[nitpick]Sever his spinal chord with a gunshot to the neck, actually.[/nitpick]
I didn’t see enough of Gods & Generals to know if it was apologist- after a point I just watched the battle scenes. One thing I liked about Ride With the Devil was that it showed rebels as the hugely mixed bunch they were- some heroes, some villains, some fighting because that’s what their friends were doing and some because their land had been “invaded” and some for no reason other than wanting an excuse to kill and plunder by the end, but even the heroes had the prejudices of their time towards blacks and women and northerners and foreigners, etc…
Gangs of New York overdid the draft riots a bit (not that they were a minor thing at all, but it took a lot of liberties) but the war on the north is terribly undertreated on film and in literature. The “romance” of a lost cause is I supposed too irresistable (and commercial). Can anybody recommend any good novels on northern life during the war?
I don’t have any problem believing that the war was primarily about slavery (there were many other issues and essentially it was more about economics even than white supremacy, but slavery saturated every single issue), but neither do I feel it’s impossible to make a movie sympathetic to southerners without being racist just as there were good Germans who fought in the Nazi armies (they didn’t have a whole lot of choice- hell, the Pope was a soldier in the Nazi army). While I have no way of knowing how I’d have felt about slavery and racism had I been born 125 years earlier (my guess is that I’d have been more like my parents in the Jim Crow era than I’m comfortable with- both of them admitted freely they thought segregation was wrong and in many ways evil but neither of them did a whole lot to fight it either, not just out of apathy but outright fear of reprisal), I am almost positive had I fought it would have been for the South. People from up north are invading, burning, killing and devastating in the land you grew up in and where your own heritage and prospects lie- essentially you shoot to drive them out first and then worry about ideology later, and I think to a very large degree (after the initial enthusiasm and disillusionment that "Well, I guess the Yankees are gonna fight about it after all* wore off) that’s what motivated a lot of Confederate soldiers (most of whom, again, never owned slaves- though the policy makers sure did) and a lot of Germans and a lot of others who fought on the unholy sides of holy wars.
And the uniforms and the chance to sleep outdoors with a much of young skinny mens with no one to turn to for comfort but themselves… Private Sampiro of Cap’n Gay’s Brokeback Division reportin’ for duty, sir!
My major pet peeves with many CW films, incidentally, especially the made for TV variety:
1- godawful accents (LISTEN to how southerners today speak! Read the letters written by men who were barely literate and thus wrote more or less phonetically to get a feel of how they spoke then! DON’T do the whole “I’m gonna set up heah on the poach and have mysef a big ol’ Julep” stock accent
2- 20th/21st century mindsets & dialogue: men in 1864, even the most liberal and enlightened among them, simply did not have the same views on sex, romance, race and other issues as we do now. There was sex to beat the band going on in the war (double digit percentages of both sides had VD) but it wasn’t quite as it’s usually depicted really nasty whores ala Deadwood [one of the best moves the Union made was in regulating prostitution in Memphis and New Orleans- it cut way way down on STDs], not even northerners saw blacks as fully equal [brought out in Glory where they neither paid them the same nor would allow them to be commissioned, and the dialogue is actually not usually exalted enough- there was a lot more nuance and euphemism in the language then. The physiques also weren’t what they are now- lean and wiry was far more common for healthy men and women than the toned and ripped physiques- I always hate that in a period movie.
3- The sets- have a tendency to be way overdone, and the word “plantation” has come to imply Corinthian columns and beautiful tapestries and professionally decorated mansions when it basically meant “great big farm”. Where are the unpainted houses with beds in every room (Huck Finn remarked on how the Grangerfords were so rich and their house so big they didn’t have a bed in their parlor) and the yards that didn’t just not have grass but the grass was intentionally kept out (you didn’t want grass in your yard if you weren’t rich- it was a nuisance that you didn’t have the time to cut and a nesting place for snakes and the like) and of course rambling mansions were as seldom then as today. Most people north and south lived in small cramped quarters we could barely imagine today- 10 people in 2 rooms wasn’t uncommon even for free farmers. (Another reason why sex wasn’t quite what it was today- people grew up in the “privacy is something you find under a quilt” environment.)
4- Not near enough Jude Law nudity. It was a matter of historical record that Jude Law did a lot of butt shots in those days and I want to see them.
