Braveheart

Since I am in a phase of watching all those movies I meant to watch but never did, and I had an hour to kill last night, I started watching Braveheart, which I've never seen.

It's awful. Just awful.

I know all the exciting stuff's in the battles, which are yet to come, but in an hour of screen time, not a single thing happened that I couldn't see coming a mile away. It's like it's a satire, only they're playing it unironically.

And I am by no means a scholar of medieval Scotland, but it is just mind-gratingly ahistorical. The things that are wrong don't even make sense! There's all this stuff about the right of nobles to sleep with any bride on her wedding night, which was genuinely never a thing--it was a persistent rumor that cropped up in times of anti-noble sentiment--but they way they talk about it in the film MAKES NO SENSE AT ALL. And what the fuck are they wearing? No one wore kilts in the thirteenth century! And they are wearing them wrong! One historian said it would be like having a movie set in colonial America where everyone's wearing business suits with the jackets on backwards.

And I know--don't nitpick it! That's not the point! But it's not even fun bad history, like Merlin or Pirates of the Caribbean, where the choices are being made based on a genre of expectations about what a fabled time period looks like. Braveheart is pretending to be gritty and real but is just full of random wrong stuff.

I will perservere, but it's fucking long movie to be so bad. And I totally stand fourteen-year-old me's decision not to see it when it came out. I would not have been able to take it at that age, and I knew it.

The Iron Lady

Watched The Iron Lady. Meryl Streep is a fantastic Margaret Thatcher. The script, however, is not fantastic. The movie uses Thatcher in her old age and dementia as a narrative framing device. Two things. One, Margaret Thatcher is still alive (I looked it up), so this seems kind of insensitive. I kept thinking how my grandmother would feel if they made a movie about how craaaazy she was. Two, it's not actually used to tell a story about old age or dementia. It's just a narrative device to allow them to talk about the rest of her life.

And they talk about all of it. Starting in WWII in the grocery store, her first run for parliament, her run for prime minister, IRA bombings, strikes, the Falklands, the ousting-- This is the problem with the movie. I know some of the history, so I could follow, but you're not going to learn anything by watching this. You're not even going to get insight into what it was like for her, the ostensible purpose of a biopic, because it's mostly done with voice overs over stock footage and shots of Streep in profile looking thinky. I watched a bit of the behind the scenes, where they talk to Anthony Stewart Head about how interesting he finds his character--and I couldn't even figure out who his character was. He shows up an hour in and has a few scenes, but that's not enough to establish any weight or relationship with Thatcher. That's the problem with each conflict. Everything gets a five minute montage. So when Thatcher says she's been fighting all her life, you have to take her word for it.

I wish they'd just picked one. And there are so many they could have picked--the run for prime minister, the Falklands, breaking the unions, or what I think would have made the most interesting movie, the infighting that led to her resignation. Instead we got a tiny piece of all of that. Or, in other words, nothing. Except helmet hair and tweed suits.