#dracula revisionism

[scarlet-came-back-wrong]

I'm still not over the Langella thing. Imagine serving so much cunt in a 1970s play that it would warp the perception of a XIX century novel for many upcoming years. And then having the play and the movie you were in be basically forgotten. And he says that the role didn't even feel important for him!

[scarlet-came-back-wrong]

"I actually think that Dracula as character presented 100% as he’s in the book wouldn’t have left such a cultural impact"

Uh... good?

I mean, that's obviously not what I think, but I suppose it would be the point that the purists are making. Dracula being that iconic breakout character is not what the book is about, and so, according to them, not what that adaptations should be about.

I, personally, suspect that the book in a non-distorted form wouldn't have left such an impact on culture. After all, other Stoker's books didn't, and now are not read and certainly not enjoyed even by Dracula fans. But perhaps some fans would actually prefer the novel to be more obscure, if it meant that its themes and characterizations would be more respected.

Not to be a hater but I’ve been seeing a lot of posts shitting on various Dracula adaptations for being unfaithful to the book and quite frankly i think it’s unfair. Adaptations aren’t meant to be 1:1 recreations of a thing, they’re literary meant to adapt it into a different media and usually end up becoming a thing of their own. I know there are a lot of aspects of the Dracula book that get lost in these (typically film) adaptations, but it’s not fair to completely discredit them as media because they don’t follow the same structure or narrative as the book. Yes, do I want to see a film adaptation of the Harker’s love that is as faithful and wonderful as the Re: Dracula retelling? Yes, do I want to see Lucy depicted as a victim of Dracula rather than his concubine? Yes, would I like to see the suitor squad in all their glory with their original characteristics? Yes, ABSOLUTELY! But I’m not going to sit here and say that wanting those things makes movies like Van Helsing or Dracula Untold or Bram Stoker’s Dracula or Nosferatu or the Netflix Dracula series or Renfield inherently bad.

[locuas642]

This is the impression I get from Hbomberguy's and Todd's videos. I havent watched any James somerton content so I cant know how much of it is an accurate or fair assesment. but the thing that strikes me from the clips they show.

I cant help but feel a certain... Disdain? for the LGBT/Queer Community? Like there is the offensive take on the post-AIDS community. His dismissal of fellow creators, his wild revisionism to

But I also noticed the weird need to elevate non-queer people over actual queer people. Like saying Bob Iger, a straight man, is an important figure for Gay Rights and implying he pressured Obama to fight for Gay Marriage. Or acting like Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula was the first or only example of a Fuckable Dracula.

And like there is more stuff. but the general feeling I get from him is a disdain towards the present LGBT+ community, and a dismissal or wild revisionism of Queer History

[z34l0t]

4: The Last Voyage of the Demeter

It seems obvious in hindsight, but the short chapter about the doomed sailors in Bram Stoker's Dracula has the structure of a classic Hollywood horror screenplay: As in Ridley Scott's Alien, John McTiernan's Predator, and John Carpenter's The Thing, an isolated crew in a remote location is terrorized by a supernatural entity, which picks them off one by one. Screenwriter Bragi Schut Jr. was one of the first to notice the similarities, and wrote an Alien-like script that languished in development for decades.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter is the final form of Schut's clever idea, and it attaches a number of modern story contrivances (including a female love interest, an adorable moppet, and a black physician straining against that era's racism) to what should have been a straightforward movie about being trapped at sea with the most famous bloodsucker in English fiction. And because it's 2023 and such things are de rigueur for studio films, the final scene deviates from Stoker's novel to set up a sequel and possible franchise.

Ultimately, that revisionism is the movie's undoing: A simple but effective story about Dracula feasting on seaman is encumbered by aspirations to produce a Victorian Blade. Like the Demeter's unfortunate crew, the film would have been better off unloading some of its baggage.

z34l0t

[silviatorani]

Saremo noi: Giorno 9

Alla fine oggi non ce l'ho fatta per pochissimo a raggiungere il traguardo delle 15mila parole totali, ma sembra già un miracolo essere riuscitɘ a scrivere così tanto nonostante si trattasse di un sabato, per cui non mi lamento. In più mi offre qualcosa di bello da aspettare domani.

Quante parole ho scritto: 1792 // 14892 (totale)

Quando ho scritto: dalle 10:00 alle 11:00 e dalle 18:00 alle 19:30.

Che musica ho ascoltato: Un po' della playlist del romanzo e un po' di una playlist metal basata sulla mia recente ossessione per Kim Dracula in Warriors: c'entra qualcosa con il libro che sto scrivendo? Assolutamente no, ma ha fatto il suo dovere.

Osservazioni: Il mio grande cruccio della sessione di oggi è aver scritto d'istinto dal punto di vista di Irene una scena che avrebbe dovuto essere scritta dal punto di vista di Cielo. Mi sono accortɘ dell'errore solo alla fine e non ho avuto il cuore di riscriverla perché mi piace tanto così. Questo rischia di scombinare la ripartizione delle scene tra i due punti di vista, ma è qualcosa di cui potrò occuparmi in revisione (non odiarmi, Ren del futuro.)

Estratto di oggi:

Accendo il bluetooth delle cuffie e le collego al mio cellulare. Una volta che si è stabilita la connessione, mi inginocchio davanti a lei senza cercare il suo sguardo e le poso le cuffie sulle orecchie. Mi metto seduta di fronte a lei e faccio partire Hide And Seek dal mio cellulare. La sua canzone preferita. Qualcosa cambia nello sguardo di Cielo: continua a tenerlo fisso davanti a sé, ma non è più perso nel vuoto, è attento, focalizzato. Appoggia le mani sulle cuffie e se le aggiusta sulle orecchie. Le schiaccia per sentire meglio. Chiude gli occhi e ascolta. A un certo punto tira fuori il cellulare e scrive qualcosa. Una notifica compare sul mio schermo. Questa è la mia parte preferita. L’inizio della seconda strofa. Vorrei che potessi sentirla anche tu. Sorrido e invio una risposta. A me non dispiace. Resto a osservarla per tutto il resto della canzone.

Abbiate pietà se trovate refusi o ripetizioni in questi estratti: è solo una prima stesura. A domani con il seguito!

[hey-its-sybarite]

Oh god, strap in. I apologise in advance for this. But I saw a lot of this go down and you did ask so here goes.

1. Yes, most people stopped writing and/or deleted their work/had their work purged because of Anne Rice’s litigation.

2. It also had a dampening effect on the ways that fandoms held together and grew back then: fan fiction awards, very small privately hosted “archives,” and public forum discussions. If you can’t even discuss the media it’s hard to keep the fandom going.

3. People were nervy in general at this time because there was US legislation tabled that would have resulted in the kind of censorship that could affect all fan works online. People were resisting it but we had no tested legal clout. We didn’t even have bloody Change.org. And anyway many people that enjoyed fanfiction also knew it had existed “just fine” in print medium, via fan zines, so some people who could return to those lacked the same sense of urgency to protect the online fan space. (Shoutout to the much appreciated Save Our Specs campaign.) But yeah, free speech online was not guaranteed and people thought it was bonkers you might want it just so you could smoosh other people’s intellectual property together like Barbie dolls. I mean, most adults didn’t have email, most of the world had never been online, so caring about artistic expression on the internet? Minuscule issue.

4. Around the same time the Vampire Chronicles fans specifically were Going Through It because it felt like everyone and their mother loathed Memnoch the Devil, to the point where it was basically RWRed/EWEed (ignored as canon) with the joke being “oh none of that happened, Lestat fed on someone with acid in their system.” The other common joke about reading the book was having to retrieve it from across the room after finishing it. Because of throwing. Because of throwing it as far away from you as you could. You can imagine that fans and creator fighting to maintain their own version of truth did not make for a great time! Then, while Pandora was well received and TVA was at least regarded as well written in the tradition of IWtV, the fandom had to endure the turning of yet another child in it. It’s not fun when a writer breaks their own in-universe rules and the payoff isn’t even regarded as worthwhile. I read the book in 1998 and I’m still upset about Benji (and Sybelle.) Lastly, the godawful QotD film came out and many many fans hated it. Some people warmed to it much later because the two main musical celebrities involved died, but frankly Aaliyah was getting death threats for daring to play Akasha before she died for real, so I don’t think the revisionism would heal all the vitriol there. So the fandom endured a lot of very public legal issues, spats and splintering, and the hostility made it difficult to grow the fandom too. It lost people but couldn’t get them back, or attract new people. Worse, a bunch of people now thought Lestat was brunette.

5. Around this time larger multifandom fan sites were becoming a thing and allowed for a lot of cross pollination to grow fandoms. Also, just more and more people were coming online for recreation. This meant that multifandom archives and multifandom recommendation sites had more traffic and engagement. But because Anne had been litigious previously some archive sites (even after she’d calmed down) were not willing to host writers in that fandom, so goodbye to fun, long WIPs getting everyone talking over time, which you really need in a book fandom with zero weekly TV episodes. Also, because all the fan works had been removed, it meant that rec sites weren’t promoting anything in the fandom either. A real missed opportunity at what should have been a time of organic fandom growth.

6. Meanwhile there was A LOT of other vampire media out that scratched an itch for folks. Films like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Dusk Til Dawn films, Dracula 2000, the Blade films etc. TV had Dracula the Series, Forever Knight, Kindred the Embraced, Buffy and Angel and later stuff like The Vampire Diaries and True Blood. The Vampire Diaries was a popular novel series, and so were the True Blood/Sookie Stackhouse novels. To a lesser extent Anita Blake and the later Dresden Files put vamps in rotation, as did comics like Preacher. There was even a new Vampire The Masquerade PC game to play! There were of course more comics, and anime, (and films and books and rpg) but I don’t know them. In fact there was a lot of second tier content that kept people fed with its churn too. This list is a teaser trailer, not a Wikipedia article! It’s by no means exhaustive.

7. By the time AO3 rolled around as a genuinely safe place to host, I had long lost my fic in the fandom. And it had been years, if I anything I was so young when I wrote them I’m frankly glad they’re gone. But sadly a bunch of others had also lost much much better stories than mine, or didn’t see the point of uploading outdated fanworks when they’d grown as writers AND they considered the fandom dead.

8. That was the final nail in the coffin, actually. By the time that we had a legally safe place to post it was oh… 2008. It had been FIVE YEARS since Anne Rice had written about any vampires, and seeing as she was off publishing (admittedly good) books about Jesus Christ, everyone thought the fandom was dead. Like, properly so. When she started writing conventional supernatural novels again it was new stuff about angels and werewolves! I mean, good for her for experimenting with new species, especially at her age, but there was a bloodlust for her beloved vampires that was going unquenched amount erstwhile fans. It would be ELEVEN YEARS before she would return to writing The Vampire Chronicles. What were you doing eleven years ago? Are you still consuming the same media in the same way? It’s a long time for many die hard fans - even if you love the media, you may interact quite differently as you age. In the decade plus many people had either left The Vampire Chronicles fandom and fandom in general or had moved into other fandoms where there was more recent media. Media where the creator hadn’t just tried to kill off a favourite character before herself finding God and being a little off putting about queers for a bit.

There you have it: the backstory as I remember it. My memory is imperfect and I joined the fandom when I was 12 so there’s also that sticky wicket. The last thing I want to say is that Christopher Rice has not been litigious and is very fan friendly. Anne had cooled her jets too, so it’s safe to write now and was when she was still alive. You don’t even have to put a disclaimer up top :)

can i ask a really dumb question. why do we have so little iwtv fics? is it bc she used to sue? do they still sue? (her son and stuff?)

[aion-rsa]

Stephen King’s Favorite TV Shows According to His Twitter Raves

https://ift.tt/3qGUGDO

“NOW WE’RE SUCKING DIESEL! If you don’t get it, you missed a great series.” Stephen King’s recent discovery of British police thriller Line of Duty – as relayed via a series of highly enthusiastic Tweets – was a delight to witness. King’s zeal is enough to make UK fans wish that he hadn’t binge-watched the BBC series from his home inside the sewers of Derry, Maine, but instead watched it at broadcast pace in the UK, where he would no doubt have made a sizeable contribution to the show’s Twitter larks. (King proved himself happy to join in with online TV show speculation when he correctly predicted the killer in HBO/Sky’s Mare of Easttown. You can bet he’d have had a take on the mystery identity of Line of Duty baddie ‘H’.)

Line of Duty isn’t alone in attracting King’s online praise; when the horror author watches a TV show he loves from inside the creepy Castle Rock devil shop he calls home, he lets his 6.5 million followers know about it. Below is a list of endorsements King has made on Twitter in recent years, from the usual sci-fi and horror suspects to a few less expected titles. 

US MODERN CLASSICS

The Americans, Game of Thrones, Homeland, Sons of Anarchy and The Shield

In Stephen King’s house (inside Derry’s landmark water tower, The Standpipe) as of February 2018, only three shows were considered ‘appointment television’: FX Cold War spy drama The Americans, HBO fantasy epic Game of Thrones and Showtime spy thriller Homeland. King describes all three as “a cut above”. Going one further, three days after the Game of Thrones series finale aired, King called out the New York Times’ list of 20 best TV dramas for neglecting to include the HBO dragon epic. He’s glad the Times included FX cop drama The Shield, a show that “fundamentally changed TV”, but feels it should also have tipped a hat to FX motorcycle gang drama Sons of Anarchy. Get it right, New York Times.

INTERNATIONAL DRAMA

Dark, Fauda, Hotel Beau Sejour, Les Revenants, Marianne, Money Heist, To The Lake, ZeroZeroZero

Nothing scares Stephen King, not even subtitles. When he’s relaxing in his converted alien spaceship half buried in the woods of Haven, Maine, he enjoys nothing more than streaming a foreign-language box-set. He particularly rates German sci-fi Dark, which he called terrific, complex and very German, and recommends these explanatory recaps for anybody confused by its multiple timelines. Virus thriller To The Lake was called “a pretty darn good Russian series on Netflix,” while Israeli spy thriller Fauda was described as “all killer and no filler”. King called Belgian crime drama Hotel Beau Sejour “eccentric, brilliant and strangely touching. Supernatural fare for those who don’t ordinarily like it.” Speaking of the supernatural, King’s a fan of celebrated French horror Marianne, which he says could scare even “a sicko” like him. Also in French, he loved atmospheric supernatural zombie drama Les Revenants/The Returned, calling it sexy and scary. Netflix’s Spanish-language thriller Money Heist is “a firecracker” while he found Italian-Anglo crime drama ZeroZeroZero “bone-shaking, chilling, terrifying, epic,” and King found it hard to believe it could be bettered. High praise.

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BRITISH DRAMA

Black Mirror, Life on Mars, Line of Duty, The Stranger

From underneath his massive, transparent dome in Chester’s Mill, Stephen King will often enjoy a bit of British telly. Back in 2013, when it was still a Channel 4 show only just available worldwide on Netflix, King Tweeted that he loved future-tech anthology series Black Mirror, calling it “terrifying, funny, intelligent,” and compared it to an R-rated The Twilight Zone. The show creator Charlie Brooker, told Den of Geek at the time that despite being a huge Stephen King fan, his reaction was characteristically muted: 

“I think I probably smiled? That’s about as effusive as I get about anything, because whenever anything nice happens in the world I always expect something appalling to happen immediately afterwards.”

BBC crime-drama-with-a-time-travel-fantasy-twist Life on Mars is another British favourite that King described in September 2020 as one of his favourite shows of all time, “the kind you go to when you’re feeling sad.” That same year, he called Harlan Coben’s mystery thriller The Stranger, starring Richard Armitage, as an excellent, addictive mystery. King’s British TV crush of the moment of course, is BBC crime drama Line of Duty, which he praises for having a central Mulder/Scully-type vibe between main characters Steve Arnott and Kate Fleming.

US THRILLERS

Big Sky, Bosch, Designated Survivor, Escape at Dannemora, Fargo, Mindhunter, Perry Mason, The Good Fight, The Man in the High Castle, The Morning Show

After he’s finished all the two-finger KitKats from the minibar at Room 217 of The Overlook Hotel, where he lives, Stephen King puts a thriller on the TV. Crime thriller, political thriller, legal thriller, alt-history Philip K. Dick thriller… he has time for them all. King is a particular fan of ABC’s murder show Big Sky, which stars Ryan Philippe and Vikings’ Kathryn Winnick. In February this year, he called it the best drama on network TV and said the final three episodes were stepping into Emmy territory. He calls Bosch an excellent detective series, one of the best on TV, with an engrossing story and superb cast. Kiefer Sutherland-starring series Designated Survivor he called excellent, complex and involving after its move to Netflix. Prison drama Escape at Dannemora is TV at its best according to King, who in 2015 described the penultimate episode of Fargo season two as the best thing on television in the last three years. In 2017, he strongly recommended David Fincher serial killer drama Mindhunter, and last year called the Matthew Rhys Perry Mason reboot a “damn good show.” In 2019, King called The Good Wife spin-off The Good Fight “the best show on TV”, and found nothing not to like about Apple TV+’s The Morning Show starring Jennifer Aniston. That was the year he also named Amazon Prime’s The Man in the High Castle season four as “amazingly good”, challenging and involving.

HORROR & SUPERNATURAL

Black Summer, Dracula, The Haunting of Hill House, Servant, Stranger Things, THEM

When he’s not nursing kidnapped novelists back to health in the remote Colorado cabin where he lives, Stephen King goes in for a bit of scare-action on the TV. He called Mike Flanagan’s adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House “close to a work of genius” despite not being a fan of revisionism of its kind in general, and praised M. Night Shyamalan’s Servant for its focus, acting and atmosphere, adding “if there’s anything creepier or more binge-worthy than this, I don’t know what it is.” He loved Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’ BBC Dracula, calling it terrific and “VERY bloody”, found the first episode of Amazon Prime Video’s THEM scared the hell out of him, and praised Netflix’s Black Summer for reinvigorating the zombie drama: “Just when you think there’s no more scare left in zombies. THIS comes along.” As for Stranger Things, he described the first season as like “watching Steve King’s greatest hits” in a good way. 

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Next week on What Famous People are Watching: is Stanley Tucci really that big on the Westminster Dog Show, or is he more of a The Underground Railroad guy? We find out.

The post Stephen King’s Favorite TV Shows According to His Twitter Raves appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3x6ARqW

[snugglyporos]

Okay ya’ll I have to rant for a good minute about the Fate series because my stupid autistic brain has been hyper focusing on it for the past four hours and I need to put these thoughts down or I’ll never get rid of them. 

I’m so... disappointed? frustrated? mad? Idk what I think. It’s all of these things to see such a great idea executed so awfully. So lazily. So incompetently. 

Because I can’t help constantly engaging with it and going ‘you know, this would be really good if they just did x.’ There’s so many monumental moments of stupidity that I can’t help but go ‘wow that’s dumb as hell.’

There’s a rule in fiction where the larger the stakes are, the more complex and unwieldy it gets, because it effects more things. That’s why usually the best fiction involves low stakes overall, or personal stakes, because you don’t need to then consider the cosmological complications of your story. Having a story that involves magic, time travel, secret organizations, multiple illuminati organizations on top of those, and countless other bullshit does not make for a coherent or compelling story. 

I’ve said before that one thing I hate is the idea of a ‘world organization.’ It’s lazy as hell. If Russia and China couldn’t get along when they were both communist, the idea that the entire world with all its varying ideologies and ethnic groups could be run by one group of people is nonsense. People can barely coexist with others like themselves. Furthermore, in our age of nationalism, the idea that say, China would have their top brass subserviant to western illumiati is stupid. It’s also stupid in the reverse. The idea that all of ANYTHING is ruled by one group of people is stupid and it makes you look lazy to write things like that.

Second, trying to put your story in the ‘real world’ or any image of it while claiming that all the world’s mages belong to one organization while ‘the church’ that runs all religions exists is stupid. It defies belief. It also wouldn’t be an issue if they weren’t dead set on trying to explain how this goes on in the ‘real world’. 

Also, apparently time travel exists. Also, all of human history was erased. Yet somehow they go back in time, and summon people from the future. You know, going back to a time that doesn’t exist, and summoning people from the future who haven’t been born yet, who also don’t exist. Time travel is ALWAYS stupid. It’s ALWAYS bad. Always. Because the core notions and questions that it brings up immediately reveal why it is stupid. Let’s say you sent one person back in time. If you witnessed it, and didn’t go with them, you should now not exist. Why? Because the act of something being somewhere that it wasn’t before creates a paradox. The only way it doesn’t is if the world you lived in is the same world where they went back in time, and that raises questions about fate and free will, and most authors simply aren’t interested in getting that metaphysical, and as such render their stories incredibly stupid. 

But! Let’s try, for the sake of arguement, to put aside all this nonsense. Does the core idea of the story make sense? Are there clear, defined rules? No! Nothing makes any goddamn sense. Apparently, magic exists, but then there are magic circuts, which aren’t explained. The rules about everything is not explained and is frequently contradicted. Example. Who can be summoned, and how? Sometimes, it’s anyone. Sometimes, it’s different versions of someone. Sometimes, it requires a piece attached to that someone. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes, where the person is summoned changes how powerful they are, and sometimes it doesn’t.

But they can’t even get their basic shit right. Example: is Dracula a vampire or is he not? Because the series can’t decide if it wants to allow people from history OR people from fiction to be summoned, it can’t decide if someone like Vlad III is undead or not. Are you going with the version of history where he was an insane, murderous, nationalistic king? Or are you going with the version from the story of Dracula, a work of fiction? You can’t have it both ways!

Here’s another example: can you summon gods or not? Heracles is summoned, and Heracles is a god. He was literally made into a god at the end of his own story. Even if you go ‘well, the version that people can summon is his non-god self from before the end’ he is still a demigod. Which means that you’re now getting into weird territory where it’s unclear who and what counts as someone who can be summoned.

But then you get into having to think about all the weird historical revisionism that the series plays with. Look, historical fiction can be fine. What I don’t understand is the series’ weird fixation with turning some of histories worst individuals into anime girls. You could certainly, for example, make a version of King Arthur where all the sexes are switched. Granted, a whole lot of the story wouldn’t work, because characters like Morgan Le Fay and Mordred no longer work in their story roles anymore. But you could, theoretically do it. 

What I don’t get is why the series says, ‘you know who we should depict as a kind and gentle anime babe? Nero.” You know, the Nero who kicked his pregnant wife to death, castrated a man and forced him to marry him, put on plays that people were forced to attend and then executed anyone who yawned or sneezed during his performances, and who built a private lake where the Colosseum now is, put a floating house on it, and had the ceiling have an accurate replica of the starry night sky using precious gems, only to then remark that ‘now I can live like a human being.’ Yeah, that Nero. Clearly, this just screams that we need to depict them as being a kind and gentle ruler, and not say, an unstable psychopath who sees himself as a literal god walking upon the earth. 

But that’s not even their worst offence. They turn Elizabeth Bathory into a pop idol. You know, one of histories worst serial killers? The person who had innocent women murdered and then bathed in their blood? Yes, clearly that is someone we should portray as an innocent girl. 

And it’s not like history is lacking in great women who did fantastic things. There are scores of heroines to choose from if you want to use them. You don’t need to pick serial killers and sex change the most insane emperors.

But even some of the ones they do pick don’t make sense. Why the fuck is Marie Antoinette considered a ‘heroic spirit?’ If we go by her in popular myth, she’s best known for something she didn’t say, which is ‘let them eat cake.’ Why the fuck did that mean ‘let’s make her someone who is entirely misunderstood and loves the peasants?’ Also, why a ‘rider’ and choose her for that because of her being pulled in a cart to her execution? The fuck?

It beggars belief. It utterly confounds the mind. It’s lazy, and its shoddy. Almost as shoddy as the notion of ‘classes’ which makes no sense and apparently has a heirarchy, which itself makes no sense if the whole point of having people fight is to decide something. Having people fight where someone gets an innately better class at random makes no sense. Hell, having classes at all makes no sense. Having it be okay for the things you summon to kill those who summoned them to win makes no sense, because if all you needed to do was kill each other, you don’t need heroes to do that! 

Hell, the fact that they’re fighting over the ‘holy grail’ and that it was made in japan is nonsense already. The holy grail is literally arthurian legend. I know japan gets a pass for this shit, but I don’t know why. Everyone rolls their eyes when they say that ancient egyptians look exactly like modern day japanese people, but apparently it’s also okay that they just straight up steal something from arthurian legend as a premise... and then entirely botch that premise or understanding anything ABOUT it. 

Here’s an idea. If you’re going to use the holy grail as your plot device, you know the thing Jesus drank out of at the last supper, maybe don’t then say that people can just make them all over the place? That’d be like if in the last crusade, all of the cups that Indiana Jones found were all capable of being the holy grail. It’s stupid.

Why is it so hard to just do something simple? You don’t need to overcomplicate this shit. Grab some characters who each want a thing they can’t have, have them be represented by some great hero, have them fight for that thing, and you’re done! You don’t need to bring time travel, the illuminati, nonsense magical rules, and metaphysical shit into this! 

Again, maybe the creators have no desire to do anything other than try and see how many awful historical people they can put boobs on. It’s starting to remind me of that book that went around a few years back where someone drew history’s greatest murderers as anime babes, so you could see guys like Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot as big tiddy anime girls. Why? Idk. 

But if the series wants to do that, if all it wants to do is wallow around in its own shit, it’s taking way too much time and effort trying to make up stupid nonsense. It’s just so frustrating and disappointing to see an idea with such promise be farted away by people who clearly do not give a shit about what they’re making in the slightest. It’s a damn shame.

[see-arcane]

First, A+++ link, lots of good info 👀

Second, I had picked up on that bit about Bramward cherry-picking ‘Dracula’ simply because it was a cool title to work with and only sprinkling in some Vlad the Impaler hints for extra cool points. As to official history, I always assumed Stoker was likely fudging more than referencing genuine reality and lore, throwing things in the blender to make a patchwork that suited the book. But even without the mass conclusion-jumping made by pop culture and cockeyed novel fans and historians deciding for everyone that Stoker’s Dracula was GUARANTEED Vlad the Impaler-Dracula--despite the conundrum of the Count referring to himself as part of a Hungarian demographic among other inconsistencies, etc--I think that very murkiness plays into Book Dracula’s whole deal.

I wouldn’t put it past this character to have been present at multiple wars through history in that territory and engaged in bloodshed (battle) and bloodshed (dinner). In addition to being just as misleading in his presentation as in everything else he does. Was he a noble while alive? In keeping with what the linked essay shows, I’d put good money on it. But which noble? What level in nobility? What country? Possibly Hungarian, as he mentioned. Unless that was a lie. Unless it wasn’t. Maybe? I wouldn’t put it past him to impersonate multiple parts of his status for personal gain. Hell, how much do his hired human lackeys even know about him? Or think they know? This guy’s full of shit on his best day (night), so even in-canon I wouldn’t know what to think.

Even taking Van Helsing’s* (*Stoker’s) ramble about his probable origins, Scholomance training included, into account, everything needs to be taken with a grain of salt because whether Bramothy meant it or not, his whole novel is brimming with loose ends and contradictory info and general incongruities important to the plot. 

(Lucy needs a prayer session and a big ritual as a mere newborn vampire VS the Brides and 400+ year old Mega Vampire Dracula who just need a stab in the heart and a chopped head? What?? And of course there’s the nitpicking about Lucy’s hair color and Abe’s completely scientifically inaccurate rambling to Jack when he was in his pre-vampire reveal pep talk, and so on. Much as I love this book, there’s no ignoring how much this thing is rough around the edges editing/fact-checking/consistency/bias-wise.)

Which is all a longwinded way of saying, whatever *official* Dracula Stoker had in mind is just a Frankensteined pile of Cool Creepy Stuff he harvested from his biased texts and travelogues. He isn’t Vlad the Impaler any more than he’s any of the other people through history who wore a Dracula title. But by centering it on Vlad Tepes III (a guy who was known for the occasional bit of cunning misdirection, with one account of his death claiming he was slain by his own men while dressed as the enemy for spying purposes) as the most likely Dracula to be Count Dracula, no matter how extraordinary his acts were or weren’t according to legends and history books, it lends the most weight to Book Dracula’s own gravitas...

...Which, Book Dracula would absolutely love. No matter how true it was or wasn’t. Dude loves a good lie when it suits him/his ego. Ask Jonathan. (And, with how absolutely inundated Vlad Tepes III is with so much overlap of truth versus propaganda headaches, it would certainly vibe with the Count’s love of being a great big enigma with a scary reputation. Isn’t that right, Count DeVille? (Nerd.)

Whoever the Count was before he was the Count, whatever nationality he is (or says he is), it feels thematically right to let him have the ~Famous Dracula~ as his backstory, if only because it fits better than just keeping him as Schrodinger's Dracula with no solid background. 

...Though it’d be delicious to see an adaptation that reveals he’s a completely unrelated Dracula who never saw a battle in his life except to mosey around drinking the leftovers. (Poser nerd.)

However! All this justification aside, I was very much not aware of the revisionist lens put on the strigoi vampire myth itself. That while Romania does have monsters called strigoi, and they do sometimes drink blood, and are sometimes ex-dead, they are not vampires! Romania did not/does not have any genuine vampiric folklore, and Stoker was working off stories hailing from Hungary. Romania’s closest thing to a vampire is more like a weird evil wizard scenario (which fits with Dracula’s dark magic and all, but he got that at the underground Devil School, so). Also, it probably doesn’t help that when you Google ‘strigoi vampire history’ you get a whole wall of links saying YUP, THOSE ARE ROMANIAN VAMPIRES RIGHT THERE, PAL, LOOK AT ALL THESE WEBSITES THAT SAY SO!*

*Frankly, this all scratches a particular itch I have about folklore with named creatures/monsters/gods as a whole when it comes to Confirmed Tales and Myths and Methodology for Dealing With Them, et cetera. And that is that humanity has only ever guessed at the things we cannot understand, giving them names and hoping/assuming our methods for protection will guard us from all we pretend to understand.

Not everything that drinks blood is a vampire. Not all vampires go as mist, not all vampires lack reflections, not all vampires cringe from the holy. 

Werewolves appear at the full moon because it’s the brightest time to hunt--every night is a night that werewolves exist. Who benefits most when you waste your good silver on bullets for them? Who started that myth when there has not been a single werewolf pelt ever collected, a single body found with a silver bullet in it? (They pick the metal out like fleas from their sturdy hides and go home richer.)

Fairies who lived before Christ was even a thought and love the sound of gonging church bells. Fairies who enjoy salt and lick up the circles you sprinkle. Fairies playing horseshoes because the iron allergy is only as common as humans with no tolerance to peanuts. 

Just...the idea of so many places having bogeymen and otherworldly entities that have a few traits that match others’, and then people making assumptions that these must all be The Same Creature and must surely quail before The Exact Same Protective Measures, only to find themselves dangerously wrong? I love that shit in a supernatural story. 

(What’s the difference between a golden retriever and a wolf? Between a black bear and a grizzly? If you assumed there was none because they share a relation or a silhouette, you’d be dead inside a minute.)

But, all that juicy narrative stuff isn’t the point here. Pointing out the revisionist BS is. So, shoutout to @atundratoadstool for the handy educational essay in the link, and double shoutout to you, @virovac​ --I love me some good history bits and scores of lore. Especially when it points out things I’d never caught onto in the first place. Thank you!

One of the reasons why I dislike Dracula interpretations that try to humanize vampires in general and Count in particular is that it makes this part meaningless: "I shall be glad as long as I live that even in that moment of final dissolution, there was in the face a look of peace, such as I never could have imagined might have rested there." Even the vicious Count, who is not symphatetic in this book in slightest, has that look of peace! Even he seems happy to be able to rest in peace!

I see that, absolutely. At least for the Brides' sake. In Dracula's case, I still think it's a little more skewed.

If Dracula really was Vlad the Impaler, he was an absolute bastard alive and undead. He was always destined for Hell, period. That being said, Vlad Tepes III had tons of legends and propaganda surrounding him--most of it heinous, but some heroic. One of those heroic legends?

Old Vlad wasn't just adamant about dealing out death and torture to enemies and/or unpatriotic subjects, but, get this--the strigoi. Romanian vampires. Granted, this is just as likely a tall tale as a historical record; a lot of the exact details surrounding Vlad's exact deeds (and even his death) are murky. But assuming the guy really was as zealous about his hatred and grisly destruction of vampires as his living targets, that suggests his own vampirism wasn't something he wanted.

If Van Helsing's tale about him attending the Scholomance was true, I could even picture Vlad getting suckered by his Devilish tutor in classic Faustian fashion--He wants power? He wants strength? He wants to be feared by his enemies and to outlast them all? Sure, buddy. No problem.

Cue Old Scratch whacking him with a case of that loathed vampiritis. (Always watch that fine print, Vlad.)

So yes, I could see him being relieved at the end of his stint as Count Dracula. He was always happy to be a monster; just not this one.

[onlinediarykindathing]

17 maggio 2022

La revisione di stamattina mi ha stordito. Di solito la facciamo il mercoledì pomeriggio e poi si va a casa. Oggi invece il prof è arrivato alle 10 e subito dopo ci siamo messi a lavorare. Per fortuna non ho mal di testa e non avevo troppo caldo grazie alla gonna che mi lasciava le gambe scoperte. Daniele oggi voleva essere ammazzato, o ero io in vena di ammazzarlo, tra battute un po’ maschiliste e quei dannati meow alla fine delle frasi (ti pare che io non sappia azionare un condizionatore? Gesù. Se la mia vita fosse un film a quest’ora avrei comprato i pezzi di una macchina da corsa verde fluo e li avrei montati da me, e dopo ci avrei fatto dei giri fantastici in città facendolo rodere. Un po’ come quando al corso di arbitro da calcio venivo sottovalutata in quanto ragazza ma io li fregavo alle domande sul fuorigioco. Ah che bella sensazione). Dracula daily è ancora il mio highlight di queste giornate, da quando sono in pari è troppo bello leggere il capitolo del giorno e andare subito qui sopra a commentarlo e a farci meme. Vorrei vedermi con Cate e Bobba ma se non scrivo io loro non si fanno sentire, è anche vero che entrambe stanno studiando per degli esami, però è da tanto che non le vedo. Per lo meno, at the end of the day, questo periodo mi sta andando bene: ho la tesi in gruppo con dei deficienti (affectionate), vedo gente in facoltà, mi sto rivedendo vecchie serie tv con mia sorella, domani saprò se sono stata sorteggiata come scrutatrice e finalmente guadagnerò qualche money in maniera rapida e quasi indolore. Aprire Facebook ultimamente è un trauma, tra ex compagna di classe che fa una figlia partorendo in acqua e se ne vanta sul gruppo wa della classe (che ho mutato) e tra ex compagna di classe che si candida in una lista comunista alle comunali, sinceramente non so chi sta peggio. Forse gli ex compagni di classe che non sono cambiati di una virgola, che fanno le stesse cose che facevano al quinto anno e che sul serio non sono cambiati! Come fai a non cambiare?! Io cambio ogni volta che incontro una nuova persona, in questi ultimi anni sono diventata mooolto più estroversa, mi viene molto più semplice essere me stessa e dire ciò che penso, sono molto più strafottente di prima e riesco a capire meglio e subito le persone e se potrò essere amica loro o meno. Quelli della classe del liceo sono ancora come li avevo lasciati, non è una cosa che terrorizza solo me vero? Bha di solito quando ti accorgi di essere cambiato in meglio ti viene voglia di rivederli e sbattergli in faccia tutti i cambiamenti, mentre io davvero non voglio più averne a che fare, non voglio ne vederli su Facebook ne vederli irl. Nada. Non sono stati anni schifosi ma non sono stati neanche piacevoli. Mi fa sempre questo effetto ripensarci. Ok ora basta, domani devo ricordarmi di portare l’hard disk con il libro di inglese che con Ile studieremo per prendere questo certificato long overdue.

[scarlet-came-back-wrong]

Just found a conservative website with pretty detailed reviews of Dracula adaptations and the 1979 movie was described as "This movie is what happens when hippies take control of the production." I can't take literally anything about this adaptation seriously and this line still made me go "yes.jpg"

It turns out that my longtime suspicions were correct: James Hart was inspired to write his screenplay that eventually became Coppola's movie by Langella's performance, just not in the movie but the play it was based on. The 1979 movie itself was also inspired by the said performance, which makes Langella a much more important figure in the development of the Dracula myth that I initially thought. Which is quite ironic considering that his movie is quite obscure now in comparison with many other Dracula adaptations.

[aion-rsa]

Historical War Epics of the 2000s Ranked

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“There was once a dream that was Rome. You could only whisper it, anything more than a whisper and it would vanish.” These were the words spoken by Richard Harris at his most regal in Gladiator, adding some blockbuster poeticism to the democratic ideals of the Roman republic—a dream lost long before Gladiator begins. But he could just as easily be speaking about the beauty and grandeur of the historical epics which inspired Gladiator .

Decades before Russell Crowe and Ridley Scott reawakened that whisper to a mighty roar, historical war epics, from swords and sandals beefcake cinema to Napoleonic and Revolutionary melodramas, were the order of the day in Hollywood. Kirk Douglas’ Spartacus and Charlton Heston’s Ben-Hur were the superheroes of the early ‘60s, before the genre’s popularity receded to camp TV miniseries ignominy. Then came Gladiator (and to a lesser extent Braveheart five years earlier), and the bloated Hollywood historical epic was back. Throughout the 2000s and early 2010s, muscular movie stars crossed swords, medieval chainmail was adorned, and Greco sandals were fitted. For a brief time in this century, bronze breastplates instead of capes were the costume of choice for Hollywood’s biggest leading men.

So with Gladiator turning 20 this summer, we felt it only fitting to rank the movies of that era from their worst to best. Note we are keeping this just to the movies released in the 2000s, but rest assured that if we included the final dregs of the early 2010s, Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood would be near the very bottom.

13. The Last Legion (2007)

The King Arthur myth remains a tantalizing conundrum for filmmakers in the 21st century. On the one hand, it is a set of legends so ancient they are all in the public domain many centuries over; on the other, no filmmaker or studio seems to know how to wrap their arms around them for a modern audience. Take for instance this dead-on-arrival action romp, The Last Legion. Three years after Disney’s more earnest attempt to remake Arthur in the blockbuster stylings of its day (more on that in a moment), Dino De Laurentiis produced this cheap, half-hearted failure that tried to find a middle way.

Centered on the dubious idea that Arthur is actually a Roman noble who’s come to save the Britons from themselves, and here is the son of the last Roman Emperor to boot, The Last Legion attempts to be a historical epic on a budget, but really plays like an expensive episode of Xena: Warrior Princess with Colin Firth standing in for Lucy Lawless. Granted this makes a certain type of sense given director Doug Lefler worked on that very show, but then that tells you everything you need to know about this less-than-magical experience.

12. King Arthur (2004)

One of the most obvious attempts to recapture Gladiator’s lightning in a bottle turned out to be among the worst in this misbegotten other “true story” telling of the King Arthur legend. Pivoting on this dubious marketing claim, Disney produced a movie which saw David Franzoni, the original screenwriter of Gladiator, take center stage without John Logan cleaning up his narrative lines and dialogue, and Clive Owen strike an unconvincing pose as a blockbuster leading man.

Loosely based on the final days of the Roman Empire’s rule in Britannia, the movie introduces Owen’s Arthur as a half-Roman officer who must reluctantly take his “Knights of the Round Table” (a dirty half-dozen) on One Last Mission™. It’s a development which bears a striking similarity to Tears of the Sun (2003), a movie Antoine Fuqua just happened to direct the year before helming this wannabe epic. Even with shots of Michael Bay-styled hazy spectacle centered around Hadrian’s Wall, and the unconvincing sight of Keira Knightley in blue war paint and leather straps as a pagan Celtic warrior—she’s Guinevere, by the by—there’s not a whole lot about this dull affair we would deem legendary.

11. Gods and Generals (2003)

This is a trickier one to include. While certainly a would-be historical war epic released in the 2000s, Gods and Generals is in earnest a prequel to producer Ted Turner and director Ronald F. Maxwell’s Gettysburg (1993). That earlier, superior film was a TNT miniseries, but it’s so enjoyable to history buffs that it eventually got a theatrical release… then came this.

If Gettysburg flirted with Southern Lost Cause revisionism, then Gods and Generals married the insidious mythology, settled down with it, and produced a cinematic ne’er-do-well as its legacy. Like the title suggests, this movie deifies Confederate generals Robert E. Lee (Robert Duvall) and Stonewall Jackson (Stephen Lang) while completely sidestepping the reasons they were rebelling against the Union. It even incredulously features a scene where Jackson assures a Black man the Confederacy will one day emancipate its slaves.

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Worse than any historical revisionism though, this movie is just a tepid slog across 220 minutes, with neither the budget nor cast of extras needed to infuse its battle scenes with a sense of authentic terror or excitement. Instead “both sides” are played by dignified, middle-aged reenactors who display no fears or self-awareness about sacrificing their lives for a cause the movie is too scared to accept.

10. Apocalypto (2006)

Ah, the first Mel Gibson entry on this list is also the picture he made after achieving brief godlike status among evangelicals and Tinseltown accountants via The Passion of the Christ (2004). With that level of box office clout, Gibson could do anything he wanted. So, tired of giving the British a bad look with his epics, he decided it was the ancient Mayans’ turn.

To be clear, there are elements to admire about Apocalypto. For starters, Gibson committed to having the actors speak in the Yucatec Maya language, an audacious choice for a Hollywood film. It really does create an irresistibly immersive quality. Dean Semler’s cinematography also goes a long way in forging a sense of reality to what is essentially a chase movie wherein ancient villagers of a remote tribe in Central America are conquered and then pursued by Mayans who desire to use their blood for human sacrifice.

Yet the sparseness of the story also makes it easy to get lost in visuals that seek to not only ‘Other’ the ancient past, but to also condescend to it in a movie that lazily equates Mayans and Aztecs as interchangeable; it was the latter who celebrated large scale human sacrifice of captured enemies. More troubling though is this seems intentionally mangled for the shock twist ending where we see the ships of Hernán Cortés arriving a full 600 years early, giving this movie the queasy realization that the whole thing is a cinematic justification for the conquest and violence of the Catholic Conquistadors.

9. Alexander (2004)

Behold, here lies Oliver Stone’s Waterloo. A testament to the filmmaker’s love for antiquity, Alexander is a big beautiful mess that cannot be saved no matter how many times Stone drastically recuts it. Indeed, there are three radically different versions of this well-intentioned ruin, but despite what the director says, none of them offer redemption. Still, it’s probably better than you remember.

With painstakingly accurate costumes designed by Jenny Beaven, gorgeous production design by Jan Roelfs, and extraordinary music by the always noteworthy Vangelis, there is a lot to aesthetically admire. But it comes to naught in this overwrought and underwritten melodrama with an Irish brogue. Yes, as mercilessly mocked in the press in 2004, star Colin Farrell speaks with an Irish lilt as the Macedonian conqueror. But hey no one is speaking ancient Greek either, so who cares? I’d argue the bigger problem is whatever Angelina Jolie is going for as Olympias, Alexander’s mother by way of Count Dracula.

More unfortunate is how Stone’s screenplay and direction reduces Alexander to a whiny, petulant, slob who bursts into tears at the drop of a toga. Despite the admirable choice by Stone to depict Alexander’s undefined queerness and love for another man (Jared Leto), one cannot help but sense the filmmaker is also relying on reductive stereotypes of the LGBTQ community to write Alexander while turning the life of a man who captured one-third of the known world into a bad soap where all he really wants to do is crawl into bed with mommy. But hey, the accurate depiction of battle tactics at Gaugamela is nifty.

8. The Patriot (2000)

One of the rare films on this list not influenced by the glut of battlefield glory spawned from Gladiator, The Patriot opened the same summer as an attempt to slyly remake Mel Gibson’s Oscar winning Braveheart in American Revolution garb. Keep in mind that both Gibson vehicles are gussied up revenge thrillers, ahistorical melodramas, and arguable propaganda intended to vilify a British Empire already quite susceptible to critique. In fact, the only significant difference may be Braveheart was directed by Gibson who, for whatever his other faults, is a hell of a storyteller, and The Patriot is helmed by the guy who gave us the Matthew Broderick Godzilla.

In between disaster flicks, Roland Emmerich took this brief stab at period piece respectability while indulging every hammy and histrionic Hollywood cliché. We have the reluctant hero in one Benjamin Martin (Mel Gibson); the wayward son who’s coming of age by proving he is exactly like the old man (Heath Ledger); and a generic British villain played by Jason Isaacs, whose nastiness errs closer to the Nazis in Occupied France than any specific Red Coat. Most incredulous though is that Gibson plays a South Carolina plantation owner who doesn’t own slaves. Yeah, that’s about as convincing as the rest of this laugh riot.

7. 300 (2007)

For many this is likely a movie where the memory is better than the film. Yes, 300 is loaded with ridiculously fetishized images of spears, corpses, and weird CGI deformities breaking like impotent waves across Gerard Butler’s chiseled abs. And sure, it spits out more quotable lines than Groucho Marx at a yacht club. But once you realize the best lines were taken from the actual historic record (at least according to Plutarch), and most of those shots already bopped in the much more digestible trailers, what we’re left with is a shallow, surface level video game cutscene that’s extended across two long hours.

In bite-sized clips, 300 can be an oblivious homoerotic gas, ready made for frat houses everywhere. Yet after a hundred minutes of Zack Snyder’s slow-motion ramping, and Butler screaming ferociously as he impales another inferior androgynous man with his flexing spear, it all wears a bit thin. It’s tendency to also indulge in fascist iconography of a godlike white civilization (that practices eugenics) shattering the faceless hordes of monstrous, dehumanized others hasn’t aged like fine wine either.

6. Troy (2004)

When 300 came out, many including myself found its CGI landscapes refreshing when compared to the hulking excesses of Wolfgang Petersen’s old-fashioned Troy. And 15 years later, the latter is still cheesier than Kraft blue box macaroni; Troy could even be mistaken for ‘50s kitsch if not for its own use of CG and copious amounts of gore and nudity. But now that Hollywood’s moved so far away from on-location shooting and grand scale moviemaking, all those alleged faults suddenly play like endearing virtues in this big goofy reduction of Homer’s The Iliad to an evening of WWE Monday Night Raw.

With a silly screenplay by David Benioff that does away with Homer’s gods, Troy lives or dies on its spectacle and charisma, and it’s got a thousand ships’ worth of both. Brad Pitt is at his hunkiest as Achilles, but the movie really belongs to Eric Bana as poor doomed Trojan Prince Hector. Essentially Benioff’s first attempt at writing Ned Stark before Game of Thrones, Hector is portrayed as a noble, ass-kicking lamb to the slaughter. Kudos also to Orlando Bloom for agreeing at the height of his popularity to play such an off-putting coward.

Still, it’s the superb action scenes that make Troy stand out. Unlike most contemporaries, Petersen shoots the action in steady, clean wide shots, revealing intricate and often dazzling fight choreography, as well as brutal smash ups between the Trojans and Greeks. With Peter O’Toole also on hand to give the movie just a passing sense of majesty as old King Priam, you can come for the thrilling Hector versus Achilles fight but stay for the aftermath where O’Toole kisses the hands of his son’s murderer. For a few minutes, Troy grazes its much desired greatness.

5. The Alamo (2004)

A film mercilessly mocked for not being remembered like its namesake, John Lee Hancock’s The Alamo deserves better. Easily more interesting than John Wayne’s 1960 snoozefest of the same name, The Alamo ’04 took the novel approach of dramatizing the actual historical record of the doomed effort to defend a Spanish mission-cum-fort from Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana’s army.

Hancock’s movie likewise uses a warts and all lens on its three heroes of William Travis (Patrick Wilson), James Bowie (Jason Patric), and David Crockett (Billy Bob Thornton), intentionally demythologizing all men, particularly the last one, while still giving Thornton several scenes of mythic quality. The actual siege of the Alamo is appropriately brutal and swift, if in a PG-13 sort of way, but it’s how Thornton plays Crockett serenading both the Mexican and Texan armies at dusk with a fiddle on a parapet that makes this movie poignant. Its qualities even overcome how tacked on the ending is where Sam Houston (Dennis Quaid) defeats the Mexican army at the later battle of San Jacinto.

4. The Last Samurai (2003)

Tom Cruise got in on the newest blockbuster fad of the current era, as is his wont, and did so with extreme conviction in The Last Samurai. The result was a satisfying and, at times, thrilling adventure picture that meshed Akira Kurosawa influences with the white savior storyline of Dances with Wolves. Problematic plotting aside, what makes The Last Samurai shine is the introduction of Ken Watanabe to American audiences as the true last Samurai.

Playing Katsumoto, a Samurai loosely based on the real-life Saigō Takamori, Watanabe dominates the movie all the way to an Oscar nomination as the lone warrior who will not get with the program. He rejects the rapid westernization of feudal Japan, much to the displeasure of his emperor and American and European patrons, thereby putting Katsumoto on a collision course with disillusioned U.S. Cavalry officer Nathan Algren (Cruise). 

Nathan, by contrast, comes to Japan as a simple mercenary after years of bitter American Indian warfare, but he stays as a convert, adopting the Samurai’s code and fighting alongside Katsumoto in a doomed battle against the emperor’s army. It’s a familiar and ludicrous tale told with sincere grace and effective direction by Edward Zwick. Plus, the Samurai versus ninja sequence is just all kinds of badass.

3. Kingdom of Heaven (2005) – Director’s Cut

Most folks have never seen the Ridley Scott director’s cut of Kingdom of Heaven, which means most have never seen Kingdom of Heaven. Not really. There is of course a theatrical version, which in 144 minutes retains the narrative skeleton and action beats of the same story, but what’s missing is the film’s heart and much of its soul. When restored to its proper 190-minute length, Kingdom of Heaven is a visibly personal film to Scott, and an intoxicating one that gets swept away in a storm of medieval pageantry and pensive spiritual anxiety.

Loosely basing his film on the Fall of Jerusalem from Christian rule 1187—placing this between the Second and Third Crusade—Scott doesn’t care so much about historical fidelity as he does with creating a brooding snapshot of Western apprehension during the height of the War on Terror. He also makes a dense epic, captured in painterly cinematography and costumes, and stuffed with amazing performances. While Orlando Bloom is only serviceable as Balian de Ibelin, he’s surrounded by fantastic performers like David Thewlis, Brendan Gleeson, Michael Sheen, Liam Neeson, Jeremy Irons, and Alexander Siddig. Of special note are Edward Norton as King Baldwin IV, the Leper King whom Scott and screenwriter William Monahan mythologize as a philosopher shrouded by a silver mask, and Ghassan Massoud as Saladin. Between the empathy of these two highly fictionalized crowns, a true Kingdom of God could’ve existed.

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The other standout that deserves special attention is Eva Green as Sibylla, the Christian princess who becomes queen. In the theatrical version, studio edits reduced her to a simple love interest; in the director’s cut she is touched with the tragedy of Medea and the madness of Lady Macbeth when her son (wholly excised from the theatrical cut) becomes king… only to discover he’s also contracted leprosy.

2. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003)

In almost any other year, Peter Weir’s meticulously crafted Master and Commander would’ve been the toast of awards season. Sadly, it was overshadowed by the splashier third chapter of Lord of the Rings. Nevertheless, you’d be hard-pressed, even 17 years later, to find a more intelligent and well-anchored epic than this naval adventure. Set during the midst of the Napoleonic Wars, and loosely based on several Patrick O’Brian novels, Master and Commander immerses viewers into the daily rigmarole of life in the British Royal Navy.

While Russell Crowe is appropriately dashing as the long-haired British captain in search of a French prize in the Pacific, it is the effect of a perfectly cast ensemble that gives Weir’s movie a lived-in authenticity. Paul Bettany stands out as the smart-to-bordering on insubordinate Irish doctor, but there’s also Max Pirkis as the young midshipman with a touch of destiny, or Lee Ingleby as the much older mid-level officer with the scent of weakness and specter of doom trailing in his wake. Hell, the entire collection of hard-weathered character actors comprising the crew buoy this movie to greatness.

With an interest in naturalism that outclasses almost any other movie of its kind, Master and Commander breathes its sea air in full, and rises and falls like the cresting waves of its ship’s victories and defeats. Bettany’s poor Dr. Maturin may never get to spend enough time researching the animals of the Galapagos Islands in the film, but his story among men-at-arms makes for its own fascinating study.

1. Gladiator (2000)

There is little that hasn’t been said about the glory and greatness of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, but here is space to revel again in how this movie’s deeds echo through eternity. When the movie came out, debuting as an unlikely leggy box office hit and an even unlikelier Best Picture Oscar winner down the road, it had its share of critics who dismissed it as an action trifle. Yet Gladiator’s legacy has outlived those naysayers. To be sure the movie paints in archetypes, but it distills them to their most visceral and operatic extremes in a passion play about three people: the unwanted son (Joaquin Phoenix), the loved surrogate child (Russell Crowe), and the much smarter daughter who must survive them all (Connie Nielsen).

With these people setting their drama on a stage no less grand than the literal Roman arena, Gladiator elevates the revenger’s story into something poetic and lyrical, thanks in large part to its highly literate screenplay. Though getting there took some time, the end result allows Scott’s visceral instincts to bask in the Roman sun and sand, and gives much meat for all of the principles to play with, making stars of Crowe and Phoenix, as well as a gnarly ensemble of acting statesman like Richard Harris, Derek Jacobi, Djimon Hounsou, and Oliver Reed in his final, deliciously crusty performance.

Each of these elements build a sum greater than its already fine parts, leading to moments as satisfying as Crowe’s Maximus threatening Phoenix’s feckless Roman Emperor before an entire Colosseum, or as rapturous as Hans Zimmer and Lisa Gerrard’s transcendent musical score ushering Maximus into the fields of Elysium. It pities and romanticizes them all, even Phoenix’s unloved tyrant, but it also bakes them in a cinematic confection so rich that the tigers and gladiatorial mayhem is just a blood-red icing on top. There’s a reason it spawned a decade of imitators and aspirants.

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