I saw it last week. A marvellous film. As @redrum said, it immerses you in the experience of two soldiers. I was absolutely hooked.
MOVIES 2016
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Definitely some Superhero fatigue around.
Seems like only yesterday Sam Raimi was making Spiderman films; it’s been rebooted twice since then.
Enough already!
They even cast Ben Affleck as Batman - he isn’t even British!
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When did Batman become British?
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When Christian Bale played him!
Ben Affleck tells a story of bumping into Christian Bale and being congratulated on gaining the part. Until that conversation BA had thought CB to be American, so I imagine many other Americans do too.
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@Private:
When Christian Bale played him!
So it takes only one british actor and Batman is Brittonized??
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Correct AetV. :-D
On that basis pretty much all the superheroes are British, which is fine by us. The Americans can play the baddies. Actually they are usually British too!
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Tom Holland = Spiderman
Henry Cavill = Superman
Christian Bale = Batman
Aeron Taylor-Johnson = Kick Ass -
Every Imperial officer of the Empire in the Star Wars franchise… British… we always knew you guys were evil.
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And who played Obi Wan? Or the two young heroes in the last one for that matter ……
Us Brits do have a proud history of playing Hollywood’s baddies. But increasingly we seem to get to be the good guys too.
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@Private:
Us Brits do have a proud history of playing Hollywood’s baddies.
There’s indeed a long cinematic tradition for this sort of thing. In American sword-and-sandal movies, ancient Romans – who typically serve as the bad guys – are almost invariably portrayed by British actors, whereas the oppressed and heavily taxed subject peoples of the imperial provinces are usually played by Americans. The 1950s version of Ben-Hur, with the American Charlton Heston in the title role and the Irish Stephen Boyd as the evil Messala, is a good example. You can see the same principle at work in the 1981 TV miniseries Masada, in which Peter Strauss (a New Yorker) plays the leader of the Rebel Alliance (oops – sorry, wrong movie) and the very British Peter O’Toole plays the commander of the Imperial forces, Lucius Flavius Silva. In that one, there’s even a touch of class structure: the Roman officers all speak in BBC English, while the enlisted men – one of them played by Warren Clarke – have Cockney accents.
I guess that this movie tradition evolved when American casting directors realized that, by casting British actors as Romans and Americans as non-Romans, a nice contrast of accents would be produced: the Romans would sound “foreign”, while nevertheless still speaking the same language (English) as the non-Romans.
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The biggest crisis facing American actors today is the influx of Australians who can effortlessly wriggle into leading, big time roles (that many stage-background English actors have struggled with) for the American movie-goer: Mel Gibson is the trailblazer*, followed by Russell Crowe and Hugh Jackman, and now we have the Hemsworth brothers. And I haven’t even gotten into the actresses, including Nicole Kidman, Cate Blanchett and Naomi Watts.
*in the modern era, Errol Flynn is the true original.
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One thing for sure, doesn’t matter if you’re British or American… if you’re an albino, you’re playing the bad guy.
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@CWO:
I guess that this movie tradition evolved when American casting directors realized that, by casting British actors as Romans and Americans as non-Romans, a nice contrast of accents would be produced: the Romans would sound “foreign”, while nevertheless still speaking the same language (English) as the non-Romans.
Hi Marc. Possibly Britain’s Imperial past and the USA’s founding myth underpinned such casting for imperial Rome. Which lead to discovering that British actors were rather good at portraying unsympathetic characters. General Veers may be right: would Laurence Olivier, Charles Loughton or Peter Ustinov ever have conveyed the nobility of soul that Kirk Douglas gave Spartacus? It’s a bad film to use as an example, though, with some variations in casting from this supposed “rule”.
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@Private:
Possibly Britain’s Imperial past and the USA’s founding myth underpinned such casting for imperial Rome. Which lead to discovering that British actors were rather good at portraying unsympathetic characters. General Veers may be right: would Laurence Olivier, Charles Loughton or Peter Ustinov ever have conveyed the nobility of soul that Kirk Douglas gave Spartacus? It’s a bad film to use as an example, though, with some variations in casting from this supposed “rule”.
I haven’t seen Spartacus, but I did see Peter Ustinov play Nero in Quo Vadis, where he does a marvelous job of portraying the Emperor as a pathological narcissist. One of his best lines comes near the end of the movie, when an enraged mob is storming his palace. Faced with his impending doom, Nero blends terror and pettiness when he expresses his incomprehension at the idea that his own subjects are intending to kill him: “How can they bear the thought of living in a world without me?”
Watching that film was a weird experience for me because one of the main characters, Petronius, is played by Leo Genn, who I remembered very well from the WWII movie The Longest Day, in which he plays a British officer on Eisenhower’s staff.
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Ben Affleck did an ok enough job, I think, hard to be as good as Bale, anyway. He cant escape the script.
What was so lacking is some dry or dark or you name it humor in this movie. Granted, I might not have captured every nuance a native speaker would have, but they could have done so much more, and still stayed dark and world-ending.
I struggled the whole movie if I should find Lex credible, but all in all the movie is not as bad as critics say, imo, although clearly, to me, far inferior than Nolans. It cant escape from being called a bit shallow, thats true, a bit too schematic.
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@CWO:
I haven’t seen Spartacus
Well you must Marc. In my view it is far and away the best of the swords and sandals epics. I’ve probably seen it 20 times over the years and it still engages my emotions (to the detriment of my few masculine credentials!).
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@Private:
In my view it is far and away the best of the swords and sandals epics. I’ve probably seen it 20 times over the years and it still engages my emotions (to the detriment of my few masculine credentials!).
“It is only within the last two hundred years that Englishmen have become ashamed of tears. Our forefathers were not ashamed to weep openly, and the references to tears in the literature of England proves to us that, to the men of other days, a man incapable of tears was believed to be a man hard, inhuman, and inaccessible to mercy. Looking at Winston Churchill at that revealing moment, I thought that in some extraordinary way he belongs definitely to an older England, to the England of the Tudors, a violent swashbuckling England perhaps, but a warm and emotional England too, an England as yet untouched by the hardness of an age of steel.”
– H.V. Morton, Atlantic Meeting -
@Private:
@CWO:
I haven’t seen Spartacus
Well you must Marc. In my view it is far and away the best of the swords and sandals epics. I’ve probably seen it 20 times over the years and it still engages my emotions (to the detriment of my few masculine credentials!).
As long as you don’t notice that in the big battle half the Roman army is just a painted backdrop.
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As long as you don’t notice that in the big battle half the Roman army is just a painted backdrop.
In fairness, so were most of the Imperial Stormtroopers in that spectacular scene in Return of the Jedi when the Emperor arrives at the Death Star, where a very large guard of honour is waiting for him. Their absolute rigidity as they stand at attention wasn’t just the result of superb military discipline.
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@CWO:
In fairness, so were most of the Imperial Stormtroopers in that spectacular scene in Return of the Jedi when the Emperor arrives at the Death Star, where a very large guard of honour is waiting for him.
I’m sure the Emperor said “I’m only going to ask this once, are there any exhaust ports that lead directly to the main reactor on this new Death Star?”
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I’m sure the Emperor said “I’m only going to ask this once, are there any exhaust ports that lead directly to the main reactor on this new Death Star?”
Probable answer: “No, but in order to plug that gap in the old design we had to leave large parts of the structure of the new design completely open.”
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