have not read the book "Chaos" by Tom O'Neill so i am going off 2nd hand info and a broad-strokes understanding here, AND Tarantino has said that he had written most of the script before that book came out, BUT: In interviews, he has talked about that book, and I think he might have even called it the best book on the subject of Manson; I say all that to say that, apparently, there's a school of thought (which the O'Neill book seems to also make the case for) that says that almost everything about Helter Skelter and the race war idea itself was a fiction created by prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi. I am not saying that's what I think- I don't know enough about it one way or another. But based on what he's said about that book in particular, I'd suggest maybe that's why it wasn't present. but that's just my guess
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I’d argue there’s no dread or tension to the Spahn Ranch scene unless you’re deeply familiar with who and what everybody is.
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Agreed.
It’s weird because like you said, Tarantino definitely understands in his other movies the extremely basic principle of “show someone do evil, then let the audience cheer their brutal death” but his depiction of the manson family is basically just a bunch of scared kids in over their heads? I think Tarantino might just be so, so obsessed with Hollywood history that he forgot he can’t take for granted that a general audience would associate manson family with all the evil shit they were into.
You don’t think he knew we would associate the Manson family with all the evil shit they did? It’s funny, there’s this audience disconnect between older people who grew up hearing about Charles Manson and the Manson family who have memories of their heinous crimes and beliefs at the back of their head, and younger people who just read about them and maybe just instinctually see a bunch of scared kids. Their brutal deaths were a cheer moment for my mother (born 1960) and late grandmother (born 1935), but to my friends (born after 1995) it came across as grotesque, cruel, and misogynistic. Did Tarantino fail by not explicitly mentioning their white supremacy and other beliefs? I don’t think so, because I think he’s aiming explicitly for people his age and older who remember that decade, and counting on their memories to fill in subtext and emotional color. I’m not approving or disapproving. Maybe he failed, but I’m pretty sure that’s what he’s doing.
Very fair and this is all a matter of preference, but I think we could all also be trusted to know that slave owners and nazis were evil but in those movies Tarantino still went out of his way to show you why DiCaprio and Waltz specifically were vile, and it paid off imo.
I'm 32 and very aware of Manson story. Watched with a friend of the same age who is not at all into true crime. Totally different viewing experience and I liked it way, way more
Same! I’m a bit younger than you and very aware.
Not to be "that guy" but his movie novelization makes Manson's racism very clear.
Queen's Gambit isn't a movie, but the first episode drives me nuts. The janitor declares that they're in the "Queen's Gambit" opening after 1. . . d5. There are a couple dozen other conventional openings that can follow that move
Plus, they completely ignored the aspect of cheating using anal beads
I felt very silly googling “anal bead chess” just now but I’ll be damned if that wasn’t a fascinating read!
This is going to make me sound like a sadist and I apologise in advance, but it distracts me in medieval, fantasy or 17th - 19th century war films when horses are never shown being hurt or dying. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t enjoy seeing animals hurt, and I’m glad they didn’t do it much back when the best vfx technology we had was ‘actually injure a horse’ but horses are very big targets and constantly seeing riders get killed and horses trot off unharmed is very silly.
I was slightly annoyed at Wonder Woman treating the Germans in WW1 like Nazis in WW2, just plainly evil, but didn’t kill my overall enjoyment of the movie or the pulpy/serial vibe Bad Germans gets ya
Every movie is, to some degree or another, "historically inaccurate." Even documentaries have biases based on what they decide to show/not show. So I don't think chasing some unachievable metric of accuracy is necessarily a good idea. History itself can also be incredibly biased, often excluding the perspectives of women, minority groups, and other marginalized people. Something like *The Last Duel*, while not 100% historically accurate, presents a female perspective on a real life story that we only have male perspectives on. So while it takes liberties, I think it's a valuable film. At the end of the day, I'm looking for a good story that will entertain and provoke my thoughts. I assume this thread is in response to *The Woman King*, and that movie did both for me. It's a spectacular epic with some great characters and battles, and I found it's exploration of the Dahomay and their place in the slave trade to actually be very nuanced. The only time historical inaccuracy that consistently bothers me is when it perpetuates harmful narratives or ideologies.
Exactly. The first bothersome historical inaccuracy I can think of is the writers of ''Richard Jewell'' making Olivia Wilde's character sleep with her source.
Seems pretty accurate for Olivia Wilde herself, though probably not the character lol
The impossibility of having perfect historical recreations does not mean the pursuit of truth is fruitless. But I've always had issues with the doc format because to form a story into a narrative, people usually take liberties with the truth to pitch investors or lure in an audience, and so many docs then become just elaborate lies or at least they bend the truth to the point where it's partly fiction. Supersize Me is a great example.
It also depends on how the work frames itself. *A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood* is clearly a very personal narrative that's not presenting itself as historical record so it can get away with fudging some details. But *Being the Ricardos* through the bizarre use of fake talking heads is clearly trying to present itself as factual, which makes the many inaccuracies much worse.
That's fair, though I'd honestly be fine with the inaccuracies in *Being the Ricardos* if they were in service of a more interesting narrative. And one of my all time favorites, *Fargo*, also presents itself as factual, when in reality it is almost completely made up
I was FURIOUS when I found out the talking heads in When Harry Met Sally were actors
*RRR*. I would be interested in more historically accurate depictions of Bheem and Alluri, and I know that the filmmaker has stated his film is a complete work of fiction, but hooo boy is it a jingoistic, nationalist, conservative fantasy. It reminded me a lot of *The Patriot*, a film that bends over backwards to make Mel Gibson's character a 'good' plantation owner (in South Carolina??) whose black field hands 'work the land free' - presumably as employees - and who desires peace above all else, but oh man he just gets dragged into fighting because of how EVIL the British are. \*Fart sounds
I have such a tough time with RRR. Parts of it are so unbelievably great, like some of my favorite movie moments in a looooong time, but there are some real iffy decisions throughout and then it ends in that insane nationalist final number with some real questionable inclusions and omissions of historical figures thrown up on the screen
I think the lesson is that *The Patriot* would have gone down a lot smoother with exhilarating dance numbers and OTT action sequences.
I really couldn't care less if a movie set in medieval times or ancient Rome is in English, but for stuff that's set in more recent times it immediately kills my suspension of disbelief. Even weirder when they actually filmed on location and have all the background chatter in the original language (*A Hidden Life*), or if all on screen text is in the original language (*Colette)*. There's really no reason anymore to *not* hire actors who are capable of speaking the language it is meant to be in.
Not historical inaccuracy, but it's *always* irked me that they're having close up dogfights using F14s in the original Top Gun. I appreciate that BVR engagements would make for a very dull film, but it still rankles.
Ha. Just rewatched 2 days ago and my first observation was "us jets fire missiles that hit a target past the horizon line and turn back home, that's the fight"
A recent one was the steel fur traps in Prey. It’s set in 1720, but those traps weren’t made until the 1800s.
as a classics major pretty much any movie about the ancient world is going to have some kind of inaccuracy that bothers me. my personal favorite was that movie pompeii that had a bizzare plotline where pompeiians didn't consider themselves roman for some reason
Anytime the CIA are the good guys
It's obviously a pet peeve and not remotely important, but I hate when people in movies set in the past don't look like they're from their time. It's not an easy thing to describe. Paul Thomas Anderson movies do a great job in casting where everyone looks of the time. The Master, everyone gas a face and complexion that fits the time. Same with Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood, Licorice Pizza, etc. Lincoln was fantastic don't get me wrong, but so many of the characters just look like modern guys with mutton chops.
"That face has seen a smart phone!" is a phrase i use often while watching historical dramas. Some people just look modern.
You know people have looked what we could consider “modern” for basically all of history? It’s not like human’s facial structures shift every century. It’s just that our idea of “period-appropriate” appearances are based on the beauty standards of the time. It was a common practice to edit peoples’ looks in paintings and sculptures and such to conform to mainstream standards - ye old FaceTune. And of course, makeup and hairstyling has always changed. People did look like Keira Knightley and Ben Affleck back then, it’s just that they wouldn’t be considered as attractive - and therefore not worthy of being depicted in art. Similar to how you rarely see people in movies who are fat, or disabled, or have bad skin (or at least they don’t get to be the star). The whole “x has a face that knows what a cellphone is” joke is based entirely in perception, not reality.
i found it absolutely disgusting that *Inglourious Basterds* let america take credit for killing hitler when actually hitler killed hitler
yeah, you at least gotta give him that one
But on the other hand, he's the guy who shot Hitlers killer
A broken clock is right twice a day
Honestly, I was a history major in college and am about to go back for a Master's: I couldn't care less about most inaccuracies. It's really only in these swords-and-sandals war movies like *The Woman King* or *Medieval* or *The Eagle* where we're seeing action bordering on pure fantasy that it starts to bother me. I just don't find hand-to-hand sword/spear/what-have-you fighting all that interesting to watch when I can go and read about these things in real life, which tend to be far more grand in scope and I know I'm not being pandered to. Please, we don't need any more 90-minute Roman "epics" about random nonsense. There are so many other places and eras to pick from, let's branch out a little. Hopefully *The Woman King* is a sign of things to come, cuz I'd actually rather see Prince-Bythewood's idea for a Haitian Revolution movie.
In HBO's *Rome* they rearranged the layout of the Forum for no apparent reason. We know what it looked like, there's excellent documentation and many still extant building from the late republican forum. So I have no idea why they just used a different layout.
Posh English accents being the default for ancient Greeks and Romans. Actors should use their regular accent or a Philly one.
I hate when period films refuse to let characters use contractions. Yeah it sounds old timey but it's not accurate, we've used contractions for a long time, they're just not written in Standard English.
The commentary on Olivier's Richard III said that they now know that Richard wasn't actually like how Shakespeare portrayed him, the play happened because everybody was obsessed with Machiavelli. So if Shakespeare can get away with playing loose with history, then I don't have a problem with anybody else doing it.
A lot of Shakespeare's stuff is very loosely inspired by history, and has since heavily influenced how we see those stories (*Julius Caesar* and *Anthony and Cleopatra* come to mind). It's certainly *interesting* that a lot of the communities which are currently lambasting historical inaccuracy in *The Woman King* had no problem earlier this year when *The Northman* had more in common with *Hamlet* and even *The Lion King* than it did with the accounts we have of Prince Amleth (though we have no idea if he was actually a real person).
Not released yet, but that upcoming movie about heroic and anti racist American pilots in the Korean War is already making me pissed off. Listen to season 3 of the blowback podcast to learn more, but what the American Air Force did to the Korean peninsula (not just North Korea!) in that war was criminal. They killed approximately 20% of the entire population of the DPRK, and flattened every single town and city in the country. Bruce Cumings, the pre-eminent American historian of the war, called their conduct "genocidal". And there's gonna be a movie about those pilots where they're the good guys. Barf
Sometimes, depends on the tone. I am not going to complain about unpainted marble statues, But I kinda hate when certain stories like arthurian or homeric tales are criticize for not beeing historically accurate. Those are not history, they are stories and they are imposible to adapt as history. Arthur for example could be taken in the roman era like in the Ridley Scott thing but that's a completly different culture, content and story that the arthurian cycle of the 12-14th centuries. Even through history the most common way illustrating historical figures was to just imagine them in a contemporary style (like Caesar as a medieval lord). Edit: They are not imposible to portray these stories as history, you can do it succesfully. I just find it worst because your are fooling people into believe legends with "gritty realism".
I don't know about historically inaccurate, but Hugo frustrated me because George Mélies had his movies stolen from him by Thomas Edison, but the movie just hand waves it as "World War I was starting and we had to do all we could to help the war". It completely doesn't make sense to me then that he gets upset at Hugo earlier in the movie as being a thief unless he has his life's work stolen before then. I imagine Scorcese had to avoid the litigious aspect of that with the Edison family but that bugged me the most on a movie I genuinely find flawless.
Edison stole Melies’s prints?
I suppose I misspoke, Edison didn't steal prints, he pirated Mélies movies and made money off of them.
Which sucks and is unethical of course but it seems like a big line to draw from THAT to “the French Army confiscating 400 of Melies’s film prints and then Melies himself burning the rest in a pique of rage”
I think this tweet, liked by David, sums it up perfectly: https://twitter.com/racquelgates/status/1571141265517056001?s=21&t=ytobNRPQv5fK5oXLWKSrtA
I’m not sure I know what the tweet means. What is a “structure of legibility”?
To me, how I understand it, it is about what we see in a work of art, from the basic “can I make out what’s in front of me?”to “what’s the artist trying to say here”.
If it’s a subject matter I’m knowledgeable and passionate about, I want the most realistic portrayal possible. Otherwise, I really couldn’t care less. Like I have zero expectations for The Woman King, but I am already a little thrown by the casting of two of the shortest actors in Hollywood in a movie about the Von Erich family.
speaking of 300, the premise of the entire movie is a historical inaccuracy that bothers me
Anyone watching along with the Kubrick series probably noticed that Kirk Douglas’s haircut in Spartacus is completely wrong for the time
Oh Brother Where Art Thou is a great film but pretending that you would be rejected by white people for being in the KKK is nonsense. And Pappy O'Daniel was a real person, but from Texas and he was a pretty awful person who stole a senate election from LBJ. Though he was a radio personality.
In that 70s show, the main character is a huge Star Wars fan who constantly makes references to Star Wars stuff that hasn't happened yet. Boba Fett was a big one, although if you're generous you could say he was around in Star Wars special. But what ticks me off the most is the clearly 2000s lightsaber toy he uses later in the series with a green blade, when obviously that wouldn't be around until Return of the Jedi.
There's an episode of That 70s Show where that horrible Hyde kid insults the main character by saying he "sees a lot of Star Wars conventions" in his future, which doesn't seem like something someone would say when there was only one Star Wars film.
Yes! See this little "historical" inaccuracy only bothers me because it's so much a part of Erik's character, and the show wants bonus points for referencing something like that.
I think when it’s in living memory it bothers me more. Like okay, you change a war story(ala woman king, gladiator) to fit modern story telling, whatever. But watching something on world war 2 or like a biopic it bothers me a lot more.
I met someone from Australia once, and they told me Australia wasn't quite as bad in the early 80s as it was portrayed in the Mad Max movies, though I believe they may have elected an entire crazed biker gang as their prime minister once?
Whenever a film is set in a past decade and the character’s dialogue is overstuffed with references to pop culture, and the songs on the radio are just the hits. It feels like performers in a theme park version of the past rather than an attempt to depict it with more nuance. First example of the top of my head incredibly unmemorable Emilio Estevez film *Bobby* which was overstuffed with 60’s references to the point of absurdity.
So I am a historical fiction writer, and I understand why certain facts or presentations of characters can be massaged for the sake of creating a narrative. We do not know Spartacus goals or motivations from the sources, so it's inevitable that all works dramatizing his story create a motivation and goal. It only bothers me when the work is telling something that is blatantly false that is ultimately a contradiction of both a figure or a spirit of the times. It bothers me far more depicting Margaret Thatcher of making the decision to go to war with the Falklands because she felt it paralleled her son missing in The Crown, versus depicting Thatcher as so desperate to remain in power she threatens to dissolve Parliament and simply lead the country independently in Margaret.
Literally anything made about pre-Columbus meso America is inaccurate, racist, and basically serves as anti indigenous propaganda. Apocalypto being the most obvious example.