What Movies Have You Seen Lately?

The first third of Apocalypse Now is considered to be pretty accurate by veterans. Doesn't matter to me, as I don't go to movies for their historical accuracy.

Though I enjoy historical depictions created for that purpose.

Some movie depictions or inaccuracies become a giant kerfluffle. Like "Passion of the Christ".

Some people seemed to get upset about "Amadeus" because the central theme was made up. People were upset with "Jaws" for making sharks so villainous. I think because people took to killing more of them.

Heck, people get upset when comic characters aren't depicted as expected from their original source.

IMO, Significant movies are less likely to be about accuracy than messages. Inherent truths. Or at least something somebody believes. Like a complex Aesop tale.

But some are just good at whatever they intend to do. Like create drama. Or produce strong emotion, or something relatable to real life.

Quote: rxwine

Some people seemed to get upset about "Amadeus" because the central theme was made up.

They have to make stuff up, most
of their lives are just as boring as
ours are. They say the Godfather
movie taught a whole generation
of Mafia how to act like Mafia.

I have an old Jewish friend who's
from NYC. In the late 50's he was
allowed to hang around Mafia
guys and run errands for them
because he was a Jew and nobody
would expect a Jew to be pawning
stolen property for them.. He says these
guys were boring and dumb to
the extreme. HS dropouts, lazy
as hell, they spent most of their
time hanging out and telling the
same jokes and plotting their
next caper. Most of which were
ridiculous and would never work.

The Godfather movie made them
look 10 times smarter than they
really were and they loved it.
Goodfellahs came closer to
depicting them as the goofball
idiots they really are. Common
crooks in thousand dollar suits.

Speaking of drug side effects, I was just reminded of “Jacob’s Ladder”. Still has good ratings.
War/horror/sci-fi I would call it.

Pretty sure I’ve already seen it twice.

Quote: rxwine

Some people seemed to get upset about "Amadeus" because the central theme was made up.

missed this the first time. That's because we don't know if Salieri was jealous for a fact, or was something else the problem for some people?

I was bothered to find out that Mozart probably didn't have that ridiculous laugh. Turns out it's a single, unreliable source that claimed that.

Quote: link

Rumors of a rivalry between the composers has swirled since they first brushed elbows in the 1770s. Salieri, an Italian, was the court composer of Emperor Joseph II and was already known for his operatic achievements when Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who was five years his junior, burst onto the music scene

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/A-German-Composer-uncovered-collaboration-between-mozart-and-salieri-180958154/

Quote: odiousgambit

missed this the first time. That's because we don't know if Salieri was jealous for a fact, or was something else the problem for some people?

It's reasonable to believe he experienced envy. I'm afraid that wouldn't be enough for big screen movie action, though fine for an actual documentary.

Possibly, it is worse to spin believable fictions about real history, than to go all out with unbelievable fiction about real history. You seem to not suffer it very well.

I recently took a few hours and went through the top 100 or so movies each year from 1950-2020 and catalogued each movie. There is an app/website called Letterboxd that makes it easy to do this quickly.

I am at around 800 movies seen. I am sure I missed a ton of the more obscure things I’ve seen, and some I forget all together, so I estimate I have seen at least 1000 movies.

Quote: rxwine

Possibly, it is worse to spin believable fictions about real history, than to go all out with unbelievable fiction about real history. You seem to not suffer it very well.

Moi?

you might be right

Quote: gamerfreak

so I estimate I have seen at least 1000 movies.

In the 20's 30's and 40's most big
city people went
to the movies once a week. Many
went 3-4 times a week. It was
cheap, it was air conditioned in
the summer, and warm in the
winter. In small towns they had
one or two theaters with new
movies every week and all the
people in the area went at least
once. TV killed all of that.

My father told the story about going to the movies every weekend with his female cousin, who was a similar age as him. One week they saw the romance/comedy film that was out (her choice); the following week was the current action/adventure film (his choice). He and his cousin clearly remembered being “in the Uptown Theater” on Sunday afternoon, December 7, 1941, when the movie was interrupted and an announcement was made concerning the attack on Pearl Harbor. My father was 8 years old at the time. He always was a movie buff, and when we cleaned out his condo near the time of his death, there were hundreds of DVDs and VHS tapes of all kinds of films.