Hollywood - it's time to draw the line!

[MILAMBER]

It's in Southern California. I'm about 20 minuites north of Orange County and 30 min east of the beach.

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"The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his."
-General George Patton (1885-1945)

Member of CLAN HADB

[Cloudbringer]

Well Donut, my fav breakfast pastry, I agree with you. I think they should leave the sport as it WAS and the ending as it actually happened... Sounds like a GREAT story to me- reality was far more interesting!


Cloudykins

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Raindancer of the Laughing Hyenas Clan
Storm-Queen
StormCloud of the Black Knight: Heart Mind Soul Forever
"To sleep, perchance to dream..."

[Lifetime]

Their rewritting of history is probably why most American kids are grossly..uninformed about what really goes on outside of the continent..
The Patriot was a damned good movie but it was so untrue that well..its just improbable. It just paints the British in such a bad light.
Saving Private Ryan also convieniently covers up most of the American blunders that made Omaha and Utah beaches what they were, and instead potrays Soldiers bravely and gallantly charging pillboxes. While not untrue, it was certainly not faithful at all to history..
And how can anyone actually change soccer to baseball? Does anyone actually understand how different soccer and baseball are?

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Why?

[Memnoch]

Originally posted by Donut: Nick Hornby caved in for Hi Fidelity and the character became american and the location changed from a bookshop in London to a record shop in Chicago but I know that he loves the Arsenal as much as I do and I hope he opposes this move.

So this is about Arsenal is it? I understand now!

I agree with you by the way. Unfortunately Hollywood is in the business of creating fiction, despite claims about historical accuracy and all that bollocks.

I trust that Sol Campbell is settling in well, despite all the death threats etc?


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[This message has been edited by Memnoch (edited 08-15-2001).]

[Donut]

Milamber - you are getting agitated for no apparent reason. I am not attacking America, Americans or the American Way. My bitch was about the changing of the ending of this specific book/film. I accept that to make the most money the sport is being changed. I also accept that some 'artistic licence' can be shown to make films entertaining. I enjoy Hollywood films in general and it would be plain daft to stop watching them because of this one incident. BTW when I talk about 'football' the sport I'm referring to is 'football'.

I find it difficult to get too upset about U-571; I wasn't particularly upset that when Sgt Ryan was being saved and Normandy was noticeably short of British and Canadian troops (2 of the five beaches were US). Essentially the film was about US soldiers, however we did get a mention in the film. Apparently it was 'Montgomery's failure to advance' that was causing the invasion to stall! It was still a bloody good film.

Again - let me reiterate. I know these are not documentaries and that money is the driving force in Hollywood. Diogenes (and others), I am delighted to hear that not all Americans take what they are fed as fact, unfortunately I get the impression that the youth of America are increasingly using films to update there historical knowledge.

Now, I have a script for Hollywood that may be a bit improbable. Aliens invade the earth and in the final battle the US President flies the warplane that destroys the alien mother ship and saves the world. It's titled Independence Day!

I think the improbable part about the Fever Pitch ending is that Hornby's character ends up with the girl AND his team wins the championship. The Hollywood writers will probably have his team losing and then he walks off into the sunset.

One last point on this. Why do so many bad guys in American films have English accents? Recently we’ve had Mission Impossible 2," "Gone in 60 Seconds," "X-Men," "Bless the Child" and now "Bedazzled. The only good guy I remember with an English accent was Dick van Dyke in Mary Poppins J. Since the demise of the Soviet Union there seems to have been an increase. Is there something inherently evil in our accent?

I suppose the reason that I’m getting so het up about Fever Pitch is that I lived through the period in which it is set. I arrived back in England from the US days before the final match knowing that we couldn’t win. I told everyone we couldn’t win. To win the championship in the last minute of a season that lasted 9 months was a fantastic feeling. I have watched the film so many times you wouldn’t believe it – I still don’t think we’re going to win it when I watch it.

Great film, great music, great ending – so don’t mess with it!!!


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Save Chip - Don't let Sarah win!
Official Titterer of the Laughing Hyenas

[Donut]

Originally posted by Memnoch: So this is about Arsenal is it? I understand now! I agree with you by the way. Unfortunately Hollywood is in the business of creating fiction, despite claims about historical accuracy and all that bollocks. I trust that Sol Campbell is settling in well, despite all the death threats etc?

Sol Campbell is alive and well and is living in hiding. He has spent one million pounds for increased security in his house.

For anyone interested let me give you the background to this.

Two football clubs, both alike in dignity, in fair North London, where we lay our scene, from ancient grudge break to new mutiny, where civil blood makes civil hands unclean. From forth the fatal loins of these two foes A star crossed footballer ........ err sorry I got a bit carried away there!

Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspurs (Spurs) are the two biggest football clubs in North London. Their stadiums are only a few miles apart. The two clubs are equally supported and the rivalry between them is very intense (going back 90 years) and there is a great deal of enmity between the clubs and their supporters. I have to work, drink and eat with Spurs fans - I even have to breathe the same air! Luckily enough Arsenal are a much better team that Spurs so I have the upper hand when it comes to banter.

Sol Campbell was a Spurs player - their best player, the jewel in their crown. He had been at the club since he was a child, he ate, drank Spurs, he was their captain, their leader, their talisiman.

At the end of season 99/00 he had one year left on his contract. Manchester United offered Spurs £19 million but they turned it down. Once his contract expired he became a free agent and offers of £200,000 a week were received from european giants like Barcelona and Juventus.

Imagine how sick the Spurs fans were when Sol decided to cross over to the mighty Arsenal - imagine our joy,imagine the piss taking. Death threats were posted on internet boards and he was hung in effigy outside their stadium. They are absolutely fuming. And the beautiful thing is we didn't have to pay them a penny. The newspapers called it the greatest betrayal since Judas Escariot.

England play Holland tonight in a friendly match and Sol would normally be playing - but the game is at Spurs' home ground so Sol has picked up a convenient injury that has ruled him out

Arsenal's nickname is 'The Gunners' and are repesented by a cannon. Spurs are (for some reason) represented by a chicken standing on a football. You can see this represented in my sig.


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Save Chip - Don't let Sarah win!
Official Titterer of the Laughing Hyenas

[Memnoch]

Hmm, I might be taking this thread off topic slightly but I have to comment - aren't Spurs getting some big guns such as Teddy Sheringham (among others)?

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[Donut]

Originally posted by Memnoch: Hmm, I might be taking this thread off topic slightly but I have to comment - aren't Spurs getting some big guns such as Teddy Sheringham (among others)?

Pensioner!



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Save Chip - Don't let Sarah win!
Official Titterer of the Laughing Hyenas

[Diogenes Of Pumpkintown]

Originally posted by Lifetime: Their rewritting of history is probably why most American kids are grossly..uninformed about what really goes on outside of the continent.. The Patriot was a damned good movie but it was so untrue that well..its just improbable. It just paints the British in such a bad light. Saving Private Ryan also convieniently covers up most of the American blunders that made Omaha and Utah beaches what they were, and instead potrays Soldiers bravely and gallantly charging pillboxes. While not untrue, it was certainly not faithful at all to history..

Hmmm .. . I have to disagree with your comments above regarding The Patriot and Saving Private Ryan.

After seeing the Patriot I was actually impressed that, for a Hollywood movie, it portrayed the war in the South in the American Revolution in a historically accurate way.

Mel Gibson's character was actually based on a combination of 3 historical rebel leaders in South Carolina -- Francis Marion (whom the British called the "Swamp Fox" for his skill at striking unexpectedly and then disappearing without a trace into the extensive swamps on the coastal plain), Thomas Sumter, and Andrew Pickens. All three were leaders of irregular guerilla bands.

The war in the south in the american revolution was very different from the more tidy, traditional battles between regular armies as occurred in the north. The main strength of the American continental army was in the north, under the command of George Washington.

The American effort in the south relied much more on irregular bands of partisans who operated by what we would call "guerilla" methods today: hit and run tactics, avoiding traditional stand up battles in which the regular British army forces would have the advantage, relying on the cover of forest and swamp to befuddle the British forces trained in the tactics of orderly European professional warfare.

The war in the south was every bit as savage, if not more so, as portrayed in the movie. This grew out of the irregular nature of it. When opposing armies of regular forces fought, they could operate according to accepted traditional rules -- but this was not the case in the south. There, the British found themselves frustrated by an enemy of ghosts, who refused to fight "fairly" according to traditional methods of war. The enemies the British were fighting did not wear uniforms to distinguish themselves from non-combatants, indeed they often hid themselves among the civilian populations when they weren't harassing the British (actually it would be more accurate to say they WERE the civilian population, not merely hiding in it). Against such a hostile civilian populace, who refused to identify themselves by regular uniforms or operate according to "civilized" methods of warfare, naturally the British were tempted to take throw the rule book out of the window themselves and take extreme reprisal methods against that population itself. And so they did.

The war in the south was barbaric, often savage and inhuman, compared to the more "civilized" war in the north. The savagery and barbarism was by no means all on the side of the British. Indeed, the civilian population in the south contained a large number of people loyal to the British crown who wanted no part of the rebellion and who actively supported the British cause. The Rebel forces committed atrocities against those loyalist civilians just as savage and barbaric as any committed by the British and loyalists against the rebels.

Often the "war" would involve incidents like a bunch of rebel minded men gathering together one night and going to the house of a suspected loyalist and butchering his entire family and burning his house down, or vice versa with a band of loyalists doing the same thing to a suspected rebel.

The British cavalry commander in the movie was based on a historical figure -- the dragoon leader Banastre Tarleton, who was hated intensely by the rebels for his particularly ruthless methods.

Many of the scenes in the movie are based on actual incidents in the war, such as the scene where Gibson fakes out Cornwallis with fake wooden cannons -- Francis Marion did as much on more than one occasion; or the climatic battle in the movie which is based on the crucial rebel victory at Cowpens, which saw the irregular guerilla bands join forces with a segment of the Continental army sent south by Washington under the command of Nathaniel Greene. The battle developed much the same way as portrayed in the movie, with the rebels faking a retreat to lure the British forward out of their formations and then counterattacking and winning the day.

Of course, obviously parts of the movie are fictional, and it does not claim to be a documentary of the war. Mel Gibson's character, like all his characters, had to have superhuman fighting skill, for example -- but all in all the movie does a good job of portraying the nature of the war in the south during the american revolution.

Regarding Saving Private Ryan, it is unfair to criticize the invasion scene in that movie for not telling the overall strategic picture. That is not what the movie was about. It was about the war experiences of a small group of soldiers, who realistically would not have been privy to the overall view. For an excellent movie showing the overall picture of the invasion of Normandy, see "The Longest Day."