Random non-serious post [orichalcum]

Why you should all go out and see Kingdom of Heaven this weekend, but not Sith for a couple of weeks:

So, there are 4 or 5 big historical epic projects that are currently on hold, waiting to see whether Kingdom of Heaven is Gladiator II or another flop like Troy and Alexander: Hannibal, Tristan and Isolde, Tutan-khamen, Warrior, etc... (Passion of the Christ winds up in its own weird category here.)

Some of these may be good. Some of them may be terrible. However, if you are in general a supporter of nifty historical movies getting made, you should go and see Kingdom of Heaven opening weekend, even with mixed reviews, because it highly raises the chances that a _good_ movie will get made in the next couple of years. It's the same reason to support medium-good superhero or fantasy movies, if you're a fan of those genres. Overall, ask yourself, would you rather Hollywood be spending its money on more Olsen twin teeny-bopper flicks, or on "Random Superhero You've Never Heard Of" movies?

Besides, the more that good historical movies get made, the more utter crap I get to drop from my syllabus.

However, there is no reason to reward George Lucas for past bad behavior. So I join the crowd of Second-Weekend-Sithers.

BTW, you can now find me in the official Northwestern Fall 2005 class directory, under Classics. Also, completely randomly, they raised my salary another 2K.

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I'm going to Kingdom of Heaven tonight. I don't think it will suck: Ridley Scott (the director) often does fine work.

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but... but...
I've heard of a lot of random superheros!
(some of them are really cool too!)

But if they only showed movies about "superheroes that a large majority of the population has heard of," they'd be down a lot of potentially good movies.

Face it, apintrix, you're not exactly the average movie-going audience. (And this is a very good thing, cuz, hey, who wants to be 14?)

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Yeah. The Passion of the Christ, while progressively more fascinating to me as i get more interested in working out the connection between visuality, imagination, meditation, and torture, is SO not a historical epic. it's bloodandguts action hero meets Renaissance art meets medieval meditation techniques meets machismo. strange, perversely intriguing, but not historical unless you consider the Gospels, the collective Catholic tradition, and various visionary reports to be all, actually, literally true.

whee. devils with offspring. whee. (yes, i just showed this movie to a class of mine, why do you ask?)

Hmmm...I definitely want to have a conversation with you about it, then. The real question, from my perspective for the course is, "Has the Passion helped shape or reflect modern ideas about the ancient world?"

Note I haven't actually seen the movie yet.

Hmmm, well, the torture is all carried out by bloodthirsty Roman soldiers, who really come off badly. Those who see anti-Semitism in the movie mainly have to identify it as their impassivity in the face of the horrific torture, but it's the Roman soldiers who definitely are caricatured as sadistic drunks who are so brutish as to be nearly non-verbal (and what they do say makes a group of adolescent boys in the lockerroom seem to have refined senses of humor).

so your question is a good one, in a sense. otoh, most of the people who went to see the movie didn't go to think about the Romans. i'm not sure many would consider the take-home message to be about how pre-civilised them there Romans were...

orichalcum

Random non-serious post

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April