movies

[jim]

[SHOW]

In Les Miz, Anne Hathaway, she played this peasant named Tantine I think which would be a funny name for an American but she was in France and she got fired from her factory job and thrown out into the street and she was upset because she needed money to care for her daughter, Cosette which is another unAmerican name except in New Orleans and Tantine sold a locket and her hair and two molars and it still wasn't enough so she tried prostitution and then she got in trouble with the law which was represented by that guy who played Maximus in Gladiator and she became ill and Jean Valjean who was posing as the Mayor of Montreul took her to the hospital where she sang a sad song which was so beautiful she will win an Academy Award for best supporting actress and then she died.

Plus the whole movie was all singing.

I thought it was very good. In some ways even better than the Broadway play, for some reason I had trouble following that and the movie I did not. But then again by the time I saw the movie I had seen the Broadway play and read the book, so maybe that had something to do with it.

Master of the house, keeper of the inn ... it's going to take months to get that out of my head unfortunately.

[Joe Shlabotnik]

Everybody knows all that.

I didn't know all that.

[Joe Shlabotnik]

That said, there's been some good commentaries on the movie's narrow focus allowing it to portray emancipation as a gift given by great white men, and on theme of compromise versus principled radicalism. See, for example this New York Times op-ed and this essay for Jacobin.

It's a movie about the passage of the 13th Amendment. The President at the time was a white guy, his cabinet consisted exclusively of white guys, and the Congress was 100% white guys.

I agree. I don't get the criticism. Is someone really advocating there were people of color that made the 13th Amendment or Emancipation happen?

In fact, the movie opens with black soldiers fighting valiantly for the Union. There is another very moving scene where Confederate negotiators including Alexander Stevens seeing determined black soldiers. One thing they could have done was include some scenes of Lincoln and others discussing how the way the black soldiers were fighting was changing some attitudes. But that's about the only way (and I think even Frederick Douglass would agree with this) blacks at the time could influence politicians of the time.

[Arthur Dent]

I take it nobody bothered to click the links.

[Vidor]

I take it nobody bothered to click the links.

I clicked the NYT link. Didn't find it convincing.

Mr. Spielberg’s “Lincoln” helps perpetuate the notion that African Americans have offered little of substance to their own liberation.

African-Americans were not involved in the passage of the 13th Amendment in any form. That op-ed recommends that the movie should have shown Lincoln talking to black people in the street. That would have made it a better movie?

Keckley and Slade might have been shown leaving the White House to attend their own meetings, for example.

Again, it's a movie about the passage of the 13th Amendment, not The Elizabeth Keckley Story. Although a movie about Keckley would surely be fascinating.

A stronger African-American presence, even at the margins of Mr. Spielberg’s “Lincoln,”

This is basically a straight-up call for tokenism.

It's not the worst piece of criticism I've read--that would be an article at Salon castigating the movie for not talking about how Lincoln was friendly to railroad magnates

http://www.salon.com/2012/11/25/what_sp ... eaves_out/

but it bugs me when a critic will rip a movie for not being something that the creator never intended it to be.

[Vidor]

Now I clicked that second link, but I bailed after this,

Stevens is too wildly idealistic and unrealistic to be allowed to speak his mind; he isn’t quite a caricature—if only because Tommie Lee Jones brings too much gravitas to the part—but he’s the uncle everyone is embarrassed of

which is just not the way Stevens is portrayed in the movie at all.

[heyzeus]

I finally saw Hot Fuzz last night. It was...eh.

[Freed Roger]

it bugs me when a critic will rip a movie for not being something that the creator never intended it to be.

Agreed. Movie was a character portrait of Lincoln via the political battle of the 13th amendment.

I'm not a historical expert, but I suspect there weren't a lot of black characters to put in this story with any historical accuracy. The limited to no political role that blacks played in amendment for their own freedom/citizenship perhaps speaks more to the desperate hardships of slavery, than juxtaposing a significant empowered black character into the script. A large attempt to chronicle slavery in this movie would have failed and trivialized it. IMO, the two black soldiers meeting with Lincoln at military camp at the beginning of movie was just that. (though the black soldiers transporting the Confederate "diplomats" was pretty good).


By the way, a criticsim of Lincoln for excluding Frederick Douglass from it. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the ... _blog.html

There is record of Lincoln and F Douglass interactions, but not sure if any relevant to 13th amendment episode.

[MrSaigon]

Wow. Did you guys recognize this elve in The Hobbit:

[SHOW]

That's freaking Bret from Flight of the Conchords.

Never would have caught that if I hadn't just been snooping around IMDB to see what Norm McDonald was up to, because I was watching some Conan clips. The Internet is poison.

[lukethedrifter]

Saw it in 3D- not on purpose- last night. Really enjoyed it. Don't think the extra I paid for the 3d experience was worth the cost.