Also this week:
Ten More Great British Directors: An Alternate List- Bilge and I react to the recent Daily Telegraph list. See if you can guess which picks are mine.
The Most Historically Inaccurate Films Ever Made, Part 1 and Part 2- another busy work, so I only ended up blurbing MISSISSIPPI BURNING. It might not sound like it from the list, but I actually don't dislike the film. I'm not a big Alan Parker fan outside of his movies that star singing Irishmen (though not so much the ones with Irishmen who don't sing) but this is one of his better non-musicals. For what it actually is, MISSISSIPPI BURNING works. But what is actually is is quite different than what it pretends to be- a dramatic recounting of a pivotal event during the American Civil Rights movement. It sold itself as a recreation of actual events in the not-too-distant past, made while many of the players were still alive. And in that sense it's sort of reprehensible. That's what the article was about- it wasn't "The Movies That Made Shit Up and Still Sucked," after all. The funny thing is that I saw the flaws the first time, yet it really made an impression on me when I first saw it (it's nothing if not skillful filmmaking); viewing it now through the prism of historical fidelity called for by the assignment, the flaws stood out more and the good stuff receded into the background. Which Bergman film was it in which someone said, "if you look for God, you'll find him everywhere"? Same goes for historical inaccuracies in movies, I suppose. Although, Hackman and McDormand's performances? Still awesome.
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