And I wonder whether you’ve noticed a character that can be found in practically every movie made today? I call her the “all conquering female.” Almost without exception, she is underestimated by men and then proves herself more intelligent, cleverer, more courageous, and more skilled than any man. Whether we’re talking about a romantic comedy, an office-drama, or an adventure movie, the all conquering female will almost inevitably show up. And she has to show her worth in a domineering way, that is to say, over and against the men. For her to appear strong, they have to appear weak. For a particularly good case in point, watch the most recent Star Wars film.
Now I perfectly understand the legitimacy of feminist concerns regarding the portrayal of women in the media as consistently demure, retiring, and subservient to men. I grant that, in most of the action/adventure movies that I saw growing up, women would typically twist an ankle or get captured and then require rescuing by the swashbuckling male hero — and I realize how galling this must have been to generations of women. And therefore, a certain correction was undoubtedly in order. But what is problematic now is the Nietzschean quality of the reaction, by which I mean, the insistence that female power has to be asserted over and against males, that there is an either/or, zero-sum conflict between men and women. It is not enough, in a word, to show women as intelligent, savvy, and good; you have to portray men as stupid, witless, and irresponsible. That this savage contrast is having an effect especially on younger men is becoming increasingly apparent.
In the midst of a “you-go-girl” feminist culture, many boys and young men feel adrift, afraid that any expression of their own good qualities will be construed as aggressive or insensitive. If you want concrete proof of this, take a look at the statistics contrasting female and male success at the university level. And you can see the phenomenon in films such as Fight Club and The Intern. In the former, the Brad Pitt character turns to his friend and laments, “we’re thirty year old boys;” and in the latter, Robert De Niro’s classic male type tries to whip into shape a number of twenty-something male colleagues who are rumpled, unsure of themselves, without ambition — and of course under the dominance of an all conquering female.
It might be the case that, in regard to money, power, and honor, a zero-sum dynamic obtains, but it decidedly does not obtain in regard to real virtue. The truly courageous person is not threatened by another person’s courage; the truly temperate man is not intimidated by the temperance of someone else; the truly just person is not put off by the justice of a countryman; and authentic love positively rejoices in the love shown by another. And therefore, it should be altogether possible to hold up the virtue of a woman without denying virtue to a man. In point of fact, if we consult the “all conquering female” characters in films and TV, we see that they often exemplify the very worst of the traditional male qualities: aggression, suspicion, hyper-sensitivity, cruelty, etc. This is what happens when a Nietzschean framework has replaced a classical one.
Bishop Robert Barron, “The Trouble With the ‘You Go Girl’ Culture”, Word on Fire, 2016-10-18.
July 30, 2020
QotD: The “strong female protagonist” in movies and on TV
July 25, 2020
Shakespeare Summarized: The Tempest
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 5 May 2014At last! It’s not a tragedy!
It may have been Shakespeare’s final play, but that doesn’t mean it’s my final summary! Hopefully, you lucky folks will get to hear my melodious rambling for a while yet.
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July 22, 2020
A brief look at the life of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s “main fixer”
Michael Coren discusses the career and reputation of Henry VIII’s powerful and capable Lord Chamberlain until he fell from favour and was executed in 1540:
Portrait of Thomas Cromwell, First Earl of Essex painted by Hans Holbein 1532-33.
From the Frick Collection via Wikimedia Commons.
The panoply of British history doesn’t include too many monsters. The nation was founded more on meetings than massacres, and other than the usual round of chronic blood-letting in the Middle Ages, and a civil war in the seventeenth-century, the English have left it to the French, the Russians, and the Germans to provide the mass murderers and the genuine villains. But if anyone was generally regarded as being unscrupulous, with a touch of the devil always around his character, it was Thomas Cromwell, the main fixer for Henry VIII in the 1530s, and according to the Oscar-winning movie A Man for all Seasons, the dark politician who had hagiographical Thomas More executed. For decades both on British television and in Hollywood epics it was this self-made man who was willing to smash the monasteries, torture innocent witnesses into giving false evidence, and assemble lies to have that nice Anne Boleyn beheaded.
This was the dictatorship of reputation. Historians provided the framework, and popular entertainment dressed it all up in countless Tudor biopics. But then it all began to change.
The first person to seriously challenge the caricature was himself a victim of lies and hatred. The revered Cambridge historian GR Elton was born Gottfried Rudolf Otto Ehrenberg, son of a German Jewish family of noted scholars, who fled to Britain shortly before the Holocaust. He’s also, by the way, the uncle of the comedian and writer Ben Elton. GR, Geoffrey Rudolph, was one of the dominant post-war historians, and insisted that modern Britain, with its secular democracy and parliamentary system, was very much the child of Thomas Cromwell the gifted administrator and political visionary.
So we had the Cromwell wars. On the one side were the traditionalist, often Roman Catholic, writers who insisted that Cromwell was a corrupt brute and a cruel tyrant; and the rival school that regarded him as the first modern leader of the country, setting it on a road that would distinguish it from the ancient regimes of the European continent. But there was more. While previous political leaders – the term “Prime Minister” didn’t develop until the early eighteenth-century – had sometimes been of relatively humble origins, and Cromwell’s mentor and predecessor Thomas Wolsey was the son of a butcher, they were invariably clerics. Cromwell wasn’t only from rough Putney on the edge of London, and the son of a blacksmith, but he was a layman, and someone who had lived abroad, even fought for foreign armies.
Here was have the embodiment of the great change: the autodidact who was multi-lingual, well travelled, reformed in his religion and politics, and prepared to rip the country out of its medieval roots. Yet no matter how many historians might believe and write this, the culture is notoriously difficult to change, and understandably indifferent to academics. Not, however, to novelists. And in 2009 the award-winning author Hilary Mantel published Wolf Hall, a fictional account of Cromwell’s life from 1500 to 1535. Three years later came the sequel, Bring Up the Bodies. Both books won the Man Booker Prize, an extraordinary achievement for two separate works. The trilogy was completed recently with The Mirror and the Light. The first two volumes were turned into an enormously successful stage play and a six-part television show. Forget noble academics working away in relative obscurity, this was sophisticated work watched and read by tens of millions of people. Cromwell was back.
“It is as a murderer that Cromwell has come down to posterity: who turned monks out on to the roads, infiltrated spies into every corner of the land, and unleashed terror in the service of the state”, wrote Mantel in the Daily Telegraph back in 2012. “If these attributions contain a grain of truth, they also embody a set of lazy assumptions, bundles of prejudice passed from one generation to the next. Novelists and dramatists, who on the whole would rather sensationalise than investigate, have seized on these assumptions to create a reach-me-down villain.”
July 4, 2020
Fixing Gettysburg: The Third Day
Atun-Shei Films
Published 3 Jul 2020In this three-part series, I review a classic Ron Maxwell film about a little known historical event that no one talks about called the Battle of Gettysburg. I also present an abbreviated and oversimplified history of the battle, while simultaneously criticizing the movie for presenting an abbreviated and oversimplified history of the battle.
In the third episode, I discuss the third day of fighting on July 3, 1863 – including the morning scrap on Culp’s Hill, East Cavalry Field, and Pickett’s Charge.
Support Atun-Shei Films on Patreon ► https://www.patreon.com/atunsheifilms
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#Gettysburg #CivilWar #VideoEssay
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Merch ► https://atun-sheifilms.bandcamp.com~REFERENCES~
[1] Frederick Tilberg, Scott Hartwig, John Heiser: Gettysburg National Military Park Handbook (2013). Historic Map and Print Company, Page 49
[2] James Longstreet: From Manassas to Appomattox, Da Capo Edition (1992). Da Capo Press, Page 392
[3] “Haskell’s Account of the Battle of Gettysburg”. Bartleby: Great Books Online https://www.bartleby.com/43/3504.html
[4] “East Cavalry Battlefield – Ranger John Nicholas” (2014). GettysburgNPS https://youtu.be/AfwBOOFFlXQ
July 3, 2020
Fixing Gettysburg: The Second Day
Atun-Shei Films
Published 2 Jul 2020In this three-part series, I review a classic Ron Maxwell film about a little known historical event that no one talks about called the Battle of Gettysburg. I also present an abbreviated and oversimplified history of the battle, while simultaneously criticizing the movie for presenting an abbreviated and oversimplified history of the battle.
In the second episode, I discuss the first day of fighting on July 2, 1863 – including Dan Sickles’ shenanigans on the left, the 20th Maine on Little Round Top, the 1st Minnesota, and the night battle on Culp’s Hill.
Support Atun-Shei Films on Patreon ► https://www.patreon.com/atunsheifilms
Leave a Tip via Paypal ► https://www.paypal.me/atunsheifilms (Between now and October, all donations made here will go toward the production of The Sudbury Devil, our historical feature film)
#Gettysburg #CivilWar #VideoEssay
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Merch ► https://atun-sheifilms.bandcamp.com~REFERENCES~
[1] Stephen W. Sears: “General Longstreet and the Lost Cause” (2005). American Heritage Magazine https://www.americanheritage.com/gene…
[2] W.C. Storrick: The Battle of Gettysburg (1931). J Horace McFarland Company, Page 26
[3] Frederick Tilberg, Scott Hartwig, John Heiser: Gettysburg National Military Park Handbook (2013). Historic Map and Print Company, Page 31-32
[4] Storrick, Page 27
[5] William B. Styple: Generals in Bronze (2005). Belle Grove Publishing Company, Page 222
[6] “The 1st Minnesota Infantry at Gettysburg” (2014). Iron Brigader https://ironbrigader.com/2014/01/03/1…
[7] Storrick, Page 29-30
[8] Tilberg, Hartwig, Heiser, Page 45
July 2, 2020
Fixing Gettysburg: The First Day
Atun-Shei Films
Published 1 Jul 2020In this three-part series, I review a classic Ron Maxwell film about a little known historical event that no one talks about called the Battle of Gettysburg. I also present an abbreviated and oversimplified history of the battle, while simultaneously criticizing the movie for presenting an abbreviated and oversimplified history of the battle.
In this first episode, I discuss the first day of fighting on July 1, 1863 – including Buford’s cavalry, the Iron Brigade, the Railroad Cut, and John Burns.
Support Atun-Shei Films on Patreon ► https://www.patreon.com/atunsheifilms
Leave a Tip via Paypal ► https://www.paypal.me/atunsheifilms (Between now and October, all donations made here will go toward the production of The Sudbury Devil, our historical feature film)
#Gettysburg #CivilWar #VideoEssay
Watch our film ALIEN, BABY! free with Prime ► http://a.co/d/3QjqOWv
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Instagram ► https://www.instagram.com/atunsheifilms
Merch ► https://atun-sheifilms.bandcamp.com~REFERENCES~
[1] “General John Buford’s Report of his Cavalry’s Action at Gettysburg” (2015). Iron Brigader https://ironbrigader.com/2015/06/22/g…
[2] W.C. Storrick: The Battle of Gettysburg (1931). J Horace McFarland Company, Page 11
[3] “The First Day at Gettysburg: Then and Now.” American Battlefield Trust https://www.battlefields.org/learn/ar…
[4] “Lt. Colonel Rufus Dawes Describes the Fighting of the 6th Wisconsin Infantry at Gettysburg” (2013). Iron Brigader https://ironbrigader.com/2013/06/13/l…
[5] “Civilian John Burns at the Battle of Gettysburg (2018)”. C-Span https://www.c-span.org/video/?447809-…
[5 1/2] Allen C. Redwood: “The Confederate in the Field”. Civil War Home https://www.civilwarhome.com/confeder…
[6] Codie Eash: “The Wounded Wisconsinite Who Witnessed Pickett’s Charge” (2018). National Museum of Civil War Medicine https://www.civilwarmed.org/reed/?fbc…
[7] Cooper Wingert: “The Confederate ‘Slave Hunt’ and the Gettysburg Campaign” (2020). Emerging Civil War https://emergingcivilwar.com/2020/05/…
July 1, 2020
The Somme then and now … in full HD
MC C
Published 1 Aug 2016100 years ago Malins and McDowell exposed their film to the light capturing a moment in time.
It’s very difficult to understand and watch the original film as they were very limited by technology and the danger. Malins risked his life on several occasions making this film, being right on the front line with a huge box camera sticking out above the trench. After watching the film many times, over many years, I wanted to find these locations and stand in their foot prints and re-film.
Some locations were easy to find, some took much research and some I haven’t yet been able to locate, but all the ones in this documentary are within yards to feet of where they filmed originally, none are guesses or just possibilities. I hope you enjoy watching and it helps you to understand please leave comments this is worth more to me than earning money I ask for nothing but love remarks.
May 3, 2020
Slaying Gladiator
Over at Steyn Online, Kathy Shaidle tag-teamed someone else on staff (it probably rhymes with Dark Time) to put the caligulae to Ridley Scott’s Gladiator with Russell Crowe in the leading role:
Germania, 180 AD. Rome is at war with the, er, Germaniacs, who stand around in the Black Forest grunting like Brits on the piss who’ve nutted themselves in one pub fight too many. You need a cool head to take on the Roman Army, and the only one the barbarians have belongs to Caesar’s emissary, whom they thoughtfully decapitated before sending back. They wave the old noggin around like a treasured footie ball, grunting, “Ug Eugh Blug” or, translated from the original gibberish, “Over ‘ere, mate.” It’s a scene that rings oddly contemporary in the age of Isis, although when I first saw it, a year before 9/11, it gave me the giggles. But then barbarians always seem funny from a distance, don’t they? Here they scratch their pelts and grunt some more, seemingly unconcerned by the fact that the Roman legions are lighting up their blazing arrows and fireballs, the smart bombs of the day. The ensuing battle, whose outcome would seem never to be in doubt, is apparently the final bloody act in a twelve-year war.
Despite having had twelve years to get there, the Emperor’s son nevertheless shows up late. “Did I miss it?” he simpers. “Did I miss the battle?” The son’s name is Commodus. No, not Commodus, but Commodus, which sounds like he dates back to a Mel Brooks sketch circa 1962 but in fact goes all the way back to the real Roman Empire. Commodus is that old stand-by of the dynastic drama, the disappointing son. His father, Marcus Aurelius, is a noble philosopher-king, but Commodus is no chip off the old block. We can tell that from the moment we first glimpse Commodus, sprawled in his commodious caravan, but just in case we miss the point Joaquin Phoenix lays on the mincing like a trowel, and the make-up, too. He’s weak, vain, decadent, and has the hots for his sister Lucilla (Connie Nielsen). Even the Bushes would think twice before running this guy for emperor.
Having spent 25 years waging war for the glory of Rome, Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris) senses there’s not much point leaving it in the hands of an emperor who’d be queen for a day. So he tells Commodus he will not succeed him. Instead, he is going to make his brave general Maximus a “trustee” until Rome is ready to become a republic again. Maximus (Russell Crowe) is a Colin Powell type of general: a nice fellow everyone respects who supposedly has no public ambitions. Commodus, though, has other ideas, and suffocates his father. As the old showbiz saying has it, dying is easy, Commodus is hard. The effete decadent mincer becomes emperor, and promptly orders the death of Maximus and the crucifixion of the general’s wife and child back in Spain.
But Maximus escapes, and what follows in Gladiator is the story of how he takes his revenge and becomes the eponymous Gladiator lui-même. It’s payback time, and, under Ridley Scott’s lean direction, that means there’s no room for sub-plots. Somewhere in pre-production, the archers lobbed their flaming shafts at the script and laid it as bare as those Germanic forests. Not only are there no sub-plots, there’s barely any plot for any sub-plot to be sub-. Once the wife and kid are dead, there’s nothing very emotional at stake. There’s no romantic interest, unless you count Commodus trying to get it on with sis. There’s a hint of backstory at the Senate, where the massed ranks of British Equity have gathered for a vast toga party (the Toga Party having a majority in the Senate at that time). But there’s no dialogue worth speaking of, except statements of the obvious. When the mob is being fickle, as mobs are wont to be, the Emperor is told: “The mob is fickle, sire.” All the lines have been pre-tested in earlier toga romps, and the only one that seems to have been specially written for this picture is Oliver Reed’s complaint that some crook dealer has sold him a pair of homosexual giraffes.
But none of that matters because Ridley Scott photographs the film so brilliantly and mesmerically that they could all be speaking Germaniac and it wouldn’t impair the storytelling. It helps that almost everyone in the movie is a pre-designated great actor, so you tend to assume there’s a lot of great acting going on, even though most of it’s just thoughtful reaction shots. The mob bays for blood. Cut to Derek Jacobi looking thoughtful. They bay some more. Cut to Connie Nielsen looking pensive from atop her fabulous neck. They stop baying. Cut to Russell Crowe looking thoughtful. What are they thinking so pensively? “Hmm. I wish I’d got the gay giraffe line”?
May 2, 2020
Gabriel Over the White House – “the most unapologetic celebration of fascism ever put on film”
Jack Cashill found this “gem” while watching Turner Classic Movies during the Wuhan Coronavirus lockdown and was amazed:
By now, I have seen most of TCM’s movies, but one aired this past week I had not even heard of. On a whim, I DVR’ed it. Good move. Called Gabriel Over the White House, this 1933 liberal wet dream proved to be the most unapologetic celebration of fascism ever put on film.
I watched it wide-eyed. The movie opens with the inauguration of Jud Hammond. A laissez-faire back-slapper, Hammond sees the White House as a way to enrich himself and reward his cronies, Depression be damned. The audience assumes Hammond is a Republican.
Out joyriding one day, Hammond crashes his car and lapses into coma. While still comatose, the Angel Gabriel visits Hammond and turns him into a committed and caring progressive. Is there another kind?
Upon waking, Hammond convenes his cabinet of corrupt self-servers and rejects their plea that the party must come first. Instead, Hammond insists their first priority be the American people. He refuses to use the U.S. Army against a marching mass of the unemployed and fires the secretary of state when he objects.
“I suggest you read the Constitution of the United States. You’ll find the President has some power,” Hammond warns his cabinet members. Some power? Fully indifferent to the Constitution, Hammond grabs all the power that can possibly be grabbed.
When the cabinet objects to his usurpation of power, Hammond fires the cabinet. When Congress threatens to impeach Hammond, he declares martial law and dispenses with Congress. When accused of being a dictator, Hammond argues that his is a dictatorship based on some imagined Jeffersonian principle of Democracy, namely the greatest good for the greatest number of people.
Now with total power, Hammond enacts a national banking law, stops foreclosures, provides direct aid to some 55 million farmers, circumvents private industry and launches his own “Army of Construction.”
A young aide, Hartley Beekman, and his female counterpart, Pendie Molloy, serve as something of a progressive chorus. “The way he thinks is so simple and honest that it sounds a little crazy,” says Beekman of Hammond.
“He’s doing the things you wanted,” Molloy answers. “And If he’s mad, it’s a divine madness. Look at the chaos and catastrophe sane men have brought about.”
The divine madness includes the creation of a Federal Police force, a subset of the Army, with young Beekman at its head. When the nation’s chief racketeer refuses to go back to his unnamed home country, Hammond warns him that the government is about to “muscle in on his racket” and federalize the sale of alcohol.
The racketeer fights back, and Beekman employs a legion of tanks Waco-style against the racketeers. When captured, the racketeers are all hauled before a three-man court martial headed by Beekman, promptly declared guilty, and executed en masse by a firing squad.
Several years ago, the movie was brought to my attention and I found this clip on YouTube that I suspect captures the essence of the film:
James Lileks describes it as “a remarkable movie. And I don’t mean ‘astonishingly good, technically superb, visually ingenious.’ I mean utterly insane.”
April 21, 2020
The Curator at Home | Film Review: Kelly’s Heroes | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published 19 Apr 2020Join Curator David Willey at Home, as he reviews the classic film: Kelly’s Heroes.
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April 9, 2020
Lawrence of Arabia | Based on a True Story
The Cynical Historian
Published 6 Nov 2015The classic film Lawrence of Arabia, is one of the most beautiful movies of all time, but it has its flaws.
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references:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrenc…http://www.wordandfilm.com/2013/08/wh…
http://www.pri.org/stories/2013-12-16…
most beautiful movies list:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kj73a…
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wiki:
Lawrence of Arabia is a 1962 epic historical drama film based on the life of T. E. Lawrence. It was directed by David Lean and produced by Sam Spiegel through his British company Horizon Pictures, with the screenplay by Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson. The film stars Peter O’Toole in the title role. It is widely considered one of the greatest and most influential films in the history of cinema. The dramatic score by Maurice Jarre and the Super Panavision 70 cinematography by Freddie Young are also highly acclaimed.
The film was nominated for ten Oscars at the 35th Academy Awards in 1963; it won seven in total: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Score, Best Cinematography (Color), Best Art Direction (Color), Best Film Editing and Best Sound Mixing. It also won the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Drama and the BAFTA Awards for Best Film and Outstanding British Film.The film depicts Lawrence’s experiences in the Arabian Peninsula during World War I, in particular his attacks on Aqaba and Damascus and his involvement in the Arab National Council. Its themes include Lawrence’s emotional struggles with the personal violence inherent in war, his own identity, and his divided allegiance between his native Britain and its army and his new-found comrades within the Arabian desert tribes. As well as O’Toole, the film stars Alec Guinness, Jack Hawkins, Anthony Quinn, Omar Sharif, Anthony Quayle, Claude Rains and Arthur Kennedy.
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Hashtags: #History #LawrenceOfArabia #WWI #Review #BasedOnATrueStory
March 10, 2020
The Birth of a Nation | Based on a True Story
The Cynical Historian
Published 7 Oct 2016The Birth of a Nation was the first major motion picture success, and because of its historical inaccuracy, the Ku Klux Klan was revived for another round of terror. This is the worst case of a “Based on a True Story” film. So today is a prime time to go into why it was so bad, and get some President Wilson bashing in.
Through YouTube’s cowardice, this video has been demonetized.
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references:
Blee, Kathleen M. Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. https://amzn.to/2NzeHblhttp://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitc…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bir…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bir…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cla…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ku_Klux…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconst…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodrow…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1804_Ha…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nat_Tur…
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Wiki:
The Birth of a Nation (originally called The Clansman) is a 1915 American silent epic drama film directed and co-produced by D. W. Griffith and starring Lillian Gish. The screenplay is adapted from the novel and play The Clansman, both by Thomas Dixon Jr. Griffith co-wrote the screenplay (with Frank E. Woods), and co-produced the film (with Harry Aitken). It was released on February 8, 1915.Three hours long, the film was originally presented in two parts separated by an intermission; it was the first 12-reel film in America. The film chronicles the relationship of two families in the American Civil War and Reconstruction era over the course of several years: the pro-Union Northern Stonemans and the pro-Confederacy Southern Camerons. The assassination of President Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth is dramatized.
The film was a commercial success, though it was highly controversial for its portrayal of black men (many played by white actors in blackface) as unintelligent and sexually aggressive towards white women, and the portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) (whose original founding is dramatized) as a heroic force. There were widespread African-American protests against The Birth of a Nation, such as in Boston, while thousands of white Bostonians flocked to see the film. The NAACP spearheaded an unsuccessful campaign to ban the film. Griffith’s indignation at efforts to censor or ban the film motivated him to produce Intolerance the following year.
The film’s release is also credited as being one of the events that inspired the formation of the “second era” Ku Klux Klan at Stone Mountain, Georgia, in the same year. The Birth of a Nation, along with the trial and lynching of Leo Frank for the 1913 murder of Mary Phagan in Atlanta, was used as a recruiting tool for the KKK. Under President Woodrow Wilson, it was the first American motion picture to be screened at the White House.
Griffith’s innovative techniques and storytelling power have made The Birth of a Nation one of the landmarks of film history. In 1992, the United States Library of Congress deemed the film “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry.
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Hashtags: #History #BirthOfANation #KKK #Review #BasedOnATrueStory #WoodrowWilson #DWGriffith
March 8, 2020
Trope Talk: Macguffins
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 6 Mar 2020Edit: DANG IT YES I MEANT THOR 2 EVERYONE LEAVE ME ALONE
Everybody wants ’em! Very few people get ’em! Sometimes, the things we call macguffins turn out not to be macguffins at all! But what IS the elusive macguffin, and how do we go about understanding, writing, OR acquiring it?
Got a favorite macguffin or macguffin-centric storyline? Drop it in the comments!
Our content is intended for teenage audiences and up.
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March 7, 2020
History Buffs: Lawrence of Arabia
History Buffs
Published 17 Apr 2016BIG THANK YOU TO THE GREAT WAR CHANNEL FOR COLLABORATING WITH ME AND MAKING AWESOME VIDEOS!
Check out their T.E. Lawrence video here –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqvcjL6ObH0And the rest of their awesome channel here 🙂
https://www.youtube.com/user/TheGreatWarAnd thank you History Buffs so very much for being patient whilst I was in Ireland working on the Vikings podcasts for the History Channel and moving house at the same time. I sincerely hope you guys enjoy this review!
● Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HistoryBuffsNH
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Lawrence of Arabia is a 1962 epic historical drama film based on the life of T. E. Lawrence. It was directed by David Lean and produced by Sam Spiegel through his British company Horizon Pictures, with the screenplay by Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson. The film stars Peter O’Toole in the title role. It is widely considered one of the greatest and most influential films in the history of cinema. The dramatic score by Maurice Jarre and the Super Panavision 70 cinematography by Freddie Young are also highly acclaimed. The film was nominated for ten Academy Awards and won seven in total including Best Director, Best Sound Editing, Best Film Editing, and Best Picture.
The film depicts Lawrence’s experiences in the Arabian peninsula during World War I, in particular his attacks on Aqaba and Damascus and his involvement in the Arab National Council. Its themes include Lawrence’s emotional struggles with the personal violence inherent in war, his own identity, and his divided allegiance between his native Britain and its army and his new-found comrades within the Arabian desert tribes.
In 1991, Lawrence of Arabia was deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” and selected for preservation in the United States Library of Congress National Film Registry.
February 10, 2020
History Buffs: Kingdom of Heaven
History Buffs
Published 15 Aug 2015Apparently, Orlando Bloom was suffering from a nasty cold when shooting a big chunk of this movie. I think it shows … Anyway, it’s time for a brand new episode of History Buffs! Enjoy guys and thank you so much for all your support!
