Two Sights: 1) Anyone see KINGDOM OF HEAVEN?

It's on TV lately.

It's a good movie, your mileage may vary. What I hate is it was trashed
when it came out by both the left and the right (for opposite reasons).

Must be doing something right.

2) Anyone see the Washington Post splash headline picture of "Internment Camps" along the Mexican Border? These are the huge ones we were accused of being paranoid about...

To quote the Emperor, they are now fully armed and -operational-....

was an over-played cheezeball movie. Nothing to do with political content, though, I just thought it sucked.

Too Braveheartish.

....but what was wrong with Braveheart (other than the painfully obvious historical inaccuracies)?

As a Scotsman, I always take umbrage with statements against my fine countrymen....and our sheep.

:spray:

"Too complex" perhaps.

paint themselves with blue woad and attack.

And I'm fresh out of sheep.

Scotland, at least the politically dominant lowland parts, was heavily "Norman-ized" culturally, Scotland was shown as far more "backward" then it really was. Wallace was also probably a lower-level baron, not a free-holding peasant according to a show on the History Channel on medieval Scotland I watched a few months ago.

Residents of Edinburgh were apparently known for having no sewers (they threw their shit out of second story windows) until the 19th century, when Scotland was culturally assimilated by the British. The redneck Scotch Irish in the US were not assimilated into Imperial British culture like, say, Canadians were, and retained their Scottish traits, which is both good and bad.

Similarly, Americans are known for driving around in big SUVs on 8-lane automobile open sewers, which are considered unhealthy in more civilized parts of the world...

Not Braveheart, Kingdumb of Heaven.

What really bugged me was all the dramatic cgi clouds they stuck into every scene. What was the deal with that?

And it did give me some trickles down my bonny cheek.

I know from Celtic music...

The music in Kingdom of Heaven was much better.

I thought Braveheart was Mychael Danna, but it was James Horner.

FREEDOM!!!!!

Too bad it inaccurately trashes the reputation of my direct ancestor,
Robert the Bruce.

:smoke:

I'm certainly don't have any Belgian relatives.

(which is good cuz the King Leopold of "Leopold's Ghost"
was a mean one)

Listen to the yell of Leopold's ghost
Burning in hell for his hand-maimed host.
Hear how the demons chucke and yell
Cutting his hands off, down in hell.

:)

Ya English bastids! :evilgrin:

lots of action. light fare

and I enjoyed the fact that it put a human face on "the Islamo-fascists", or what they would be called today. Of course, Orlando Bloom is always easy on the eyes.

I must have been distracted. :loveya:




Actually, I didn't mind KOH. It was ok. I have seen it more than once and don't mind watching it. I agree, it was nice to see people portrayed as people, not just the "evil brown fascists."

For a brainless action movie it was pretty much ok by my standards. I liked that Saladin was portrayed as an honorable figure.

Also, and this is just a hobby of mine, I thought it was cool that they made use of some of the latest research into medieval swordfighting styles. A lot of the tapestries from the time have images of swordsmen using the high guard and aggressive pommel and shield techniques Liam Neeson shows to Orlando Bloom but for a long time people assumed that couldn't have been how they fought. Then they found out the swords were much lighter than people assumed and that they did probably fight like that.

I also loved the line about razing Jerusalem and tearing down every single brick that drives men mad. If only...

On the DVD version, there is a commentary about the real-life historical background of the characters in the movie. The real story is actually more dramatic than the story on screen, which is simplified a bit for dramatic purposes.

I think a lot of people didn't really grasp the subtext of what was going on with the Kingdom of Jerusalem and the fact that there was a war going on for control between essentially the neocons (the people who massacred all the muslims and jews within the gates a hundred years earlier) and the realists/idealists, who wanted peace with Salahuddin.

This was criticized by many movie critics as too PC for a war movie about evil infidels, but is based on fact.

... a company in Wisconsin which is trying to replicate what swords were really like, in earlier eras, measured and weighed surviving examples in museums. I've handled a few, and was amazed by how light and fast they were, compared to heavier replicas like the Del Tin line (and the stage-sword type like Starfire, which can end up weighing as much as 8 lbs -- more than twice the weight of even the longer "swords of war" that came into use for the later crusades).

http://www.albion-swords.com/swords/albion/swords-albion-mark-nextgen.htm#Single-Handed

I imagine that would sure make a difference in fighting styles. They've had to guess, based on fencing manuals from centuries after the Crusades, how they could have been handled -- but it's quite interesting to see alternatives to the standard guys-swinging-sharpened-crowbars.

Was that you have so many interesting REAL characters from the Crusades - King Richard, Saladin, etc, etc.

Yet, they chose a fictional character (the guy who played Legolas whose name escapes me right now) to play a major role in a real historical event.

It's not like Titanic where the two main characters didn't have control over the main story of the ship sinking and so many dying... this was the fictional character actually commanding the defenses during the siege of Jerusalem.

Why not a story about Richard vs Saladin? (you could even do 2 movies like Eastwood did with the battle for Iwo Jima!) Or, the events of the first crusade?

Faint.

As Lewis Black would say, there was too much fucking shit going on in that movie, it made my fucking head spin.

Normally, when women go ga-ga over a man, I honestly have trouble figuring out why (never understood Richard Gere in his day, or Fabio or Brad Pitt, etc)

But, with Bloom, I can see why women like him.

I agree with you re Gere, but he sure can wear a suit. And Brad Pitt sitting on that rock with the sun beating down on him in A River Runs Through It? That is a sight to behold. (Not to mention young Brad's abs in Thelma and Louise.) And I was one of the many who used to bust on Fabio, but then I saw him at a celebrity appearance at a department store in DC. Yeah, the long hair and open shirts are cheesy, but he definitely had "it" going on. What came to mind is that he looked as if he'd be very "attentive" and that's a good thing. Who knows, though, in real life he could very well be a flaming asshole! ;-)

I only faint over the young Pierce Brosnan, and his James Bond appearances. No movie star has ever made me go ga-ga.

Only my husband. Happy 9th anniversary honey!! :D

Happy anniversary!

She not only has a head over heels crush on him, but she wrote a story and sent it to him telling him she based the main character on him. He wrote her back telling her about how flattered he was. She is not giving up her fantasies about him to anyone.

:rofl:

I guess he proved the contention of most Arabs, that Americans can't stand history classes, when the movie bombed.

it's like they just wanted to have a big action movie set during the crusades and they just through in historical stuff all hodge podge.

It was more interesting in the pirate movies.

Yes, I know some of the battles were not historically accurate... but, at least it was not a major revision of history where it had some unknown leading the Scots at the battle of Stirling Bridge and William Wallace nowhere to be found.

Somebody, in this case Gibson, decided to have an action movie in the middle ages and threw together a bunch of marginally related historical figures, some bad romances, over the top villains, cheesy dialogue, etc.

There is too much text to have an announcer. The whole movie is basically footnoted with what is true to life and what was an invention.

The characters were basically true to life:

Balian
Guy
The King
Tiberias
Reynaud
Saladin
the Patriarch
Sybila

The following characters/situations were invented by the screnwriters:

Godfrey

Balian was born in Jerusalem, we don't know his parentage.

Balian never had an affair with Sybila, he was not the person
offered her hand in marriage, but Tiberias did attempt a similar
deal to prevent Guy from obtaining the throne. Sybila did have
several purported flings with other noblemen who got combined
with Balian's character, and this affected her decision to stay
with Guy in the end, as told in the movie. (The extended edition
makes it much more clear because Sybila had a child/heir who died.)

Balian did defend Jerusalem against Saladin after Guy and Reynaud
("Fox") were massacred in an ill-considered war of agression,
which was chalked up as "preemptive warfare" after Reynaud
allegedly killed Saladin's sister.

Reynaud (the red-haired guy) WAS an insane monster who liked to
massacre Muslims at random, engaged in piracy, and threatened
to sack Mecca and destroy the Ka'aba.

Guy de Lusignan was according to contemporary accounts, an
incompetent, George Bush-like pretender to the throne who desired
war with the Saracens to increase his own personal fortune.

Tiberias (he had a real name, he was the Duke of Tiberias for
a short while) was a pro-peace lord who commanded the King's
armies. He was actually been present at the massacre
in the desert, but he negotiated with Saladin and retired to Acre
or Tyre, where accounts friendly to the deceased King tell how
Guy manipulated Sybila into office and broke the peace with
Saladin. This affected future diplomacy with Richard Lionheart
because both sides agreed that Saladin was within his rights to
attack Jerusalem.

The leper King of Jerusalem (name forgetting) was a sainted
figure as portrayed in the movie, and highly respected by Saladin.

There may have been no Godfrey of Ibelin, but this section of the
movie was clearly intended to show the conditions in Europe at the
time, and the background of many of the people like Balian.

Ironically, the real Balian, like Sybila, would have been born in
the Holy Land and fully acculturated. There was a huge amount of
tension between the Knights Templar (holy warriors and generally
an evil bunch) Knights Hospitaler (who kept travellers safe but
also fought) and the native Jerusalemites, including the descendants
of the original Crusaders from 100 years previous.

When the original Crusaders arrived, they massacred every Jew and
Muslim in city walls. When Saladin took back the city, (almost) everyone's lives were spared.

I was very frustrated because when I read the book* that had supposedly been plagiarized for the movie (HA!), everything in the movie was covered in the first 50 pages or so and the rest focused on Richard and his crew. The parts that were left out of the movie were absolutely jaw dropping. As you noted above, Reynaud really hated all Moslems and was this close to attacking and razing Medina and Mecca. I don't want to even imagine what would have happened next if he'd manged to do that!

In any case, I think Ridley Scott is trying to envision a possible world of missed chances, not replay history literally. The Rome that the gladiator fought for never really existed, either.







*Warriors of God: Richard the Lionheart and Saladin in the Third Crusade - Scotty Reston

It originally involved the iron from the steel combining with
the nitrogen from people's innards.

Then they discovered they could use tannins from animal skins instead. Oops!

And you thought the Iranians had a hard time recruiting scientists
to purify uranium.

fictional and did defend Jerusalem with common folk, but he was separated from the other folks by about 60 years; so he never married the princess of Jerusalem.

He was a native-born Jerusalemite like Sybila. There's no way of knowing whether he had a fling with Sybila or not, she had several. He was the last Christian knight left in Jerusalem, though, as portrayed in the movie.

Godfrey (which I thought was exceptionally well-played by Liam Neeson) is based on real-life supporters of the King of Jerusalem who desired peace with the Saracens, in part because many of them had grown up in Jerusalem.

But that part of the movie was obviously intended to show the world the Crusaders were coming from. Some Crusaders were blood-thirsty monsters like the Knights Templar, later excommunicated; some were soldiers of fortune; many were simply trying to get away from poverty in Europe in the name of a good cause they were told about, like Arab soldiers going to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. Many more were unskilled in warfare and went over for spiritual and economic reasons, i.e. to "make a better life for themselves". Unfortunately they ended up being used as cannon-fodder, often in assaults on "enemy" Christian cities.

"King Richard and the Crusaders" with George Sanders as Richard and Rex Harrison as Saladin

http://www.amazon.com/King-Richard-Crusaders-Rex-Harrison/dp/630278753X

I don't remember much about it but it too had a positive portrayal of Saladin.

I think it's sad how Ridley Scott was criticised for "not picking sides"
or "taking it too seriously when it should be a mindless action flick like other movies set in the Middle East."

There's a cool scene at the beginning where the hero knight has a run in with a lone Muslim warrior. There's a great fight scene where the Muslim guy and his superbly trained and agile Arabian horse run rings around the heavily armored Crusader.

We later learn that this noble warrior is non other than Sultan Saladin himself. Unfortunately, the real Saladin was pretty old at the time and probably not up to the acrobatics that Rex Harrison (or Harrison's double) performed in the movie. It may be historically inacurate but I always loved that fight scene--and I would have given the world for Saladin's horse.

By the way, I think this was based on a pretty cool but of course historically inaccurate book by Sir Walter Scott called "The Talisman".

Saladin pretty much always got good press, by the way. He was a noble man in the best sense of the word.

While the real Saladin was almost as noble (though considerably older) as portrayed, the real King Richard was not.

He ordered the execution of prisoners while negotiations were ongoing for their release. He doublecrossed the French and the Germans which led to his capture and imprisonment by the Holy Roman Emperor when he decided to go home alone, with just a page boy (or was it a minstrel) for company.

There's no doubt that he was personally courageous, and a great warrior but in the end his Crusade failed. His nasty little brother Prince John (think Robin Hood) was stabbing him in the back, back home in England despite the best efforts of their elderly mother Eleanor of Aquitane. He was also unable to overcome his homosexual tendencies (or too proud to let someone else take the stud duties) in order to provide his country with an heir leading to the rise of King John.

Bad things sometimes lead to good things. King John was so bad that the nobles revolted and in the end forced him to sign the Magna Carta.

The DVD version of the video includes a running historical commentary track in subtitles (huge chunks of text) describing the exact historical
background of the tale.

Ridley Scott deliberately chose to avoid the obvious Richard the Lionhearted vs. Saladin story to educate people about an unmentioned side of the crusades, which is the story of the leper king of Jerusalem, who supported peace with Saladin, and the pretender to the throne who broke it (Guy de Lusignan).

Sound familiar? I guess people don't appreciate subtlety anymore.

it explains the characters.

To be honest, I found it very interesting.

And Balian was a real key character in the history of Jerusalem and the Crusader period.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balian_of_Ibelin

I could swear that I read something about the movie about how there were several people named "Balian" in the Crusades and Orlando Bloom's character was sort of an amalgamation of all of them, but not any specific Balian. I had gotten the impression that all of the Balians were somewhat obscure.

I guess my memory is getting faulty in my old age.

To quote a famous high school essay, "Homer was not actually written by Homer but by another man of the same name."

Balian was left with only two knights to defend the city, and had to knight much of the population. There WERE Jews and Muslims living in the city at the time, although the Christians had massacred them all 100 years earlier, the policy of "I will kill you" was reversed subsequently and Jews and Muslims were allowed back in.

Muslim mosques and artifacts were preserved, although the Dome of the Rock was converted to a church. This is what Balian threatened to destroy if Saladin stormed the city and killed everyone inside it (as the Christians had done 100 years earlier.)

The leper king, who apparently knew Saladin personally, was considered the only person who could keep the peace because of constant massacres by the Templars and Reynaud de Chatillon. After he died, Guy siezed the throne in a series of Bush-like machinations involving marrying the King's sister (which the guy played by Jeremy Irons attempted to annul) and promptly declaring war and getting everyone killed.

Balian and the Jeremy Irons character were both at the real-life battle where everyone else was massacred. However, Jeremy Irons' character retreated unhurt, or was not able to reach the battle in time, I forget which, and returned to Tiberias or Acre (hence his character's name, Tiberias, his real name was Richard de someone, I think) where his chroniclers wrote the story of all this stuff.

Balian would have been massacred like all the rest or taken hostage or enslaved, which was the fate of most prisoners on either side (hostage if they were wealthy, otherwise enslavement) but Saladin was particularly angry that day, so almost no one survived; however, he had a pre-existing debt of friendship to Balian (encapsulated by the character played by his right-hand man in the movie) and had promised to let him go free, unharmed, so long as he did not return to Jerusalem.

Balian broke his promise and returned to Jerusalem with two or three knights, however, and Saladin laid siege to the city, having promised his hard-line clerical advisors (as we see in the movie) to show no mercy on the civilian inhabitants. He was angered to find out Balian
was leading a last-ditch defense and knighting civilians to man the walls.

Balian therefore sent out a message to Saladin asking forgiveness for having broken his promise not to return to Jerusalem.

In return, after some back and forth, Saladin agreed to break his POLITICAL promise to the Caliph to show no mercy on the civilian population because of Reynaud's continual massacres of Muslims and threats to destroy the Ka'aba, not to mention the Crusader's genocide of Muslims and Jews 100 years before. (Saladin was merely a general for the Caliphate of Baghdad, having been recruited for the job after his previous post as the top general of Egypt.)

The Patriarch of Jerusalem (who was Orthodox Christian and therefore acceptable to both sides, the Orthodox having put up with Muslim rule long before the Catholics arrived and started calling them heretics, condemning them for living side-by-side with Muslims, and sacking Orthodox cities) was sent out to work out the details.

Saladin agreed to spare the lives of every non-Muslim in the city, but the city would have to pay a steep ransom for their freedom. The Patriarch got together with remaining business leaders but could not come up with enough gold to ransom every one.

He was subsequently lambasted in Europe as a "corrupt defeatocrat" and "surrender monkey" for turning over holy treasures to the Muslims in order to ransom the citizenry (golden crucifixes and such).

So Saladin lowered the ransom and agreed to accept whatever figure the Patriarch was able to come up with.

After 4 days of negotiation, the Muslims entered the city, 2/3 of the non-Muslim population was spared, although most Christians fled the city, at least the non-native ones did. This probably had to do with the fact that 1/3 of the population WAS enslaved as a political concession to Saladin's bosses in Baghdad.

Allegedly, many of the 1/3 of the population that was enslaved were native Jerusalemites who were simply unable to buy their freedom at
the time. Christians, Muslims and Jews continued to live in Jerusalem in varying percentages as they had done from 750 AD to the present, since there are/were many Arab, Armenian, and Coptic Christians in the neighborhood, and these were the ones who couldn't just up and leave, so they were probably the 1/3 who were left behind and whose descendants live there today.

(In Muslim world, enslavement for Christians and Jews was not permanent. For instance, the Saracens in Sicily enslaved quite a few people, and after the Normans invaded Sicily the former Saracen land bosses evolved into the Cosa Nostra.)

Saladin himself was a Kurd, who like most Kurds, was highly educated, not particularly strident about religion, and much more skilled at warfare and administration than many of the Arab leaders he worked for.

He basically was the ruler of Egypt and Syria in all but name.

On Edit: Oh yeah, the fate of Guy and Reynaud, including the bit about the ice water (it may have actually been an italian ice type of delicacy which Saladin offered Guy) actually happened by accounts on both sides.

As Saladin said, "A king does not kill a king. You served a great king and did not learn from his example" and put him on a donkey and paraded him in front of the walls of Jerusalem, a proper fate for a warmongering pretender to the throne, like Guy.

Unfortunately, he was subsequently let go and continued to make trouble, but was universally derided in Europe.

It's not just another 5 or ten minutes of junk thrown in -- it's more than 30 minutes of scenes that add depth and substance to the characters and storyline.

It makes for a far more coherent film than the original theatrical release, which is also making the rounds on cable.

I've watched it 3 or 4 times now...gets better each time...

I really enjoyed it

and frankly I'm on the fence (no pun) about the detainment centers...

To quote an old WWI ditty from "It's a Marvelous War" (great movie, never heard of it before!)

I went to Wapo's website and didn't see anything about the internment camps...help? Thanks.

I had it in print but I don't have it in front of me.

Anyone know where the photo can be found, or the title of the article??

Unfortunately, the photo is worth a 1,000 mealy-mouth Washington Post words, and the Washington Post almost never posts front-page photos on
its website. One reason newspaper graveyards are valuable.

But the article should still be there since it's less than 2 wks old.

Movies are NOT supposed to nor required to be historically accurate. That is a big part of why they usually say they are fictional and all the rest of the disclaimers.

The best that can come from a well made historical film is it will pique interest in the subject and people will read books and other sources to find the truth.

That said, the only thing that really sucks about braveheart is that it convinced people that Mel Gibson was a great director and began his career of filming sado-masochistic content that is just sickening. Fortunately he has now gone so far off the deep end with that shit that only the blind could not see what a demented twisted man he really is.

And bizarrely credited the Spaniards as saving the world from late classic Maya civilizaion (which was hardly as bloodthirsty as depicted -- they had an unhealthy obsession with gore, just like Mel and his audience, but mostly they engaged in auto-sacrifice.) So it was the perfect material for him.

understand why we are in the fine mess we're in. I also rate it as one of the greatest films I've ever seen.

Didn't Lawrence of Arabia portray the House of Saud and its disinterested American spectators, mute witnesses both to an evil British plot to carve up the Middle East, in a favorable light that we now know was inappropriate?