Well, he screams and rants all the time and has at some point a meltdown, for me he came of more as a lunatic as anything else. After that meltdown he is really broken down, but I really had no sympathies at any point.
But give it a watch. Its really worth it for Bruno Ganz and the woman who played Goebels wife. Even when it may lose a bit from its charm when you watch it with subtitles or dubs.
I agree that Downfall didn't seem like it made hitler sympathetic, it just made him human. There's a big difference and besides, it's not like they didn't show hitler at his worst, ranting like a lunatic.
I remember there was a controversy over one of the characters in Zulu being portrayed as a lazy drunk, when in reality he was a straight-edge, model soldier who was constantly awarded good conduct pay.
Isn't this contradicting itself? If Germans would see themselves as victims of Nazis it would hardly lead to nationalism, after all is nationalism what the Nazis embodied.The popularity of Downfall capitalises on the success of recent publications about the bombing of German cities and the dreadful experience of civilians overrun by the Red Army. These horrors are undeniable, but the use of memoirs intended to distance their authors from Nazism by depicting Hitler's clique as contemptible reinforces the sense of Germans as guileless victims. Is the belligerent self-pity fostered by Downfall becoming a new form of German nationalism?
Isn't this contradicting itself? If Germans would see themselves as victims of Nazis it would hardly lead to nationalism, after all is nationalism what the Nazis embodied.
That's a good thing though and doesn't have to diminish the terrible nature of the atrocities he committed. If we just firewall his existence as "evil" we won't learn anything.That's quite the reading of the film. Though I shouldn't be surprised, I've heard people claim that Der Untergang somehow tries to make Hitler into a tragic, sympathetic character.
I agree that Downfall didn't seem like it made hitler sympathetic, it just made him human. There's a big difference and besides, it's not like they didn't show hitler at his worst, ranting like a lunatic.
Came to post this. While the character was interesting and he redeemed himself in the end, the real Henry Hook wasn't a drunk who didn't want to fight.
That's not what the article is saying. It's saying that it depicts the German people, even those who belonged to Nazi organisations, as Hitler's unwitting victims rather than willing collaborators.
I thought the added invented drama seriously messed up the movie.
I was quite offended by 300 but often got told " it's just a movie" or "it doesn't claim to be historical so suck it up", sometimes even on GAF. Argo had some bullshit too.Yea I'd be really offended by 300 if I was Iranian.
Even worse, I remember at uni we watched an old tv series on Alexander. It begins showing some dirt and the narrator says something like "Persia, an eastern wasteland" then if switches to an Aryan Alexander on horseback and he says "But from the West, from Greece, comes civilisation".
I was quite offended by 300 but often got told " it's just a movie" or "it doesn't claim to be historical so suck it up", sometimes even on GAF. Argo had some bullshit too.
Middle Eastern people really get screwed over in Western media.
I don't know the other movie you're talking about, but 21 is a good example of this.That card counting moviewith a white guyPassion of the something
Kingdom of Heaven.
I've heard nothing but bad things about the "Rudy" guy himself, and how he campaigned to make his own movie about...himselfI know from personal experience that Rudy's brother is an insufferable prick, so him being one is honestly something I'd expect.
Pablo Escobar was a pedophile, though I guess that would have been a too damning quality for a protagonist in Narcos.
I don't know the other movie you're talking about, but 21 is a good example of this.
In reality, a bunch of Asian students who come up with and carry out a scheme to mathematically break blackjack and make tons of money.
The movie is about a bunch of white people who come up with and carry out a scheme to mathematically break blackjack and make tons of money, with one token Asian guy in the group who happens to be a kleptomaniac.
Though this is more whitewashing than anything, since it's not a terribly historic event.
Roland Emmerich's The Patriot has too many to list.
I think you'd have a much shorter list of movies that actually portrayed history accurately.
Almost none of them even try to. Directors and writers want to tell their own story which gets in the way of history.
And if you do, you run the risk of being a flop. Tora Tora Tora was a fairly accurate movie about Pearl Harbor, done as a collaboration between Japanese and American filmmakers, but it flopped at the box office because it's kinda boring (and long). And even that condenses stuff.
Gladiator, Braveheart, Cobb.
+1
edit: I guess Gladiator is a bit inaccurate; I don't think it had an actual historical character.
Enemy at the Gates is the worst "historical" film I've seen, although it's based on Soviet propaganda of events as I recall.
American Sniper
aka a modern state propaganda film
edit: yes i actually watched it. in a theater. it's a crap movie.
edit: main character was of course able to fix everything through sheer will, kept spouting off pentagon approved phrasing instead of what soldiers would actually say, for some reason they added a scene where he shoots a kid even though by all accounts he never claimed to, the antagonist sniper was poorly written, he of course John Cena'd into every MOS on the battlefield, was able to overcome PTSD by basically going "nah, I don't have PTSD", and of course everyone around him is broken,but not him.
A bit off topic:
This movie was pretty gross. The glorification of the righteous killing for country coupled with the constant hero speak, as you mentioned.
It was a love letter to the good God fearin' republicans of the US of A.
I lost a lot of respect for Bradley and just shook my head at Eastwood.
Yeah I'm thinking the same thing.The opposite would be more surprising.
Jurassic Park wasn't entirely accurate in how it portrayed the Trex.
Reading the article suggests the authors of it simply had an axe to grind. It's also pretty disparaging of German people.What? I never got this from the film. I always took it as the Nazi regime at the end of its days, fearing what they will get if their last stronghold falls. The killing of the children show the desperation they all felt. Never had I the feeling that I should be sympathetic or that it negates all the bad stuff they have done in the years before.
Reading the article suggests the authors of it simply had an axe to grind. It's also pretty disparaging of German people.
And even that condenses stuff.
"There is a popular belief that where history is concerned, Hollywood always gets it wrong - and sometimes it does. What is overlooked is the astonishing amount of history Hollywood has got right, and the immense, unacknowledged debt we owe to the commercial cinema as an illuminator of the story of mankind."
~ George MacDonald Frasier, The Hollywood History of the World
Granted, later in his career he began criticising movies for appealing to ignorance more so than they used to, especially Braveheart, so . . .
Lawrence of Arabia is one of the greatest films of all time, and as historical fiction it's still very, very good, but historians have argued for years about whether the portray of T.E. Lawrence was accurate or not, and many other side characters (like Gen. Allenby, Sherif Ali) were blatantly fictional to create drama or motivations between the main characters. There's also the depiction of Lawrence's personal proclivities, which you could say are fictionalized, but there's been a lot of debate throughout history especially Lawrence's depiction as a homosexual or sexually non-normative, which has been debated by biographers and the movie sort of took a centrist line.
Also, prominent historical events depicted in the movie (Aqaba) weren't as prominent as the movie would make it seem, and the timeline is all sorts of messed up. The movie doesn't really firmly nail down a timeline in most scenes, but the dialog contradicts timeline indicators.
Still, it's a great movie.
Also Tesla in The Prestige
I didn't know until I read about it afterwards that Washington DC during the time of the Lincoln movie was literally surrounded by camps of African-American abolitionist protestors, which is why DC is still so heavily African-American today.
In fact, both of the African-American servants we see in Lincoln's household were, in reality, outspoken abolitionists. But that would take away from Lincoln's victory!
Is Lawrence of Arabia actually trying to be accurate, or is it trying to be a movie version of the Seven Pillars of Wisdom that removes the hundreds of pages worth of narrative about camel rides?
The Imitation Game basically makes Turing into Sheldon Cooper.