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I watched Gettysburg a couple years ago, it's pretty good.
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Dec 2, 2018 02:45
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Gettysburg is very good. Gods and Generals is... not so much. Gettysburg, Glory, and Lincoln are the best Civil War movies. Good as movies and all reasonably historically accurate.
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Dec 2, 2018 02:52
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Grand Fromage posted:Gettysburg is very good. Gods and Generals is... not so much. Gettysburg, Glory, and Lincoln are the best Civil War movies. Good as movies and all reasonably historically accurate. Denzel Washington in Glory though... 
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Dec 2, 2018 03:03
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Grand Fromage posted:Gettysburg is very good. Gods and Generals is... not so much. Gettysburg, Glory, and Lincoln are the best Civil War movies. Good as movies and all reasonably historically accurate. What about Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.
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Dec 2, 2018 03:53
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The book I would really recommend people read/listen to having to do with the Civil War is probably Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin. She's a fabulous writer, and it's an absolutely masterful book that paints the most real and true portrait of Lincoln that I've ever encountered in any sort of media. It is LIGHT YEARS better than the stupid Ken Burns documentary, and definitely FAR more worth your time, now that I really think about it. Listening to that book is better than watching the documentary! Actually, I guess the film Lincoln was somewhat based on Goodwin's book, but it's taking like... one small aspect/part of the book and bringing it to life on the screen. The boook itself is much more about what was really going on in Lincoln's administration; the title refers to the cabinet which Lincoln assembled at the start of his first term, in 1860. Going very much against the grain of political wisdom (then or now) he chose to populate his cabinet with all his main rivals for the Republican nominations, partially in an effort to unify the party at what was a time that required as much unity as politics would allow for.
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Dec 2, 2018 03:53
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The only problem with Glory is that the composer rips himself off and all his music sounds the same. The Braveheart score sounds identical.
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Dec 2, 2018 03:54
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The only actually good movie made about the Civil War is Ride with the Devil, and even that is way less savage than it should be.
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Dec 2, 2018 04:20
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Report from my Deadwood rewatch: this show is good.
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Dec 2, 2018 04:20
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kaworu posted:The book I would really recommend people read/listen to having to do with the Civil War is probably Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin. She's a fabulous writer, and it's an absolutely masterful book that paints the most real and true portrait of Lincoln that I've ever encountered in any sort of media. It is LIGHT YEARS better than the stupid Ken Burns documentary, and definitely FAR more worth your time, now that I really think about it. Listening to that book is better than watching the documentary! I read ToR and loved it to death. How is her book on LBJ?
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Dec 2, 2018 05:08
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The Ken Burns doc is fantastic. I can't think of any other Civil War documentary that even comes close. Despite not being 100% accurate The Killer Angels is a fantastic read.
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Dec 2, 2018 05:17
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:Report from my Deadwood rewatch: this show is good. The four universal rules. Death, taxes, water is wet, deadwood is good.
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Dec 2, 2018 05:37
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fawning deference posted:I read ToR and loved it to death. How is her book on LBJ? Nowhere nearly as good as Caro's books about LBJ! I'll take any excuse to talk more about this, hah. My father was always a huge fan of Caro from way back, but even so it took him a while to actually get me truly excited to read an incomplete multi-part biography about Lyndon Baines Johnson - I didn't really understand what made him all that significant when at the time it seemed to me that the two presidents bookending him (Kennedy and Nixon) seemed to be "bigger" names which certainly carried more weight in the mythology of American politics. Of course, the truth is that LBJ was a far more dynamic and complex individual than either Kennedy or Nixon, and in many ways was the consummate politician of his time who achieved absolutely incredible goddamn things that a lot of people just don't know all too much about. I think Master of the Senate is a great starting point even though it's Caro's third book in the series. It just goes through a particularly fascinating time in American politics, the 1950's, that I did not know a tremendous deal about the intricacies and ins and outs thereof. And Johnson was really the central figure behind the scenes in American politics at the time, doing unprecedented things. And by the way, Caro has been working on this multi-part biography of LBJ since uh... at least 1974 (!) I think. He's been releasing about a book every decade more or less, and released the 4th book in 2013. He's working on the fifth book which is probably going to be the final given Caro's age. But I'd say on the whole it's arguably the greatest piece of American political journalism.. I can't think of many things that really compare with it, in that regard. fake edit: Caro's first book, The Power Broker which is all about Robert Moses and is just a goddamn mesmerizing piece of work. Moses was probably the most powerful unelected public official in the 20th century, and a longtime rival to FDR. He's probably the man who is singly most responsible for making New York City into what it is today, for better or worse. Very complex and fascinating figure whose name your average millennial probably doesn't even recognize.
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Dec 2, 2018 06:05
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You cocksuckers are doing a great job of teaching me things 
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Dec 2, 2018 13:30
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I would like to learn more about Hearst not William Randolph Hearst but George Hearst. At the time I watched deadwood years ago I had never heard of him. I tried to find a book on him but everything was about his son. He was so charismatic and ruthless on Deadwood I wanted to read the whole story about him. Was he really that much of an rear end in a top hat and that insane about gold? How historically accurate is his character on deadwood? I want to believe he really had his giant bodyguard fight a salon owner’s toughest man to the death.
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Dec 2, 2018 14:19
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Yeah I love seeing historical rich assholes on TV. Like JFK's dad in Boardwalk Empire who was pretty much a thug.
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Dec 2, 2018 14:38
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DropsySufferer posted:I would like to learn more about Hearst not William Randolph Hearst but George Hearst. At the time I watched deadwood years ago I had never heard of him. I tried to find a book on him but everything was about his son. He was considered one of the best at determining the value of mines. Besides that and buying interests in large mining operations, I'm pretty sure everything else is just made up for the show. I did like the little "I'll just buy a paper and have it lie the other way" as a small nod to the eventual Hearst news empire though.
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Dec 2, 2018 18:11
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Grand Fromage posted:Gettysburg is very good. Gods and Generals is... not so much. Gettysburg, Glory, and Lincoln are the best Civil War movies. Good as movies and all reasonably historically accurate. lincoln is liberal pablum with quasi-historical sheen, sorry. thaddeus stevens abandoning his principles is treated as a big heroic moment and spielberg throws in some black characters to cheer over being called equal before the law rather than human beings deserving of dignity.
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Dec 3, 2018 08:36
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R. Guyovich posted:lincoln is liberal pablum with quasi-historical sheen, sorry. thaddeus stevens abandoning his principles is treated as a big heroic moment and spielberg throws in some black characters to cheer over being called equal before the law rather than human beings deserving of dignity. I don't know. It certainly has a liberal bent, but it's a loving Tony Kushner script based on a Doris Kearns Goodwin novel directed by Spielberg; what in gently caress do you expect? And of course it's going to be skewed towards the triumphant/great moments during the civil war rather than representing the actual reality of the Civil War, which was sickness and suffering and death. He did the same drat thing with Schindler's List, and that offended some people too. In both cases he told tales depicting human dignity and the sanctity of human life and equal rights over actually depicting the reality of the actual events. Which in both cases was near-endless suffering and death for a protracted period of time, ultimately. But this is what Spielberg does - he's always fundamentally optimistic about human nature in most of his films. In any case, it was Tony Kushner who wrote the script and you should drat well credit the stuff with Stevens to him, not Spielberg, as it reeks of Kushner (not necessarily in a bad way in my opinion). He just has a tendency to portray characters like that from a highly romantic point of view. I took Lincoln's thesis on Stevens to be that he was doing all of these things almost entirely out of his love for his wife. That's why he allows Mary Todd to publicly humiliate him without saying a word, and that's why he "abandons his principles", as you put it. Except he was not abandoning his principles, he was simply saying what was necessary for him to say in the moment to achieve his goals. And yes, it's portrayed as heroic in the film, but we only truly understand how and why until that final scene with him where he lays down with his wife and has her read it to him. I thought the film should have ended right there, in a way. Again, maybe I'm just a hopeless romantic, too. But I cannot think of anything more incredibly romantic than deciding to break the bonds of an entire people out of an intense and sincere love for one of them. What is more romantic than declaring, "I will free you and all the people here like you in the same situation!" and actually doing it? Before Lincoln was even made I became positive OBSESSED with the film Lawrence of Arabia (certainly a film worthy of obsession) and I wound up reading several biographies of T.E. Lawrence, along with his Seven Pillars. What was so amazing and romantic about his story is that before the war he had of course already been captivated by the desert and living in such a place... Lawrence did not really have any sort of "normal" kind of sexuality and tended towards sadomasochism in later life, possibly as a result of experiences during the war. I hesitate to label him as homosexual, but apparently living in Egypt before the war he had fallen deeply in love with, and was living with, a teenage Bedouin boy for some years. In fact, the dedication in his Seven Pillars of Wisdom (his own account of his wartime exploits) is to this boy, who sadly died before the war even began. In any case, similar to Thaddeus Stevens in some ways, Lawrence had resolved to set free this boy's entire people however he possibly could manage it, even after the boy had died. And in some ways he achieved this - he certainly did everything humanly (sometimes super-humanly) to try and get this done. Maybe I'm just a sap but I find stories like this in history to be incredibly captivating and romantic, and regardless of the extent of the truth of these stories, in either case, I don't really care. These sorts of side-stories are what makes history feel alive, and human. Call me a sap for liberal pablum if you like.
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Dec 3, 2018 13:35
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kaworu posted:Again, maybe I'm just a hopeless romantic, too. But I cannot think of anything more incredibly romantic than deciding to break the bonds of an entire people out of an intense and sincere love for one of them. What is more romantic than declaring, "I will free you and all the people here like you in the same situation!" and actually doing it? Freeing an entire people because they are humans and not just because you're in love with one of them?
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Dec 3, 2018 14:18
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Hakkesshu posted:Freeing an entire people because they are humans and not just because you're in love with one of them? If you apply this absolute morality to everyone in history, they will all be monsters.
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Dec 3, 2018 14:27
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Cojawfee posted:If you apply this absolute morality to everyone in history, they will all be monsters. Yeah
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Dec 3, 2018 14:37
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kaworu posted:Again, maybe I'm just a hopeless romantic, too. But I cannot think of anything more incredibly romantic than deciding to break the bonds of an entire people out of an intense and sincere love for one of them. What is more romantic than declaring, "I will free you and all the people here like you in the same situation!" and actually doing it? Didn't the Emancipation Proclomation only apply to slaves in rebel states? Pretty sure slavery was still legal in the north until the war ended. I thought that the historical consensus was that Lincoln didn't care much about slavery being legal or not, but cared very much about preserving the Union.
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Dec 3, 2018 15:25
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Toxic Fart Syndrome posted:Didn't the Emancipation Proclomation only apply to slaves in rebel states? Pretty sure slavery was still legal in the north until the war ended. Emancipation was only for the south to avoid having the four slave holding Union states decide to leave. Lincoln was personally against slavery but was willing to put his beliefs aside in order to preserve the Union. Once those two goals became aligned, he went for it.
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Dec 3, 2018 17:58
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Cojawfee posted:If you apply this absolute morality to everyone in history, they will all be monsters. by all accounts thaddeus stevens was on the right side of history and for the right reasons. it's the movie that personalizes his motives.
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Dec 4, 2018 03:09
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kaworu posted:And yes, it's portrayed as heroic in the film, but we only truly understand how and why until that final scene with him where he lays down with his wife and has her read it to him. I thought the film should have ended right there, in a way. I really wish the film had ended with Lincoln saying,"I'd like to stay, but I have to go" and heading out on the coach with the servant watching him head off into the night. Actually showing the aftermath of the assassination was a misstep in my view, we all knew it was going to happen and it overshadows so much of everything else remarkable he did over the course of the film.
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Dec 4, 2018 03:30
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In the late season 2 episode where Andy Cramed comes back to Deadwood and he's a minister Farnum offers him a room for $2, with a 50 cent discount for clergy. But in that season the price sign at Farnum's says a room is $1.50! I had such a good laugh when I realized that. EB is so single minded he's like a particularly dumb Ferengi.
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Dec 5, 2018 05:37
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His prices getting higher and higher as the season goes on is one of my favorite little things. Also, when he calls Bullock the "town pugilist" just to catch an asskicking from him later in the season (I think, he may have said that in season 1 and caught the beating in season 3).
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Dec 5, 2018 06:17
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He is so detestably loveable. 
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Dec 5, 2018 06:32
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I like how EB desperately wants to be as important as Swearengen and gets frustrated when new people show up in town and quickly gain more power than him.
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Dec 5, 2018 07:05
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Powers Boothe's little talking to God routine during his conversation with Hearst in the season 2 finale means so much more to you if you've seen the movie where Boothe played Jim Jones.
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Dec 5, 2018 07:39
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Holy poo poo just the amount of STUFF that happens in the Season 2 finale is astounding. The sheer number of plots advanced, characters that grow, stories that pay off it's insane! How could they stick that much into one episode of TV without it being an incoherent jumble?? It's truly amazing and every bit is affecting.
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Dec 5, 2018 07:53
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:Powers Boothe's little talking to God routine during his conversation with Hearst in the season 2 finale means so much more to you if you've seen the movie where Boothe played Jim Jones. I didn't even know this existed and now must watch it.
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Dec 5, 2018 13:59
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I can't believe he tried to play Hearst by pretending to have a letter when Hearst could easily just go check.
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Dec 5, 2018 16:48
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Rupert Buttermilk posted:I didn't even know this existed and now must watch it. It also has a big role for a 31 year old Brad Dourif as the cult's doctor. Teriyaki Hairpiece fucked around with this message at 17:08 on Dec 5, 2018 |
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Dec 5, 2018 17:06
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Rupert Buttermilk posted:I didn't even know this existed and now must watch it. he won an Emmy for it, too. also any discussion of Eustace Bailey Farnum is not complete without mentioning this (watch Titus Welliver come this close to corpsing): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zneXoHhj4A
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Dec 5, 2018 19:41
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That impression is one of the funniest goddamn things ever and I'm like SLIGHTLY annoyed you posted it because it's always such a treat to see a scene like that on Deadwood where there's something just TOTALLY unexpectedly hilarious like that. I freaking lost it when I watched that episode last weekend and got to that scene. I probably rewound it at least 7 or 8 times before I could move on, it's so great.. OK, it was probably twice that many times. I probably watched it a dozen times just laughing at the way Al says "Rose'. Ohhh man. I had never noticed Titus Welliver having to actually cover and straighten his mouth to keep from totally losing composure though - makes me wonder if he'd heard McShane do that impression of Sanderson as EB before. Like, I almost imagine McShane being a massive fan of the character just from their scenes together and spending hours in his trailer perfecting the voice and never telling anyone or something, I don't know  It's too goddamn perfect and hilarious to have been his first attempt.And frankly I can imagine it being harder and harder not to laugh with each subsequent take as that impression is so goddamn funny... Hell, the whole conversation is, with Al actually being kinda fuckin' scared visibly for the first time ever on the show.
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Dec 5, 2018 22:03
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I'm guessing they had to do that scene 20 times and that was the closest they could get to nobody losing it.
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Dec 6, 2018 06:13
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gently caress I forgot all about that scene and how hilarious it was. Goddamn does Ian McShane own.
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Dec 6, 2018 08:13
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Laterite posted:Goddamn does Ian McShane own.
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Dec 6, 2018 21:43
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Deadwood was the first thing I remember seeing him in, and now his English accent always sounds fake to me.
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Dec 6, 2018 21:48
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