Happy to be slaves? Nope. Sang as they toiled? Yup. Southern aristocracy believed them slaves to be happy because they sang? Somewhat. But they had too many examples of slave rebellions to keep in mind to be too complacent.
Yeah, the southern belles were tended by little girls fanning them and “mammies” looking after them, and the house slaves seemed pretty harmless. That’s because anybody who seemed angry about their situation or liable to do anything about it wasn’t allowed to work in the house, but was kept out in the fields.
I’m not saying that this is a GOOD thing, understand. But the movie shows how the antebellum South (and the bellum South) looked to the Southern slaveholders. I can’t believe that people don’t understand this. Just because Mitchell doesn’t describe it and the film-makers don’t depict slave beatings and attempts to run away doesn’t mean they didn’t exist. But GWTW isn’t a movie about slavery – it’s about the effects of the Civil War on those who lived through it.A writer or film-maker today, in the wake of the Civil Rights movement of the 195s and 1960s, of the riots of the 1960s and of the 1990s, would never dream of ignoring the story from the point of view of the slaves. The lack of it is, nowadays, too obvious. But GWTW was a product of the 1920s and 1930s, and priorities and sensibilities were different then. GWTW doesn’t depict the KKK as heroes, for cryin’ out loud, like Birth of a Nation does.
Sorry, friedo, but I just can’t agree with you. It had some fun pokes at the other movies, but it was just one long dirty joke after another and I expect a little more from a movie than that.
Oh, gee, thanks, Legomancer, I’d almost managed to forget Witches of Eastwick. ::shudder::
Maybe I should have excluded the word “sang,” because I knew that it would not go by unnoticed. smiley Either way, they all seemed way too happy. There’s a difference between not seeming angry about one’s situation, and smiling from ear to ear blissfully.
I would take that statement a few steps further: I think the film (more than) implies that the American Civil War should never have happened. Its main raison d’etre seems to be to demonstrate how perfect life in the South was before the war, and that those damn Yankees should have left the Southerners to their own device. Sort of like saying “hey, look… We were happy, and our slaves were happy, so you bastards should have left us well alone.” In other words, the little creature-comforts of spoiled brats like Scarlett O’Hara were much more important than the emancipation of all those slaves.
Maybe it’s due to my late 20th/early 21st Century sensitivities, but this idea makes me uncomfortable.
Other actual films I have had the misfortune of viewing:
To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar: just the idea of Patrick Swayze in drag should have tipped me off.
Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death: See Bill Maher before he was on Politically Incorrect! Actually, don’t.
Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-o-rama: Actually, I rented this while working at Blockbuster video, KNOWING it was going to be bad. Absolutely atrocious.
I have seen everything that is out in theaters right now, so I have a lot to say about some of the currnet stuff. Planet of the Apes…bad movie, awful movie, hornedous. ICK. Then there is Jurrassic Park III, wtf is this movie? “How many diferent ways can we put dinosaurs in a movie???” Again, bad movie. And the plt to The Fast and the Furious was really bad. It jumped around a lot, and basically amde no sense. I mean, why did this happen, and why did that happen? Hell, I could start an entire thread on things in taht movie taht made no sense. I would’ve completely hated the movie if I didn’t like cars so much.
I’m sorry, I know I just posted, but, I cannot resist. I thought I was the only person who had ever seen this movie, much less hard of it. I watched it when I was about 11 or 12 (hehe),it came on Showtime, and even at that age I thought it was awful, apart from the blatent nudity, of course (damn prepubecent hormones ;))
I had a real MST3K experience when I went to see Congo.
Man, that movie was bad, but I guess I had fun.
I’ve been told that Godzilla (with Matthew Broderick) was bad. When I went to see it though, I thought it was a hysterical satire. I had no idea it was supposed to be serious.
The Mummy made me feel like I needed a shower. I think that was the most racist movie (in the mainstream) in recent memory.
But the all time worst for me was a movie that made me want to get up and bitch slap every single person involved in it: Kids. That movie really, really pissed me off. I knew some of the kids in it. I knew a lot of kids in that general social circle. If I had ever seen anyone behave like that I would have beat them within an inch of their lives. For their own good. It still just makes me angry to think about how that was the image of me and my peers that fuck Larry Clark sold to America and how all those other little fuckers were willing to sell out for a shot at screentime.
I haven’t even read any other replies here. I’m just going to list the shit movies i’ve sat through because I’m such a movie whore.
Robocop 2
Highlander 2
Universal Soldier 2
Speces 2
The Jetsons
The Crying Game
The Thin Red Line
Natural Born Killers
Eyes Wide Shut
Blair Witch 2
Godzilla
Eye Of The Beholder
Jurassic Park II
Boys And Girls (Girlfriend wanted to see it)
The Ninth Gate
Shadow Of The Vampire
Crash
eXiStense(sp)
Event Horizon
I know there are others…many, many others…but I’ve blocked out the memory.
Forgot about this yesterday. Not the worst movie I ever paid to see, but the worst movie I was paid to see.
My high school job was at a movie theater in the small town where I grew up. Rural East Tennesee around 1988. One of the biggest movies ever to hit the old Cowan Oldham Theater was the Patrick Swazye classic Roadhouse. Played for two months, I shit you not.
A couple weeks into the run, the owner / projectionist noticed that the film was always breaking. The problem turned out to be that the platter that recieved the film after it had run through the projector was spinning at a slightly faster rate than the platter that fed the projector. No big deal to fix for a qualified tech, right?
The problem is that “qualified techs” didn’t visit our particular neck of the back woods very often. So my boss puts in a service call and we wait. The interim solution was that someone had to sit in the booth with the projector and keep an eye on the film as it ran through. If the film started to get a little tight, that someone would lightly touch the recieving platter and slow it down enough so that the film could get the proper amount of slack and not break. Guess who got to do that? Yours truly. It wasn’t an exact science–I still had plenty of film breaks. But my boss assured me that it wasn’t happening as frequently as it had been before.
It took two weeks for the repairman to show up. In that time, I saw Roadhouse twice a night, three times on weekends. The horror…
Am I the only sucker to have seen the horrific North? This movie is so bad it even motivated Roger Ebert’s book titled, *I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie
*.
Not only have I also seen Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama, but like poopah chalupa, I saw Laser Blast at a drive-in.
The worst movie I’ve recently paid to go see: Manhood and Other Modern Dilemmas, a French flick at the Seattle International Film Festival. Read my review here.
God, I LOVED the Thin Red Line - I thought it was brilliant. I thought you felt the uncertainty and fear of the soldiers, it was unpredictable and human. Much better than Tom Hanks Cheesefest O’Rama Private Ryan.
And I actually felt the same way about Saving Private Ryan, that despite the occasional melodramic scene, it showed the horror of war very well. To me, The Thin Red Line was set in an alternate universe where only poets and community theater actors got drafted.
I saw it with my buddy Bryan, and an hour or so into the movie I swore to him that if the narrator started another “What is this war? Why must we die” monologues, I’d either walk or burn the screen down. I decided to walk.
I was also pissed off that the only reason George Clooney was in the thing was to show him in the trailer.
For all its faults, the thirty minute beach landing in Private Ryan said more about war, with minimal dialogue, than the entire Thin Red Travelogue could manage.
I’ve seen it, but not in the theatre. (I was replying earlier only about films I had paid to see in a theatre). We rented North once. We figured it couldn’t possibly be that bad. We were so very very wrong. I hated that movie so much. Possibly more than Ebert did (that was one of my all-time favorite reviews by him, btw). Not only was it bad, it reinforced stereotypes and then went a step further and invented new ones.
The Texan couple that wanted North to “replace” their dead son, who IIRC had died from over-eating? WTF was that all about?
The governor (and wife) of Hawaii who wanted to use North as the poster child for their new campaign to get people to move there instead of just visiting? Ridiculous! And could the writer (and I use that term loosely) have possibly used the word “crack” more times in a single scene?
And then there was the Eskimo family. They took a six month trip to put the grandpa (Abe Vigoda) on an ice floe so he could sail off and die! Who puts Abe Vigoda on an ice floe? And why would they?
And I hated that little evil kid. The blond boy (North’s nemesis). I have never seen a movie that made me want to maim a child, but I wanted to kill that little [expletive deleted]*. I’ve seen The Good Son and I couldn’t even hate Macauley Culkin very much in that!
And North was such a little stuck up, snotty, holier-than-thou SOB! If I were his parents, I would have cheered when he decided to leave! What a little brat!
I could say more, but this is not the Pit and this post has gone on too long already.
[sub]*I do not advocate violence against children. I have nothing against the actor who played that kid. But if I ever get a magic ticket (a la The Last Action Hero), the first thing I’ll do is go into that movie (North) and make that kid suffer.[/sub]
I forgot about this and would like to add it: Joe vs. the Volcano. Take a good premise and completely crap all over it by introducing horrifically silly “comedy” and a gutless ending. I don’t know who directed and wrote it, but I imagine them watching “Brazil” and saying “Oh, this idea could be so much better if only it had Tom Hanks in it, was funnier, and had a happy ending!”
Three pages and no one’s mentioned Mary Lambert’s aptly titled 1987 effort Siesta? Big name cast (Ellen Barkin, Gabriel Byrne, Isabella Rossellini, Jodie Foster, Julian Sands, Martin Sheen, Grace Jones), all utterly wasted in one of the most ill-conceived, trite, pointless strips of celluloid ever created. A friend and I saw this because we expected it to be bad, but it far exceeded our expectations.
1.The Flintstones movie- Rosie O’Donnell as Betty? What the hell were they thinking? This movie did a horrible injustice to the original show, and they shouldn’t have tried to make it in the first place.
2.The Wizard- (shudder…) I’ve heard of product placement in movies, but I think this was movie placement in a product. I liked it when I was seven, because at that age I didn’t realize that it was a two and half-hour ad for Nintendo consisting of an idiotic plot and horrible acting. I can’t even believe a movie this bad was legal- I mean, in almost every single shot there is either a Nintendo product or someone is talking about Nintendo. And it must be just a coincidence that the whole ending of this so-called movie revolves around the release of Mario Bros. 3, which just happened to coincide with the actual release of that game in real life. Yuck.
3.Deep Blue Sea- Even by action movie standards this was just terrible. (note to self- never, ever pay to see any movie starring LL Cool J again.)
Ah, but it had one redeeming quality - the gripping portrayal of Brad Pitt’s death. He zings through the air one way, and then flies back another way. The first time I watched it, we kept rewinding the movie to play that scene over and over again. Too funny.
My vote for worst movie I paid money for - A.I. Ow, that one hurt.
