OK, it’s the Hagia Sophia, but it definitely is used in all kinds of films as representation of the Orient and situated everywhere from Tripoli to Japan.
Chronos writes:
> I’ve heard that all of the math shown in the background in Good Will Hunting is
> correct, though I’ve never had the chance to freeze-frame, and probably don’t
> have enough training to understand all of it.
Yes and no. It’s real math. It’s just not the right sort of math for the situations described in the film. It’s probably impossible to make some plot points in the film make sense (a young man who never even met a mathematician before has created new mathematical ideas that are nearly beyond the ability of a Fields Medalist? Yeah, right), but Good Will Hunting doesn’t even try to get the math shown in the film consistent with the level that it should be. The best example of getting math right that I know of is the film It’s My Turn. Not a very good film overall, but it opens with a scene that’s dead on accurate in both the math and the attitude. In the opening scene, Jill Clayburgh plays a math professor teaching a course in algebraic topology. Daniel Stern plays a grad student. Clayburgh goes through a discussion of a theorem called the Snake Lemma, while Stern asks questions about the proof. They get the details exactly right for what a professor would say as she put the proof on the board and what a smart, wiseguy grad student would object to in the proof.
Of course there’s the scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian in which the Roman soldier corrects the Latin of the local rebel, funny because the rebel could conceivably have the same trouble learning Latin as a modern schoolboy, and because the soldier is doing an actual grammar lesson.
If they just show a dome with a bunch of spires (minarets), it could be just about any mosque, and thus could be any large city in the Middle East. FYI, the Dome of the Rock is quite a unique structure, and thus couldn’t really stand in for any mosque. The Hagia Sophia, with Ottoman additions, actually looks closer to a lot of the Ottoman mosques.
From my observations, every Muslim country seems to have its own style of mosque, The Turkish mosques, with their layered half-domes and multiple minarets, are very distinctive (and incidentaly, it’s not that the Hagia Sophia is similar to other Ottoman mosques; it’s that most Ottoman mosques are patterned after the Hagia Sophia. Which isn’t at all shiny).
I never studied Latin, but several friends have told me that the Latin grammar scene in Life of Brian is dead-on.
Holy Grail is, oddly enough, in many ways one of the more historically/legendarily accurate movies about King Arthur. (Probably thanks to Terry Jones.) I’m sure there are jokes in the movie that I’m not well educated enough to get! To my untrained eye the sets and costumes appear appropriate for the period depicted. They’re certainly not the fru-fru pseudo-High Medieval stuff you usually get. The gag about saying “knights” as “kuh-nig-its” is, I believe, a reference to real Middle English pronunciation. All the business about meeting strange knights and monsters in the woods and having weird side-quests comes from the legends, although the Pythons made it a bit sillier. But only a bit! Sir Galahad’s adventure at the castle full of nubile maidens has a legendary basis as well. And the scene where Lancelot rushes in to save the princess (or so he thinks!) and ends up cutting down a bunch of innocent, unarmed onlookers in his frenzy is almost right out of Malory!
Thank you for pointing that out - it never occured to me that “kuh-nig-its” was meant to be an alternate pronunciation of “knights” - I just thought it was another bit of the kind of complete (seeming) nonsense for which I love Monty Python.
williamw, Lamia’s absolutely right about the pronounciation in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. As an English major in college, I was forced to take a class including Chaucer and we had to read the preface to The Canterbury Tales in Middle English. During the course of the lesson, we learned that every consonant in Middle English is pronounced, even those that normally now are silent. Therefore, “kuh-nig-its” for “knights.”
I laughed even harder at the movie after that.
'Course, whether Arthur would be speaking middle English at that time is probably what’s debateable, but at least the pronounciation’s good.
Snicks
I rather liked the huge, 70mm shots of the Roman army deploying for battle in perfect manipular legion formation near the end of Spartacus (that’s the odd checkerboard-looking pattern). Very impressive. Okay, so the Roman army hadn’t used maniples as a tactical unit for something like 100 years, but hey. B+ for effort.
Slight nitpick. I believe you’re referring to Collateral, the movie with Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx. Collateral Damage was an excreble movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Agreed. Except at the end, when they run down to the subway. I live in a suburb, and I don’t get into the city itself much. But, AFAIK, we don’t have subways here. We do have the above-ground metro system, and that was accurate too, I believe. In fact, the station where the last scene took place looked like it could have been the one a few blocks away from me.
But… subways?
Fair enough. It’s still leaps and bounds beyond any math that you typically see on film. At least it’s something… I can’t recall any other film I’ve seen at all which had accurate math beyond the level of 2+2=4.
I never went down in one (or saw anyone else go) but there are subway stations in LA. As for actual trains, I dunno, but there certainly are stations, the below ground part of the metro system.
Didn’t the building of the subway run into major construction problems (took seven years to build) because they hit bedrock way before they expected to and go way way over budget? Also, it doesn’t go much of anywhere.
And the coconuts they used instead of horses were, in fact, from the correct species of palm tree growing in England at that time . . . 
I was always impressed at Jayne’s quick-on-his-feet thinking in the Firefly episode Out of Gas. To you and I, the best way to put out a fire is to throw water on it. Instead of filling your internal atmosphere with smoke and steam, you simply vent the atmosphere to vacuum, suffocating the fire with nothing at all. Sure you lose a little oxygen, but it’s better than the ship exploding. Right?
The external shot of Serenity – with all the debris and a swirling plume of fire and oxygen tumbling out the back of the ship, silently! – was awesome.
I don’t know about England, but there’s palm trees all over the place in Ireland. I don’t know if they’re indigenous, and I don’t know if there are coconuts, though.
On the math front, by the way, I may have remembered another one. In a movie called Enigma, about the code-breaking effort in WWII, we’re shown some of the work the codebreakers were doing. I can’t be sure, but it did look (to my non-mathemetican mind) like they were doing group theory work, which seems like it would be relevant to codebreaking. Can anyone more knowledgeable (about the movie and/or about codebreaking) chime in?
According to the documentaries that came with the *Enigma * DVD, the director and production crew worked very hard to ensure every detail of the code breaking effort was shown as accurately as possible. All of the coded messages and the steps that went into decrypting them were verified as authentic by an on-set surviving Bletchley Park codebreaker. Kate Winslet spoke of how she had to take hours of training in order to be sure she was using the Enigma machine properly.
Random notes on comments in this thread:[ul][]Will Hunting is not protrayed as coming up with new ideas that are beyond the professor. Rather, he is frustrated that proofs that seem obvious to him come with great difficulty to Lambeau. And, there is at least one shot of his apartment that shows stacks of math books, suggesting that he is probably extraordinarily well read in the subject.[]There are indeed palm trees in western Devonshire, England, though I doubt any are coconut treesMonty Python and the Holy Grail is set in pre-Norman but united England, so the characters would likely have been speaking West Saxon/Old English. Like history matters for a Monty Python movie, though. :D[/ul]
Holy shit. Obviously, I really didn’t mean Collateral Damage. The funny thing is, I’ve never even seen that movie.
I must have brained my damage at some point…
Posted by Snickers:
If you can take some more Chaucer, I recommend Terry Jones’ book Chaucer’s Knight. It made me see The Canterbury Tales in a whole new way.