Can you enjoy an inacurrate movie?

Cafe Society
41

It’s totally a case-by-case basis. Sometimes it’s esoterica that I know most of the audience doesn’t know as well as I do: recent cultivars of plants in a flowerpot on a 19th-century porch; New World parrots on a perch in the HBO series Rome; a Nile Monitor called a Komodo Dragon in The Freshman.

Or when it seems not so much oversight as justifiable expedience.

But sometimes–and nothing specifically comes to mind–a glaring inaccuracy comes off as disrespect for the audience. Mid-career Spielberg is rife with such disrespect, IIRC (again, no cites come to mind; only a memory that I often felt disrespected by his cavalier treatment of such things).

So yeah, case by case: if it feels cavalier, it rankles. If it feels honest, or justified, not so much.

42

[QUOTE=silenus]
Put me down with the “How serious was it meant to be?” crowd. I hated Braveheart and The Day After Tomorrow, for example, but absolutely adored Shakespeare In Love.
[/QUOTE]

This is a good point. When it’s sold as historical–300, Apocalypto, Schindler’s List–but it’s not, that pisses me off. When it’s simply inspired by historical events–Amadeus, Shakespeare in Love–not so much.

Again, case by case, lots of variables.

43

Since my all-time-favorite-movie-in-the-whole-wide-world is The Lion in Winter, I must admit that yes, I can thoroughly enjoy an inaccurate movie.

44

300 was sold as historical?

45

[QUOTE=silenus]
Our entire history department went to see Pearl Harbor as a group. I’m ashamed to say that anybody around us (there weren’t many) had to put up with our running count of historical inaccuracies, impossibilities, and dramatic “flairs” that were just plain stupid. I forget what our final count was, but I believe we almost made triple digits.
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Friend silenus

Pearl harbor is a good example of my point. I did not assume, going into the movie, that it would be accurate. That being the case, I enjoyed it for itrs entertainment value. There is a huge amount of historical information on the attack at Pearl. If I want history, I know where to find it. I just never assume it will be in a movie.

46

[QUOTE=Malodorous]
300 was sold as historical?
[/QUOTE]

It actually wasn’t sold as such. The director went to great pains to explain that it was a depiction of the myth that Thermopylae had become already in just the few years since it happened, as told by one Spartan soldier to others. It was never meant to be a historical docudrama.

47

[QUOTE=Malodorous]
300 was sold as historical?
[/QUOTE]

It was one of the things I heard most frequently about it, that it was based on a true story, on a historical event.

Plus, to take something based on a true story, and to make most the “creative” changes racist and homophobic, well whether it’s sold as historical or not, that’s equally problematic.

48

Friend longhair

But that’s the point. If they just wanted to make a love story, they could have placed it any time or place during the war. But when you portray on screen a key historical event, you need to get it right, or as right as possible under the circumstances. There’s Cinematic Expedience, and then there’s Just Not Giving A Damn. It comes down to “What amount of respect do the writer, director and producer have for the source material?” I’m willing to cut “Zulu” a ton of slack for the things they got wrong because of all the things they got right, and their obvious respect for the subject. Ditto “Shakespeare In Love.” The people involved in that film showed their love for Shakespeare in every frame, even as they were having fun with it. Ditto the aforementioned “The Lion In Winter,” which is also one of my favorite movies of all time. They got some of the facts wrong, but they got the feel just right. It helps to have top-notch actors at the top of their game involved as well.

“Pearl Harbor” was a just a travesty.

49

longhair75, but what about expecting a movie to be about what it’s named for?

You could have taken the whole attack sequence out of Pearl Harbor, and not affected the story that the movie was telling at all. I don’t expect most movie goers to recognize Spruance class destroyers (though they were a HUGE speed bump for me) but there’s something effing annoying to this former squid to have a movie named for one of the defining moments in modern US Navy history, have the only character from the Navy was the token black man.

I don’t mean to take anything from the memory of Doris Miller - he was a hero, and quite justifiably recognized for it - because of the institutional racism of the US Navy at the time, there’s just not much scope for showing any larger picture of the attack from his viewpoint.

50

I watched the making-of doc on the Pearl Harbor DVD, and Michael Bay was always going, when the camera was kind of candidly observing him directing a scene, “Can we get more airplanes down through here?” or “Can we make the explosion bigger?”

–Never, “Would it be more historically accurate to have more airplanes?” or anything like that; never any questions to his coterie of “consultants,” only questions about making it bigger and louder.

51

One more thought about Pearl Harbor -

If it had worked as a movie, I’d be willing to give any amount of historical inaccuracies a bye. But since the larger story didn’t work, the inaccuracies are part of the many flaws of the film. Far from being the only flaws, but they emphasize for me how little the people making the film cared.

52

[QUOTE=silenus]
Put me down with the “How serious was it meant to be?” crowd. I hated Braveheart and The Day After Tomorrow, for example, but absolutely adored Shakespeare In Love.
[/QUOTE]

How did you feel about Elizabeth? That one, for me, breaks the rule of “if it’s serious, it better be accurate.” It was so, so, so NOT right, in everything from it’s timeline (including events that happened 20 years into Elizabeth’s reign as if they were the events of the first year) to major political intrigue (the assasination of Marie de Guise) to the character notes (the Duke d’Anjou, period.)

But it worked for me anyway. I know (some of) the history, and I knew it was wrong, and I just didn’t care because the movie was good enough to make me not care. It didn’t, as **kurilla **says, “kick me out of the movie.”

53

Aside from historical fact, I can’t stand movies that make gross errors regarding weapons, technology, tactics, etc. Not only-fanatics-would-know errors, but simple errors that could have been corrected had someone given a rat’s ass, but no one did.

My basic criterion for this is if I can imagine the director saying to someone, “Just shoot it as is. No one will know the difference anyway.”

For example, take Die Hard 2, the one in the airport. The whole plot was based on these airplanes being stuck over an airport because they couldn’t land because terrorists controlled the airport. And there was no way to talk to the airplanes except through the control tower, which the terrorists controlled.

Of course, airplanes have enough fuel to divert to another airport in case their destination is shut down - and most people know this. Of course, airplanes have radios that can communicate with many people other than the control tower - and most people know this. Of course, all the other airplanes in the sky or parked on the ground could talk to them - and most people know this. But the directors of the movie just didn’t care. They thought the audience was too stupid to notice. That pisses me off. I can forgive the fact that they showed ejection seats in a Hercules, which doesn’t have them, because that’s the kind of fact only true fanboys would know. I can forgive them showing a hero jumping off the wing of a 747 about to take off, and surviving, even though he’d be making the equivalent of a three-story jump going 150 mph, because it was a trivial detail for an exciting shot. But when they get the easy stuff wrong, and for no reason other than laziness, it pisses me off.

On the other hand, a movie that takes great pains to get the details right develops an air of realism that makes the story more immersive and really gives you a sense that, “yes, that’s the way it could have happened.” That enhances a movie. For instance, the movie Thief depicted a sophisticated bank robber. The producers hired actual ex-cons as technical advisors, and they filmed James Caan actually breaking into safes, using the ex-cons own safecracking hardware. When one of the crooks is testing for phone lines, the correct voltages were shown on his meters when he found one. When the main character stormed a house with a handgun, he did it after being coached by Jeff Cooper, a world reknowned authority on handgun combat, on the right technique for clearing a room.

This attention to accuracy casts a wider swath than you’d think. Everyone’s an expert on something. If a movie gets a little detail right for you, you believe the others, even if you don’t know if they’re accurate or not. And it makes the movie more enjoyable to watch.

54

[QUOTE=silenus]
Put me down with the “How serious was it meant to be?” crowd. I hated Braveheart and The Day After Tomorrow, for example, but absolutely adored Shakespeare In Love.
[/QUOTE]

Maybe that’s what is is for me too. Take Around the World in 80 Days (the version with Steve Coogan and Jackie Chan), for example. It took enormous liberties with the story, as well as trying to slot itself into something trying to resemble a real Victorian historical context (although I think it was probably quite a mishmash of periods, particularly with the architecture), yet it still manages to be for me an entertaining and enjoyable film. Possibly because, as you say, it’s not even trying to take itself seriously.

55

[QUOTE=lissener]
I watched the making-of doc on the Pearl Harbor DVD, and Michael Bay was always going, when the camera was kind of candidly observing him directing a scene, “Can we get more airplanes down through here?” or “Can we make the explosion bigger?”

–Never, “Would it be more historically accurate to have more airplanes?” or anything like that; never any questions to his coterie of “consultants,” only questions about making it bigger and louder.
[/QUOTE]

This is just an intractable discussion, then.

I would actually expect and PREFER a director to say, “there’s too many airplanes in this scene, even if it is accurate. Let’s take some out to make the action clearer. Let’s change their color because these sort of kill the look I’m going for, and I’d like a couple of bigger explosions.”

I’m there to see a movie, and I want to see the director’s take on what Pearl Harbor felt like to him.

Ken Burns is doing a 7 part series for PBS about the Second World War. I’d rather he not cut in bigger explosions.

But, when I go to see Pearl Harbor, I expect to see Michael Bay’s artistic vision! Yes, that’s a joke (I’ve never actually seen Pearl Harbor), but you get the point.

They say Gods and Generals is very accurate. People need to watch that piece of shit a couple times and tell me how dramatic historical accuracy is.

56

[QUOTE=Trunk]
They say Gods and Generals is very accurate. People need to watch that piece of shit a couple times and tell me how dramatic historical accuracy is.
[/QUOTE]

I was going to let your appeal to kill the arguement go, until this last line, Trunk. I can’t speak for how accurate Gods and Generals might be as a movie, I’ve never seen it - but to claim that it’s unenjoyable because it’s historically accurate seems to me to be a completely untenable position.

I imagine that the biggest problem is that the creators failed to present a good, compelling story. One of the reasons that they failed may have been that they paid too much attention to historical accuracy, instead of trying to tell a story. But I’ve never seen a historically accurate film, that failed as a story, where the only thing that prevented the audience from enjoying the film were the accuracies of the story.

There are a lot of reasons why a historical story may have to change details, the ones you mentioned in your post are all good, to be honest - clarity is vital for telling a story, even at the cost of some accuracy. I’ll accept that a historical movie that doesn’t change some details will likely fail, even. For the most part ensemble stories, where there are scads of “main characters” (Like Midway, forex) are hard for an audience to follow - and often unsatisfying because there’s no time to develop any single character in any detail. Which does mean that telling larger stories than something focusing on, for an arbitrary number, more than about 100 people is very, very difficult. (The first exception I can think of to that general rule would be a Naval film where the ship involved had a much larger crew.)

[screed critiquing the accuracies and inaccuracies of Pearl Harbor and how they both worked to make the film so unsatsified snipped because if I’m getting tired of it, I can only imagine how you’re all feeling.]

I believe it’s quite possible to recount historical events in a dramatic and satisfying manner without sacrificing accuracy. I will admit it takes a bit more skill and attention to detail than a normal film might require. For that matter, if we look at the difficulties in adapting a book to film, and adapting a historical event to film, they’re awfully similar: For the most part, a film just doesn’t have the time to cover everything in a book, similarly boiling down to the essence of any historical event to meet the 90-150 minute limit that modern audiences will accept is a challenge.

I think that a line of Emerson’s sums up my feelings pretty well: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” If a storyteller forgets, in his or her quest for historical accuracy, that they’re telling a story - and let the details that their research has come up with overwhelm the greater story - that’s a major flaw. On the other hand, though, a complete lack of concern with accuracy can likewise be fatal to a story purporting to show historical events. Foolish consistencies are bad, but so are wild inconsistencies.

57

Just to expand on my point a bit. . .

Gods and Generals was, by most accounts, a very compelling book. I haven’t read it, but I’ve read The Last Full Measure, so I expect in was in the style.

Yeah, the fault of the movie wasn’t really it’s historical accuracy, but perhaps the focus on that – instead of an eye tuned to “how can we make this more dramatic” – was it’s downfall.

The point is, you can’t just make a compelling movie from compelling source material by staying true to it. They’re completely different media.

Why wasn’t that movie as gripping as the book? You read a book, and you fill in the costumes, the scenery, the battle scenes. Passage of time in a book is different than a movie. You construct these things in your head, and your constructions are probably more interesting than the history actually looked.

When you put that on screen, however. . .you are getting an accurate portrayal of that “boring” history. The costumes, the landscape, the explosions, the personalities, the time-line. What you need is a director who knows how to punch it up, or what you get is Gods & Generals.

58

It bugs the crap out of me. Like, after watching Trauma on A&E for a while, the television show ER was thoroughly irritating. They just flipped those stethoscopes over their heads constantly.

Someone told me about a study that found that for people who are fluent in a particular field, spotting a fake is extremely easy. Such as, when viewing footage, surgeons can tell a real surgeon from an actor who’s playing one (even a GOOD actor, no stethoscope flipping) in milliseconds.

59

I agree with many of the comments about historical failures in movies taking one out of one’s enjoyment – but a movie I still adore is Amadeus, which is dreadfully inaccurate in so many details, especially in its major plot devices, but is such an engaging drama nonetheless. (By the way, I’m a professional classical musician by trade…)

I do wish, however, that more people would have realized that the movie was largely fictional, based on real characters, but no more than that. Salieri didn’t kill Mozart, Mozart wasn’t a foul-mouthed imbecile who went around offending nobility, Mozart actually did edit his scores and wrote drafts, yadda yadda yadda.

But then a few amazing scenes: such as when Salieri is holding one of Mozart’s manuscripts, listening to it in his head, and is just floored by it. Also, when Mozart is dictating the Requiem Mass to Salieri on his deathbed is great … even though it makes Salieri look incompetent a couple times: you’re telling me a court composer can’t tell the difference between tonic and dominant harmony? Sheesh! Not to mention that no composer of Salieri’s stature would be taking dictation from someone whose position in court and society was beneath his…

But the wonderful moments make up for all that, in my opinion.

60

[QUOTE=lissener]
Plus, to take something based on a true story, and to make most the “creative” changes racist and homophobic
[/QUOTE]

:rolleyes:
Yeah, sure…whatever you say, bub.