Um, no.
Here is an image of the Hagia Sophia.
Here’s a vidcap from Slave Market
They’re pretty much the same. I know exactly what the Hagia Sophia looks like, even if I didn’t know what it was called, because I have always considered a mind-blowingly great piece of architecture. I see it, or as in the case of Slave Market, close approximations of it, all the time when someone is trying to visually portray the Near East. Or the Far East.
The Los Angeles Metro Red Line.
Further proof that I am apparently the only person in Los Angeles who ever bothers to ride the trains, above or below ground. Try it next time you have jury duty, it’s a lot better than driving downtown and parking.
I’ve been on the Red Line! When I go out dancing in the city, I like to do the train/subway thing if possible.
[QUOTE=Cerowyn]
…
[li]Monty 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[/list][/li][/QUOTE]
[Pedant’s mode on]True, since Arthur (“King of the Britons”) supposedly existed before there was an England and would’ve spoken some sort of now-extinct Celtic tongue that was related to present-day Welsh.[/Pedant’s mode off]
No to what?
They’re not really the same. The vidcap from “Slave Market” looks a lot more like (a Westerner’s view of) an average Ottoman mosque than it looks like the Hagia Sophia. Note the base like a flattened cube with arches, much like the Ottoman Blue Mosque or the Suleymaniye. This is unlike the Byzantine arched buttresses (see inverted U-shapes around the base and the half-domes flanking the main dome on the Hagia Sophia (see your picture above). The minarets are similar on all pictures, but the minarets on the Hagia Sophia were Ottoman additions anyway.
I have had it suggested to me that Sir Robin’s encounter with the three-headed giant is a reference to Chaucer’s Tale of Sir Thopas, which also features a projected (the tale is interrupted deliberately, so it doesn’t have an end) encounter between a milquetoast knight and a three-headed giant. Although Sir Thopas isn’t accompanied by minstrels, and probably Sir Olifant’s three heads wouldn’t have argued about tea and biscuits… 
As a bit of a tangent, I had a teacher in high school who explained the portrait of the Knight in the General Prologue in the same way that Jones does. I was quite baffled that I never heard this anywhere else, until I studied the Tales again as an undergrad and the prof mentioned Terry Jones. I was glad to know that such an interp wasn’t entirely unheard of, though I don’t think I buy it…
(Jones also has a book out where he argues that the reason we don’t know precisely when or how Chaucer died is because Henry IV had him bumped off. While this would make a great piece of historical fiction, I don’t buy that either. ;))
[/tangent]
According to the commentary on the Criterion DVD John Cleese taught Latin for a while. So that pretty much him giving a lesson 
Actually that was Mal’s quick thinking rather than Jayne’s.
Cube.
I liked the fact that the canons in Master and Commander actually recoiled when fired. Nothing bothers me more than large canons firing like popguns.
I also like that fact that the characters in both Master and Commander and Deadwood seem to think like 19th century people. So many stories set in particular historical situations seem to involve characters who are apparently 20th and 21st century time travelers set in other periods with their modern sensibilities intact (see Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman). The crew in M&C really believed that they had a Jonah aboard and Aubrey seemed to believe it himself.
Most tellingly, so did the Jonah.
I did quite the spit-take before I finished reading your sentence. 
I was always impressed by the the sword fight at the end of Rob Roy. It really conveyed how tiring it can be, not just two people dancing and prancing up and down stairs, etc.
In Six Days Seven Nights* it seemed like Harrison Ford really knew how to fly that DeHavilland Beaver. Because he did. He owns one.
*The damn thing was on USA for about three months - I couldn’t escape it.
OK, you’ve got a point. The mosque in question could as easily be the inspiration for the one in Slave Market as the Hagia Sophia. Still, I think the drawing looks a little more like the Sophia than the Blue. But in a medium in which people are routinely drawn with three fingers because it’s easier, it seems foolish to press the point.
A.I. Artificial Intelligence is set in a future world where global warming has changed the climate and melted the ice caps. In one scene set in a forest somewhere in North America there is a bird calling in the background - and it’s a Screaming Piha, a common bird of the Amazonian rainforest. I have to believe it was an inside joke by someone who went out and got just the kind of bird that might have migrated north with changing climate. (Most movies use the Australian Kookaburra as the all-purpose “jungle bird-call.”)
Cerowyn writes:
> 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.
I said that they strained the mind of the professor, not that they were beyond him. Where would he get those math books? How could someone like him afford them? Math books beyond the level of freshman calculus are expensive. Did he get them out of the library? What library? A public library wouldn’t have them. Did he get them from a university library? How?
We’re supposed to believe that at 20 he’s already not only better at proofs than a Fields medalist, but that he’s also well read in history, law, chemistry, and psychology. It’s just not humanly possible for someone to read that much by that age. The comparison people bring up is Ramanujan, but Ramanujan was quite different. He grew up in a Brahman family, reasonably well off for that time in India. As a teenager all his teachers knew he was a genius, which is why he entered college with a scholarship at 16. He lost his scholarship because he spent all his time studying math and ignored his other subjects. Another mathematician got him a job as a clerk so that he could spend his spare time doing math. A second mathematician told him to write to G. H. Hardy because he was doing similar things to the math that Ramanujan was interested in.
The movie would have you believe then that Will Hunting is a self-taught genius well beyond the level of Ramanujan, who’s probably as close to a self-taught mathematical genius as they come. And the movie tells you that this happens despite the fact that Will was brought up in foster homes where he was beaten. And it tells you that no teacher in high school ever recognized how smart he was. And it’s apparent that Will doesn’t actually spend much time reading but hanging out with his friends, who mostly drive around, get drunk, and get into fights.
He works in a university, or did, at the beginning of the film. He could have either bought them used or stolen them.
It’s not difficult to get old text-books. Especially when they’re out of date and no book-store will buy them back. Most students will dump off their books on whoever is willing to pay, even if it’s just $10 or $20 at a time.
As for being “humanly possible”, he’s obviously a speed-reader. In fact, I think there was a scene where he was reading at an extra-ordinary speed. I mean, the Dope is full of readers who can plough through books at an extraordinary pace. If he’s not distracted by television and the Internet and radio and doesn’t spend every waking second with his buddies or working (and it’s obvious he doesn’t because we see him by himself several times in the movie) than there’s no reason why he can’t make it through those books.
The smartest kids I knew growing up are probably working menial jobs, if they’re working at all. Who’s to say a teacher didn’t recognize his potential in grade school or high school? He was in and out of jail, he was surly, he was impossible to get close to, and he had a serious problem with authority figures. What chance did a high school teacher or a foster parent have when it took the threat of a very long jail sentence to get him to even work with the Prof? Will was actually motivated for the first time to use his abilities and gifts because he wanted to stay out of jail and even then it was a constant struggle to keep him focused. What chance did a teacher have when she had 30 other students to deal with and he was probably smarter than her anyway?
The movie Rounders was a dead-on depiction of the poker life. The tiny details of the underground club culture, the strategy of the game were all perfect. The only deviation from perfection was an overplaying of the opponent’s ‘tell’.
There was a throwaway line that particularly caught my ear: John Turturro was warning Matt Damon that his friend was a card cheat, and he said, “I was suspicious when I saw the mechanic’s grip, but I knew he was dealing seconds when I heard the snap”. Well, dealing ‘seconds’ means that rather than dealing the top card off the deck, you pull it back slightly with your thumb, exposing the second card. You pull that out and deal it, keeping the (known) top card for yourself or your cheating partner. However, because you are pulling a card out from between two other cards that are under pressure from your thumb, when the card comes out there will be a little ‘snick’ sound. An inconsequential and very obscure detail of an even more obscure art, and they got it into the script.
More films should do this. If you can convince your audience that you’re giving them the straight dope about the background material, it just adds a certain punch to the movie and makes it easier to drop into that world. I’ve always wondered why more filmmakers didn’t understand this. They can be so incredibly sloppy with the details.
The movie Miracle had some extremely accurate choreographing in the hockey scenes and sis a good job of recreating goals and sequences from actual games, especially the semi-foinal game against the Russians.
More generally, Dazed and Confused is probably the most dead on portrayal of high school kids I’ve ever seen. It’s practically a documentary.
Same goes for Dangerous Liasions, in the fight scene between John Malkovich and Keanu Reeves. They are absolutely exhausted by the time it ends, even with the pauses that occur when, as they are both gentlemen, each waits for the other to retrieve his dropped weapon!
IIRC from the DVD extras, Miracle’s choreography was taken exactly from footage of the final game, frame by frame. Watching the choreographers and actors try and recreate the events is amazing (and damned difficult). Frank Gifford also rerecorded the exact words he spoke as commentator during the game, except for the now-famous line “Do you believe in miracles? Yes!” after the win. They used the actual recording, because he couldn’t repeat it without sounding fake to himself.
