TV/Movies Megathread

[crazy canuck]

Yeah, in what way was Normal rule an improvement for anyone other than the Normans? 

Cool castles?

[Tonitrus]

Yeah, in what way was Normal rule an improvement for anyone other than the Normans? 

Cool castles?

And then Cromwell came along and ruined many of those. 

[Valmy]

Yeah, in what way was Normal rule an improvement for anyone other than the Normans? 

Well in the short term very few ways.

Well they outlawed slavery and freed the remaining slaves. That was cool. Freedom to be a peasant.

They outlawed forced marriage. Though I have my suspicions there might have still been some coercion involved at time

But really the main thing was that the French nobles were just a very troublesome bunch and kept revolting and limiting the King's power. I also think linking England culturally more to the Continent instead of Scandinavia was one of the main developments that made England England.

I don't know. I used to have a long list of why the Norman Conquest wasn't ultimately that bad of a deal but really without a time machine to compare 12th century Anglo-Saxon England with 12th Century Norman England I guess we will never know.

[Syt]

PC Gamer have illustrated almost every Witcher 3 related story with Bathtub Geralt for years now:



So they now follow tradition with the TV series since the latest trailer:

[Eddie Teach]

Rosemary's Baby. Creepy.

[celedhring]

Terminator Dark Fate - it's essentially The Force Awakens of the Terminator saga. Reuses the very same plot of the classic movies but with young protagonists, the older cast serving as mentors/torch-passers.

It's decently entertaining if you like the saga (certainly more enjoyable than Genisys or Salvation), but it feels really lazy.

[Admiral Yi]

It's a pity Linda Hamilton's nipples didn't get more roles after T2.

[Habbaku]

Jonathan Sumption (Hundred Years War historian) wrote a nice piece on the recent The King film:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/theatre/what-to-see/agincourt-according-shakespeare-henry-v-rewrote-past-english/

Agincourt, according to Shakespeare: how Henry V rewrote the past for the English

Henry V was the last of the eight plays Shakespeare wrote about the English kings of the Hundred Years War, and it is the key to the whole series. The play's central event, the Battle of Agincourt, which took place on October 25 1415, provides the patriotic climax to a century of history. The dissolute youth seen in both parts of Henry IV comes into his own, a reformed character, as the greatest warrior-king that England has ever seen.

After that, as the chorus foretells in the final lines of the play, the rest will be a sorry tale of decline: Henry V's heroic achievements undone by the squabbles of the lesser men who tried to fill his shoes, the corrosive effects of human ambition, and the wounds of a divided nation.

Even after four centuries, our ideas about this fascinating period are still moulded by Shakespeare's phrases and arresting images. Yet how accurate is he? In detail, very: Shakespeare got most of his facts from the Tudor writer Raphael Holinshed, who was a competent historian.

But Henry V is misleading in general, even if accurate in detail. The main problem is Shakespeare's treatment of the French. They appear as "confident and over-lusty", their boasts and insults a dramatic prelude to their condign destruction.

This classic sequence of hubris and nemesis lends dramatic impact to Shakespeare's story, in which English virtue prevails against apparently impossible odds. However, it misses the main historical point. The wars of Henry V were a tragic episode in the history of France. They cannot be understood simply by crying, "God for England, Harry and St George."

At the time of Agincourt, France, although the richest and strongest state of Europe, was divided by a bitter civil war. The king, Charles VI, had been mad for nearly half of his 46 years. His incapacity left a void which those around him fought each other to fill. Eight years before Agincourt, the king's brother Louis, Duke of Orleans, had been battered to death in a Paris street by a band of assassins hired by his cousin John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy. In the capital, John seized control of the king and the administration and governed with the support of the butchers' guild, strong and violent men who were the leaders of the city's mob.

In an atmosphere of mounting tension, John the Fearless was able to hang on to power for nearly six years. But in 1413, he lost control of the mob, which took over Paris and launched a reign of terror. In the resultant backlash, the city's conservative patriciate recovered control of the streets and John was forced to flee. The Dauphin, Louis of Guyenne, swiftly took over the government. The Orleanists returned to the city in triumph.

This was the situation when Henry V launched his first invasion of France in 1415. The Agincourt campaign was undoubtedly an extraordinary feat of physical endurance and moral courage, but it is a very mixed tribute to Henry's generalship.

The English had captured Harfleur in September after a siege of a month, but their battle casualties and losses to disease were so heavy that Henry was forced to abandon the campaign and return to England. Instead of re-embarking at Harfleur, however, he resolved upon a show of force, by marching across northern France and re-embarking at Calais.

His plan was to outrun the French and reach Calais before they could concentrate their forces against him. Henry, however, was outmanoeuvred at every point by the French Constable, Charles of Albret. On October 25, St Crispin's Day, he found his path blocked at Agincourt by a French army about twice the size of his own.

Henry's victory was due mainly to the folly of the French commanders. They chose to fight on a confined site, which made it impossible for them to take advantage of their superior numbers. They also put all the commanders in the front line, so that the rear echelons were left without leaders or orders.

The only military consequence of the French defeat was that the English were able to escape back to England. But the political impact was enormous. The defeated army had been raised by the Dauphin's Orleanist government, and it was almost entirely drawn from the ranks of their supporters. Almost the entire leadership of their party was killed or captured.

The Duke of Burgundy had stayed away because the Dauphin had refused to cede power to him. "With respect, most noble lord," his ambassadors had said, "you must understand that unless you submit to our master's demands neither he nor his vassals or subjects will lift a finger to help when the English set upon you." Nor did they.

If these facts are little known in England, it is largely because Shakespeare does not mention them. He tells us nothing about the French king's madness; rather, Charles VI appears in the play as a wise and cautious old man, a foil to his overconfident son. Nor is there any word about the civil war.

Most remarkably, the play jumps straight from the Battle of Agincourt to the treaty of Troyes, five years later, the notorious instrument by which Charles VI, now a pawn of the Burgundians, agreed to disinherit his son and adopt the English king as his heir. Shakespeare treats it as the consequence of the battle.

He thus skips over the death of the Dauphin by disease, the Orleanist military dictatorship that followed, the second English invasion of Normandy in 1417, the brutal recapture of Paris by the Burgundians and, finally, the carefully planned murder of John the Fearless by the new Dauphin's courtiers at a conference ostensibly called to settle their differences. These dramatic events left France at Henry V's mercy.

Shakespeare was well aware of all this. The essential facts are all in Holinshed. But he suppressed them in order to make his play a purely English story, the king's triumph an English triumph, the fruit of English courage.

He thereby missed a whole dimension of this great human tragedy. The truth would have been stranger than the fiction, but it would also, ironically, have been better: a very different drama, but certainly one worthy of Shakespeare.

[Berkut]

Just watched The King.

What about the battle in particular was so egregiously wrong?

[Admiral Yi]

Just watched The King.

What about the battle in particular was so egregiously wrong?

English archers planted stakes.
There was no English suicidal ruse charge.
There was no English hidden flank attack.
Mounted French knights charged the blocks of archers on the wings at the beginning of the batttle, not knights and men at arms in the center.
Except for those initial charges, all French waves advanced on foot.
English men at arms killed French knights by pulling them over with hookbills then sticking them in visor slits and weak spots, not by wrestling them.
Long bow bolts didn't penetrate plate armor.

[crazy canuck]

It's a pity Linda Hamilton's nipples didn't get more roles after T2.

Is there ever a day your misogyny takes a break or this you 24/7?

[Berkut]

Just watched The King.

What about the battle in particular was so egregiously wrong?

English archers planted stakes.
There was no English suicidal ruse charge.
There was no English hidden flank attack.
Mounted French knights charged the blocks of archers on the wings at the beginning of the batttle, not knights and men at arms in the center.
Except for those initial charges, all French waves advanced on foot.
English men at arms killed French knights by pulling them over with hookbills then sticking them in visor slits and weak spots, not by wrestling them.
Long bow bolts didn't penetrate plate armor.

1. The movie didn't imply that they did not. Just didn't show them.
2. The basic portrayal of the English attack was not a suicidal ruse charge, just a march. In fact, they never "charged" at all, and eventually actually stopped.
3. OK. But there was the English light infantry and archers attacking. This seems like an interpretation more than an outright fabrication.
4. OK, that is different from the published accounts.
5. This is a bit more annoying, if just because it seems obviously "Hollywood" and unnecessary. I guess so it could be part of the "master battle plan".
6. Meh. How men in plate armor get killed is pretty up for debate, and there are plenty of accounts saying that French knight were in fact drowned in the mud, and knocked down by the more lightly armored English infantry. The movie is showing a big ass, muddy melee. This is pretty non-egregious.
7. I didn't get the impression from the movie that they did - the longbows seemed to be a lot more dangerous to the horses than the men. And arrows could certainly penetrate parts of an armored target. And they fired a LOT of arrows.

Overall, this is pretty tame by Hollywood standards, and given that there is a lot of speculation historically about what exactly happened at Agincourt, at least so far as I remember, I really didn't find it all that shocking.

Now, the parts that were more annoying was just the stright out fictionalized history. The Dauphin was not even there, and Henry was just trying to get away back to England.
3.

[Valmy]

It's a pity Linda Hamilton's nipples didn't get more roles after T2.

Is there ever a day your misogyny takes a break or this you 24/7?

Really? Huh.

[Admiral Yi]

Oh yeah, also the Genoese crossbowmen that the mounted charges rode over were left out.

[Valmy]

Oh yeah, also the Genoese crossbowmen that the mounted charges rode over were left out.

I thought that was Crecy. Did they do that twice?