quick pitch: 100 years ago, the Iranians were pawns in between Russia and Great Britian, and tried to organize a nation with a constitution and an efficient, honest central government. To do this they had to reform their customs collections and tax system. And to do this, they hired a team of American adminstrators. Of course, it all turned to shit.
Imagine a movie that shows the Iranian seeing Americans as their best hope, and the concept of taxation as necessary for a country’s strength and autonomy. You’d have to hose off the ceiling in the theaters from the heads exploding.
Of course America is the best hope for Iranians…and for all freedom loving people in the world. And Americans do work from January 1st to April 9th to pay their taxes…more money than they spend on food, clothing and shelter. http://www.taxfoundation.org/taxfreedomday/
Your comments aren’t really relevant to what Slithy Tove was talking about. He wasn’t saying that Americans don’t pay taxes or that improvement in Iranian/American relations wouldn’t be a good thing.
Rather, he was saying that contemporary American moviegoers would be very startled to see a movie portraying Iranians as having a positive impression of Americans, and presenting state taxation in a positive light.
There’s the recent Hindi drama Mangal Pandey—The Rising. And apparently there was a 1912 short film on the subject, which might be an interesting curiosity.
How about a movie about Gustavus Adolphus? For that matter, except for stuff in France, I don’t remember any movies about the 30 Years War except for “The Last Valley”.
A movie about the Battle of Vicksburg would certainly show a different side of General Grant.
It should also highlight the little-remembered fact that the Mexican-American War was mainly a Southern project, out of which the Southerners hoped to form new slave states out West and maintain the free-slave balance in the U.S. Senate; a hope in which they were frustrated, leading to the Civil War, in which the Confederacy tried to seize control of the West in the New Mexico Campaign (the only cinematic treatment of which to date, AFAIK, was in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.).
Also, I’ve never seen a movie involving the Knights of the Golden Circles’ project to form new U.S. slave states out of territories in Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean.
And we already have an excellent script source. My favorite Renault book. In her afterward ( I think ) she mentions another excellent topic - the staccato, careening career of Demetrios Poliorcetes.
Or for that matter the career of Pyrrhus of Epirus. That whole period is bursting with interesting characters and possibly apocryphal but highly entertaining anecdotes. Like Hannibal’s use of catapulted poison vipers in clay pots to win a naval engagement in his later, post-Carthaginian career as a mercenary commander.
I saw some Medieval armor today, including both suits of armor and two-handed long swords. Unless they’re Super Heroes no way anyone was swinging those around fast. One of the suits of armor weighs 50 kilograms. The two handed swords were at least 1.5 meters long. They also had a “blunderbuss”. It took two men to handle it and I think they said it could be fired up to two times an hour. This was stuff in a German castle, maybe in England or elsewhere it was different.
That would be unusually heavy for battle-armor, even full plate. Quality steel plate at least was usually half that and well-distributed on the body. Pretty similar to full kit for a modern soldier and better distributed at that. Later armor like plate was actually rather more agile than earlier stuff like chain mail.
More likely if that weight was accurate, it was either just a fancy showpiece or specially designed jousting armor, which was more massive stuff never meant for combat.
Size didn’t necessarily make them slow. More it depends how it was used. While wide swings might be slowish compared to a saber, often large blades like that ( depending on the period ) were wielded “half-sword”. Fighting by two guys in plate armor with longswords often more closely resembled two crabs trying to peel each other out of their shell. Really after the High Middle Ages most longswords depended much more on point than edge and probably weren’t swung freely in big arcs all that much, except maybe against unarmored opponents.
