(via)

After Alexander and Macedonia, our next Anglofilmia stop was Isreal, to visit Judah Ben-Hur, in our first entry for our Roman Britain section (43 AD to 410 AD: they came, they saw, they conquered). (Note: we’ve selected it to provide historical context to the events of the time, as it doesn’t actually take place in Britain.)

Unlike Alexander, this epic actually delivered in story, character and scale. Check out our five observations about the film, a re-edited, contemporary trailer and a recap, below.

1. Ben-Hur is intimidating. It took us a long time to get around to sitting down and watching it, and it’s taken even longer for me to figure out how to write about it. Where do you even begin? People who are familiar with film culture already know all of the neat trivia and people who are familiar with history know about the context, but we started with no knowledge of either. Our selection of this film was, in fact, to lend historical context to the project, since at the time the Romans in Britain were busy invading and killing, but hadn’t yet pissed off Boudica.

Check out this trailer for the 50th anniversary Blu-Ray version; it’s interesting to see trailers for older films presented in the movie language of today’s viewers.

A recap (with spoilers – although, can you spoil a film this old and famous?):

Ben-Hur is a 1959 film starring Charlton Heston as a wealthy merchant in Jerusalem in AD 26.

Ben-Hur’s childhood friend Messala supports the Roman empire, while Ben-Hur wants to maintain the freedom of the Jewish people. After an accident that injures the new governor of Judea, Messala spitefully has Ben-Hur and his family arrested. Ben-Hur is sent to be a slave in a ship galley, and briefly meets Jesus of Nazareth as he makes his way to the sea.

After three years, Ben-Hur gains the respect of Roman Consul Arrius, who, after some adventures, eventually frees him from slavery and adopts him as a son. Ben-Hur adapts to Roman life and learns to be a charioteer, but he is homesick and eventually returns to Judea.

Meanwhile, Ben-Hur’s mother and sister have contracted leprosy in prison, and ask his girlfriend Esther to conceal their fate; she tells Ben-Hur they have died, and he is so enraged that he enters a chariot race against Messala.

Thus, the famous chariot scene. Incidentally, Messala drives a “Pict chariot”. It’s a nice touch, though it’s not enough to prevent him from being trampled and mortally wounded. He tells Ben-Hur that his sister and mother are still alive.

Ben-Hur goes to retrieve them, and is generally filled with rage about Messala, Rome and his family’s situation. Then he, his girlfriend, his mother and sister witness the trial and execution of Jesus, and are healed physically and spiritually.

2. It is totally worth the investment of time. By the time we made it to the Intermission (at 2 hours, 20 minutes in) we were ready for a brief break, but couldn’t stop. It’s fun to watch for the same reasons I love stop-motion films; you know everything in it is real, not just being rendered by a computer. Plus, the brain can tell the difference. It’s much more of an impact to see see the flooding of the massive galley ship, the city streets and the unbelievably intense chariot race scenes when you know it’s happening to real people, even if parts are on a studio set.

3. I was surprised it wasn’t included on Slate’s list of languishing Netflix rentals. (Although the AFI’s Best Epic and future Anglofilmia watchee, Lawrence of Arabia, is. Ben-Hur is #2 on the AFI list.)

4. Thanks to internet meme culture, “epic” is one of the most incorrectly overused words ever.

Things that are epic:
15,000 line poems
265000 word novels
Movies with massive budgets, enormous casts, gigantic sets and sweeping plotlines, preferably including heroes and/or voyages
Ben Hur

Things that are not epic:
Things that are awesome
Things that are merely badass
Doing pretty well at something – even doing it really, really well (also known as “winning”)
Funny signs
Ironic situations
A duck standing on another duck’s back
Bad tattoos

5. “The theater-goer in conventional dramatic theater says: Yes, I’ve felt that way, too. That’s the way I am. That’s life. That’s the way it will always be. The suffering of this or that person grips me because there is no escape for him. That’s great art—Everything is self- evident. I am made to cry with those who cry, and laugh with those who laugh. But the theater-goer in the epic theater says: I would never have thought that. You can’t do that. That’s very strange, practically unbelievable. That has to stop. The suffering of this or that person grips me because there is an escape for him. That’s great art—nothing is self-evident. I am made to laugh about those who cry, and cry about those who laugh.” – Bertolt Brecht

The “real” Craggy Island, the one in the helicopter shots shown in the opening sequence, is Inisheer, the little one on the right.

The whole thing is tucked away in the Galway Bay:

That got me to thinking about the most outlying points of the British Isles, and sure enough, there’s a wikipedia page for that too. Did you know that the first person to visit each of the most outlying points of Scotland is also the only person to do so? He did that in 2007. He’s also the only person to sleep on all of them, a feat accomplished in 2009.

There’s also a list of the most extreme points of the United Kingdom. But when I was looking it over, I became confused. The points of the United Kingdom are listed…but so are points for Great Britain, and they’re different. And what are Crown dependencies?

Luckily Jey came to my rescue, sharing with me this video which was apparently making the rounds not too long ago. It explains in a very clear and concise manner the difference between Great Britain, the United Kingdom, the Crown and a whole mess of other titles of ownership I had no idea even existed. Enjoy!

What’s taking so long?
Most of the films we’re chosen are on the timeline because they’re great works of art, or tell a fascinating story. Others are there because they’re the only available option. This makes for some slow movie watching periods, because it’s hard to make time to sit and watch something we know we probably won’t enjoy all that much.

Where are you on the timeline now?
We’re currently eight films ahead of the blog, meaning we’ve just watched the film about St. Patrick, while I’ve only written up to Alexander (a gap of about 800 years). This is mostly because we’ve been settling into our new house, and I’m going to make an effort to catch up on writing before we get too much further along.

Where do you find copies of all the films?
Some of the movies we’ve chosen for the timeline are rare, from a small release, or aired on television many years ago, and frankly lots are nearly impossible to find. Our sources are, in descending order: Netflix discs and Netflix Instant (the American equivalent of Lovefilm), DVDs rented from the library, series posted to YouTube or other video-sharing sites, and torrents.

It’s frustrating when we can’t find copies of something (I wrote a bit about that here and so far that list includes the animated Y Mabinogi, Vercingétorix, the 1978 BBC series “Living in the Past” and a TV version of St. Patrick’s story narrated by Liam Neeson)…but most of the time it’s a fun little treasure hunt.

Do you watch everything in order/what do you do when a new film is released?
We watch everything in order, with some backtracking allowed where necessary (for example, we are waiting for the DVD release of The Eagle).

There have been some fantastic films about British history released recently, including Bright Star, The Young Victoria and The King’s Speech. We have watched none of them. (If you know about my passion for Romantic and Victorian literature, you’ll understand the level of my commitment to this project.)

Is the timeline complete?
I created the timeline with a lot of online research, but as we begin a new period I have another look and try to add things I missed the first time around. The History of Britain series by Simon Schama is one of the things I discovered after we’d finished with pre-history, but it’s proven very useful as a primer on the Saxons and Normans, and that’s only the first episode.

Also, I’m wondering if I should create a timeline with the films intermixed with significant events or artifacts like the Lindow Man. Thoughts?

How has it been so far?
We both agree that even though we are only just now getting into post-Roman Britain (with a side journey into Europe, for context) we’ve already learned a massive amount about Britain’s history. Britain is wonderful in that many of the artifacts of even these earliest periods still exist, from henges to the Roman roads and beyond.

Any other questions about how the project is run? Post a comment below.

I’ll start my review of Oliver Stone’s Alexander by stating a simple fact: the story of Alexander III of Macedon is too epic – in both scale and badasssery – for one film to contain. That doesn’t stop Alexander from trying.

The real-life Alexander (356-323 BC) is fascinating, to say the least. Alexander’s mother (played in the film by Angelina Jolie) groomed him from childhood to believe it was his destiny to rule. He began his command at the age of 16, a period when most of us are writing in journals about how much that song reminds us of this boy we’re crushing on, omg. By the age of thirty he had created one of history’s largest empires. At the time of his death at age thirty-three, he was undefeated in battle and today “is considered one of the most successful commanders of all time”.

This film tries to cover all of that in its 175 minute run time, focusing mainly the miscellaneous battles he engaged in as he took over the world, as well as his relationships to his mother (confused), his male lover (tender) and his wife (raw).

A lot of reviews of the film point out how well-received it was outside of the United States, and Stone himself said Americans are too squeamish about homosexual love. But you know what? I think people didn’t like it because it wasn’t gay enough.

The film sets up a contrast between Alexander’s true love Hephaistion (Jared Leto) and his political wife Roxane (Rosario Dawson). Supposedly, Alexander and Hephaistion are as close as two souls can be, having grown up together, and they now remain always at each others’ sides, while Alexander and Roxane marry only for the sake of proving he’s down with people from “barbarian” nations.

Yet the film devotes a significant amount of screen time to an uncomfortable, not-entirely-consensual sex scene between Alexander and Roxane, in which you see her partially nude. The most action poor Hephaistion sees during the entire 2.5 hours is some hugging and a whole lot of wistful gazing. They don’t even kiss.

Agape vs. eros? (Historical documents suggest their relationship was sexual as well as erotic.) Studio meddling? Whatever the case, this handling of their relationship was a mistake so large the film simply couldn’t overcome it.

Aside from the disingenuous handling of the character’s sexual relationships (and did I mention, there seems to be an implied sexual tension between Alexander and his ambitious, scheming mother?) I thought the casting left something to be desired.

I like Colin Farrell a lot and he’s an electric actor, always roiling with a kind of nervous energy. Supposedly the real Alexander had a violent temper and an impulsive nature (attributed, by Plutarch, to his penchant for drink). But he was also a statesman, a general and a man possessing great intelligence and dignity (and, dare I say it, gravitas). For me, Farrell always manages to come off as a lovable rogue, and that just doesn’t work for a character that’s supposed to be the ruler of 90% of the known world.

The film looks great, and it’s a treat to see wonders of the ancient world such as the Library of Alexandria and the gates and palaces of Babylon. But there’s an excess of narration and the battle scenes are cumbersome and blend together.

And there’s also the issue of the portrayal, as in 300, of the Persians as barbarians in need of Occidental civilizing. There’s the usual amount of Hollywood whitewashing, with Alexander appearing as the traditional-but-misinformed Nordic blonde, and barbarian Iranian Roxana as dark-skinned when she would apparently have been from a northern tribe of blue-eyed, blonde nomads.

Detail from the Alexander mosaic from the House of the Faun, Pompeii, c. 80 B.C.
National Archaeologic Museum, Naples, Italy

A lot of this is due, naturally, to drawing from Greek historical sources, which aren’t going to be particularly subtle in their praise or their condemnation. A lot of ink has been spilled over the other historical inaccuracies in this film, and I won’t add any more to it except to say that viewers should keep in mind that the Persians were pretty great at empire-making, themselves.

It’s interesting to note that Stone released an extended final cut of the film in 2007, in which he restores every piece of cut footage and subplot that had been edited out of the original and the 2005 director’s cut. The total running time is 3 hours 40 minutes, with an intermission between the two acts. (Our next entry Ben Hur clocks in at 3 hours 32 minutes.)

Surprisingly, given how we chafed under the length of the original, if I were to ever watch Alexander again, it would be this longer version. There’s a thorough review of the lengthier film here, and while the review says the movie still “doesn’t exactly gel”, it notes the film has been re-edited to help the narrative flow and give a lot more time to the human influences on Alexander’s life. Even if his political and militaristic motivations are made “hopelessly muddy” by the reshuffling, at least there’s this:

While there still isn’t much physical expression of their affection, the relationship between the king and Hephaistion is not shied away from. Their liaison is quite clear. Expanded scenes of Hephaistion counseling Alexander also show their connection is more than physical.

And finally, I can’t wrap up this post without discussing my own first exposure to the myth and legend of Alexander, which came through the animated series Reign: The Conqueror (Alexander Senki). It was designed by Peter Chung, whose Liquid Television series Aeon Flux started me as a child on the path of appreciating animation as an art form, and gave me a taste for shows of the the surreal and mind-bending variety.

Reign follows in the same vein, drawing as much on metaphysics, Euclidian geometry and the Pythagorean cult (believers in a mathematic mysticism, of sorts, and forebearers of hermeticism, gnosticism and alchemy as well as modern physics) as on the actual historical legend of Alexander.

Someone has uploaded the entire show onto YouTube, and it’s well worth a watch to gain an entirely different, still fascinating perspective of the Alexander mythos.

Support Anglofilmia by purchasing Alexander through our Amazon Affiliate links. US: Alexander Revisited, UK: Alexander – Director’s Cut.

300 is another of the Anglofilmia movies that touches on several familiar concepts: natives fighting invading forces, the appeal of a glorious death in battle at the peak of one’s life, and the resulting immortality in story form throughout history (see also: Troy).

I’m sure by now you’ve seen the film, and if not, you’re at least vaguely familiar with the story, if for no other reason than its advertising was ubiquitous when it was released in 2007.

But just in case: 300 is based on a Frank Miller/Lynn Varley comic of the same name, which tells the story of the baddest-ass group of fighters in history, in their baddest-ass epic battle, shown in bad-ass stylized form. It’s an eye-melting spectacle of battle glory and sweaty, ripped abs and lots of men yelling. And then everyone dies. (Except one guy, who’s the one telling the story.)

All caught up? Good. Since we’re all familiar with the story, a bit of context is also necessary.

2007 was a great year for stylized (or at least stylish) movies. For indie hipster color, we had Juno, Superbad, Lars and the Real Girl, Dan in Real Life, and Hairspray (does that count as indie?). On the other end of the tones spectrum, repping for washed-out cool, we had Sweeney Todd, the Orphanage, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and There Will Be Blood.

Blockbuster comics movies seemed to be nearing the end of their run (though in retrospect we know better), with X-Men: the Last Stand in 2006 and Spider-Man 3 standing in stark contrast to 2007′s Persepolis. It was as if filmmakers realized a comic page made a pretty sweet-lookin’ storyboard without any meddling, and Frank Miller’s oeuvre was still ripe for the picking.

As it turned out, 300 became a blockbuster in its own right, raking in over $200 million at the box office. Comics movies are still going strong.

The movie currently sits at a 60% critic rating on Rotten Tomatoes, compared to a 90% user rating. It makes sense that there’s such a huge gap. The film turned out to be one of those that you either love or you hate. People get into the flashy stylishness, the deliberately over the top battle scenes, the comic panel framing, and the rigorous training undertaken by the actors, or they loathe the historical inaccuracies, the portrayal of Persians and the disabled, and the posturing.

In short, 300 doesn’t try to be anything but itself, which is to say it doesn’t let truth (or historical accuracy) get in the way of a story, and there’s a lot of very shiny battle scenes, and it matches the comic very, very closely. Ultimately, war stories are written by the people who won, and we can’t help but project our contemporary sensibilities onto the stories. Whether you can accept those elements will determine your feelings on the film.

So what of the actual Battle of Thermopylae? Learning about the actual event, it’s such a cool story that it doesn’t actually need much (any?) embellishment to be downright fascinating. But while 300 throws in some magic, demons and depicts Xerxes as “an angry bald giant“, as far as the general sketch of events goes, 300 doesn’t actually deviate all that much.

The primary source for information on the wars is Herodotus, and other accounts line up with his telling. The Persian Wars took place between 500 and 479 BC. Wikipedia tells us it was “fought between an alliance of Greek city-states, led by Sparta, and the Persian Empire of Xerxes I over the course of three days, during the second Persian invasion of Greece.”

Persia was mounting its second invasion of Greece, who mostly agreed they weren’t keen on the idea. The armies launched a two-pronged defense, blocking the army at the pass of Thermopylae and the navy at the Straights of Artemisium.

Around 7,000 Greeks (Herodotus says 4,200) held off approximately 100,000 to 300,000 Persian soldiers for three days of battle, with Spartan king Leonidas at the pass itself, a strategic stronghold.

Two days in, a local named Ephialtes revealed the location of a small path that bypassed the Greeks and allowed the Persian army to flank them. Leonidas saw what was happening and sent most of the Greek army away, leading around 1,400 in the last stand.

The Greek navy withdrew after learning of the defeat, and the Persian army captured Athens. But several months later, the Greeks attacked and defeated them, causing Xerxes to withdraw his army from Greece, and the following year he gave up his quest for Greece after a massive defeat at the Battle of Plataea.

(300 begins at the beginning of the Battle of Plataea, at which the story of the Battle of Thermpylae is told in order to rouse the troops, with all its attendant exaggerations.)

After Plataea (479 BC), the Greek city states went on the offensive, Best estimates put a peace accord some time around 466 BC. Herodotus wrote his Greek histories around 440–430 BC, ensuring Leonidas and his soldiers a place in legend.

Funnily, the film begat a legacy all its own, in the form of memes derived from the over the top line deliveries from the film trailers, like “THIS IS SPARTA!” and “TONIGHT WE DINE IN HELL.”

As for me, I know what I’m being next Halloween.

Support Anglofilmia by purchasing 300 on DVD or Bluray, or the Frank Miller and Lynn Varley graphic novel on which it’s based, through our Amazon Affiliate links.

UK DVD, UK Bluray, UK graphic novel,
The 300 Spartans on DVD

And, I didn’t realize it was being released so soon. When I first heard about it (last year), 2011 seemed so far away… Guess I’d better get on with the book before the film arrives.

If you can’t see the embedded trailer below, visit the site to watch.

We’d been planning to go to England for the holidays for about six months, to surprise Jey’s parents. This meant six months of rigamarole as all the siblings concocted elaborate ruses about where they’d be, how to get presents to where, and so on. So by the time we’d forcibly fit all of our wrapped gifts into a single suitcase, we were already tired.

Little did we know that a stopover in Dallas to see my parents would turn into a much longer ordeal, and we would yearn for the relative relaxation of battling Christmas crowds full of children flying tiny wireless helicopters.

A map detailing every leg of our journey; click to view at a larger size

Note: we were flying on standby, which means you only get a seat if there’s space available, and generally other standbys are higher-ranked than us to boot.

Another note: this post gets lengthy, so if you can’t be bothered with the details, skip to the end for the TL;DR summary.

The snow hit Heathrow right when we were about to leave, so we were still hopeful that we’d be able to get on one of the two planes out of DFW International. But Heathrow shutting down meant planes weren’t returning to the US to be filled again, and flights-full of people were getting moved to the next plane over, or diverted via other cities. Several days’ worth of cancellations meant that literally every seat had a passenger. To discover this, we had to go to the airport, check in, wait at the gate for four and a half hours until the plane had departed, repeat for the next flight (usually waiting a bit less time), then going home again. Repeat for three days.

Eventually we decided to try flying out of New York City, as they had at least six flights going to Heathrow each day, plus connections to other European cities. The Eurorail was shut down, but we figured, there’s also land and sea.

In New York, we fared much better. We did spend the entire day in the airport, but we were pretty high up in the lists of standbys. There were a lot of people trying to get out of NYC, most of them crowded around the ticket desks at the departure gate — and when a British crowd receives bad news, they get hilarious. So that took some of the edge off.

Eventually, we were booked on a flight to Paris, and while at the gate the agent told us we’d have a much better chance of getting out of Brussels — if we could leg it to the complete opposite end of the terminal in time.

Number of airline employees who quite literally laughed at us, denied we would ever have a chance of flying out, and told us to enjoy our Christmas in New York: 4

Number of Jeys and Laus laughing in desperate, hysterical relief when we showed up red-faced and sweaty, and were allowed on the plane despite clearly being crazy people: 2

Once on the plane, we settled in for a restless sleep, having already messed up our west coast sleep patterns several days previous. When we woke as the plane was landing, we were surprised to hear that we had not arrived in Brussels, home of the Manneken Pis, but Dublin, home of the Men Who Can…well, you get my meaning.

As it turns out, the plane’s wing was leaking water, and had we tried to land in -14 degree Brussels, it would have frozen and made us crash. Fantastic! The Dublin airport had opened only two hours before we landed because of all the snow, and our flight attendant pal told us he’d never seen Ireland with any snow, much less completely covered.

The banks of snow were so high around the runways that the requisite emergency vehicles (“Standard procedure,” said our reassuring flight attendant friend) couldn’t even get to us. There were bunnies hopping around in it.

We sat on the runway for three or four hours as the ground crew tried to unfreeze the wheels of the portable stairs to get them close to the plane, so they could make repairs and coat it with a de-icing gel. Finally, we took off on our short hop to Brussels.

By this point, we were tired, jetlagged, smelly, dirty and frustrated. Our phones were dying. We’d missed our first (non-refundable) connecting flight out of Brussels due to the Dublin stopover, and had a few hours to wait before the next one, which would take us to Manchester. So we were pretty emotionally unprepared when we had to re-enter security, and they forced us to open every single one of our carefully wrapped Christmas presents and show them to a security agent.

Mostly it was books. Why could they not send them through the scanner a second time? The world will never know. We looked away when unwrapping the gifts we’d picked for each other. There may have been some tears shed. This was 100% the lowest point of the entire trip, so I’ll not dwell on it any longer.

Instead of partaking in a large pint at one of the many bars scattered around the airport, we found the gate for our Manchester flight, which was located in one of the remote add-on wings the airport built to accomodate short-distance planes. While it was technically a building, it was freezing cold, set on top of concrete and you could hear water running in the ceiling.

[Speaking of water, a fun fact about Belgium: they have the worst water in the world! (Seriously. "Sewage-laden.") We wondered why the tap water smelled strange. Further research revealed that not only do they have terrible quality water, they didn't actually make fixing the situation a priority until the 00s. Given this, you would be surprised at how scarce was bottled water for sale in the airport, how small and expensive the bottles. Maybe that's why all the beer?

What a revelation to learn how privileged we have been, to grow up in a place where water is not only abundant -- what you might normally imagine is the problem for deprived areas of the world -- but also considered a human right.]

Our flight to Manchester was on a discount airline, and the plane literally had propellers on it. We landed, got a hotel room, and woke up at 5 to catch the earliest possible train to London. We’d booked on a Virgin train and it was fantastic; it was quiet, and the entire British countryside was blanketed in white.

We spent a few hours in the city (and saw Love Never Dies). Relieved to finally be in the safe, comforting embrace of the homeland, where everything is polite and orderly, we boarded our train to Dorking.

Which was cancelled when 3/4ths of the signals at Waterloo Station went out.

TL;DR: After many cancelled and redirected flights, stopovers and train fails, we finally reached England, where things weren’t all that much better, but at least we were with family.

“After the death of his father King George V (Michael Gambon) and the scandalous abdication of King Edward VIII (Guy Pearce), Bertie (Colin Firth) who has suffered from a debilitating speech impediment all his life, is suddenly crowned King George VI of England.

With his country on the brink of war and in desperate need of a leader, his wife, Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter), the future Queen Mother, arranges for her husband to see an eccentric speech therapist, Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush). After a rough start, the two delve into an unorthodox course of treatment and eventually form an unbreakable bond.

With the support of Logue, his family, his government and Winston Churchill (Timothy Spall), the King will overcome his stammer and deliver a radio-address that inspires his people and unites them in battle. Based on the true story of King George VI, THE KING’S SPEECH follows the Royal Monarch’s quest to find his voice.”

With this cast, it’s bound for success. It’s currently at 93% on Rotten Tomatoes and there’s already whispers of Oscar nominations.

In terms of watching, we’re just about to close out the “Roman Britain” period and enter into “Sub-Roman Britain (Saxons and Normans)”, which is a period that yielded plenty of fascinating stories. Since the film version of “Eagle of the Ninth” isn’t coming out until 2011, I’m reading the 1954 book to fill in some of the gaps between 117 AD, Gladiator (192 AD) and the story of St. Patrick (440s).

And finally, it’s a sad fact that this early in the timeline, relevant movies are sparse, and it’s always a bit painful to have to skip over something when we can’t get ahold of a copy. So I’m also quite pleased to have located a copy of the last film in the Sub-Roman segment, a 1976 BBC teleplay called “Penda’s Fen”.

Like many stories that deal with Britain’s mythological history, it blends contemporary and historical elements, the latter of which qualifies it to represent the 650s AD. If we’d had to skip, it would have been a jump from the 440s to the 800s with nothing in between, which I’m sure we can all agree would have been tragic indeed.