Category: Movies

Reviews, comment and similar.

Facetious Movie Awards, 2018 Edition

~ Inquisitor

Yes, it’s the end of 2018, it’s been a while, and it’s time to return to my favourite theme of the year: joke movie awards. Because there’s been enough both good and bad this year to deserve them, and I almost have as many jokes as there are Grammys.

There may be some barbs at 2017 movies as well, as I missed out on doing this last year. This set of awards is brought to you by the Cineworld Unlimited card, without which I wouldn’t see nearly as much rubbish as I do.

And as The Favourite isn’t out until 2019, I think I’ve seen pretty much everything that’s worth seeing that’s out this year. So let’s go…

[FYI: This blog has been edited to fix a typo, and a statement about Steven Spielberg changed because, unfortunately, I remembered about Crystal Skull. Further edits will also be noted here.]

Best Animated Movie: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Effortlessly fun, endlessly inventive, and appropriately respectful to almost every version of Spidey ever put on paper. The best thing Sony have done with any of their Marvel properties without supervision from the mothership, and hopefully the start of more (as long as Lord and Miller can stay in the loop.)

Hon mentions to Isle of Dogs (but then I am a Wes Anderson fan so I would wouldn’t I?), Incredibles 2, and Ralph Breaks the Internet.

Best Superhero Movie: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. See above.

Best Non-Animated Superhero Movie: Black Panther. Hon mentions (in order) to Avengers: Infinity War, Deadpool 2, Ant-Man and the Wasp, and even Aquaman. In fact, it would be a really strong year if it wasn’t for…

Worst Spinoff: Venom. Everyone at Sony, no matter what generation, appear to be obsessed with the idea that Venom is a good character and a decent one to build your spinoff around, rather than the terrible relic of Dork Age storytelling he actually is. And Tom Hardy is not going to save you.

Best Stunt: Tom Cruise quite literally breaking his leg while jumping between buildings in Mission: Impossible – Fallout.

Runners up: The rest of Mission: Impossible – Fallout, which has the single best set of cascading action sequences since Fury Road. The bathroom scene, the terrifying Paris car chase, the helicopter sequence, the dream sequence, the HALO jump, and on and on and on… Chris McQuarrie needs to keep making these until he actually does run out of steam.

Best Documentary: Science Fair, a National Geographic film following a set of students from various means and training levels (but all with tremendous ability) as their talents get them into a massive Intel-sponsored international science fair, held in Los Angeles. So well done.

Best LGBT+ Movie: The outstanding 120 BPM (Beats Per Minute), brilliantly evoking lives of protest, dance, liberation, and just about managing in the era of AIDS. Hon mention to Love Simon, which managed to make a classically constructed teen movie about a gay relationship without being preachy and with being generally charming.

Best Musical: Anna and the Apocalypse, a charming little tale about a Scottish high school girl whose worries and issues with a mediocre life in a place that is not Port Glasgow (but it was filmed there) are washed away by a sudden outbreak of viral zombies. Also, it’s set at Christmas. Brilliant.

Runner up: A Star Is Born, in which Lady Gaga shows that she actually can act – and well. I suspect she’s got the Oscar nailed down, but we shall see. And Mary Poppins Returns, which is very much a do-over with a massive Dawes ex machina as its ending, but a very nicely done one.

Best Moment in a Terrible Musical: Most of Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again is generally competent but completely dull; you don’t care about anyone, none of them sing anywhere near as good as Agnetha and Anni-Frid (although at least they only give Pierce two lines of S.O.S., bless him), and the plot is a complete nothing. And then almost as you’ve lost the will to live Cher turns up, and is Cher for four minutes, and it almost gets camp enough to work. It doesn’t, but not a bad try.

Best Villain: Daniel Kaluuya as the utterly compelling yet completely terrifying Jatemme Manning, an enforcer and live-wire for his up-and-coming big brother Jamal (an also terrific Brian Tyree Henry), in Steve McQueen’s excellent and underseen Widows. As far away from his Get Out role as it’s possible to get.

Best Supervillain: Michael B. Jordan’s compelling and somehow a little sympathetic Killmonger in Black Panther (which only makes him more fascinating.) Runner up: Thanos, obviously.

Best Ending: Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman. FUCK ME.

Best Score: The at turns beautiful, mesmerising, creepy, and all of these things at once score created by the late Jóhann Jóhannsson for Mandy, a film that would be a lot less of an experience without it. Runners up: Daniel Pemberton following up his fantastically varied Guy Ritchie work with an actually good film on Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and a decent one on All the Money in the World; plus the quite fun Cousteau-plus score on Aquaman by Rupert Gregson-Williams.

Worst Oscar Snub: That said score for Mandy doesn’t qualify for the Best Score Oscar because its American distributors sent it straight to the iTunes Store during its New York/Los Angeles qualifying run. (Even Netflix are smarter than this, possibly because they know that Roma is going to clean up big time.) Might not have got it, but it deserves a nomination.

Best Joke: Christopher Plummer reshooting all over Kevin Spacey on All the Money in the World, a film which was actually probably improved by the replacement (and which at least is better than Alien Covenant: well done Ridley.) But still not as good as Trust, which while a TV miniseries provided the Infamous to its Capote.

Worst Joke: Deadpool 2 fridging Vanessa (even if temporarily). Not quite as blatant a bad move as Kingsman: The Golden Circle‘s utter bullshit wiping out of every sympathetic female character in one go; but unlike Kingsman, Deadpool 2 was actually a good film and was also 2018.

Shoulda Been Rejected At The Pitch Stage: Four words – Eli Roth’s Death Wish. You don’t even need to add “starring a bored Bruce Willis” to make this seem more like a bad idea. Terrible, terrible, terrible.

This year also featured Show Dogs, which might also apply.

Least Appropriate BBFC Rating: I’d say the 15 for Death Wish, but that was at least a cut version; so I’ll go for the 15 for The Predator, in which a guy gets graphically bisected in the first five minutes (more graphic than a lot of the 18-rated Mandy).

Most Appropriate BBFC Rating: 15 for 120 BPM, a true sign of the times and an entirely reasonable one. Shame no teens will see it cause it’s French; they could really learn something.

Surprised At The Reaction: You would have thought from a lot of the Internet reaction that Ready Player One was a total disaster; in fact, it’s a generally charming piece of work that fixes several of the biggest problems of its overrated source material (notably that no-one has any agency other than its arrogant and loathsome hero, for whom everything falls down like a dominoes record attempt).

Considering how nostalgia cycles, I think the world of the film actually sort of works; and out of Spielberg’s two films this year, I actually preferred it to The Post. That one had far too much of insufferable journalists going on about how someone doing their job is somehow heroic, and with even less insight than its writers’ previous Spotlight, whereas Ready Player One is just really quite fun.

(The Post does have good work from Bob Odenkirk and a nice final shot though. Spielberg has never himself directed a really bad film – with the exception of Indy 4 – but he’s produced a bunch.)

Worst Casting: Clint Eastwood casting the guys that were actually on the 15:17 to Paris, which is more of a philosophical question than it should actually be a casting decision.

Worst Franchise Starter: This year’s had a whole load of films that promised a bit, aimed for a Cinematic Universe, and then fizzled out completely: like A Wrinkle in Time and Mortal Engines. There’s also Peter Rabbit: despite the fact that it made bank, which makes it worse (in a year where Paddington 2, a far superior film in every possible way, got ignored completely in the US). Venom, which similarly seems profitable, is a runner up; but we’ll have to go for what was originally called Robin Hood: Origins before Lionsgate realised how awful that sounds, which literally has a scene in which Robin of Loxley gets a draft notice. For the Crusades. And it’s not meant to be funny.

Worst Franchise Closer: It’s a toss-up between The Maze Runner and Fifty Shades. I’ll take the latter. At least they’re done now.

Worst Delayed Sequel: Oh boy. Some year for this. The Predator, The Girl in the Spider’s Web, Escape Plan 2, Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again, Super Troopers 2, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Johnny Depp(Colin Farrell was probably still available), Ocean’s 8, Pacific Rim: Uprising. Out of this, I’ll go for The Predator, which has the most promise and fritters it all away; shit title, decent enough first act, I don’t care about any of the characters, really bad sequel-baiting ending.

Best Movie With The Rock In: Jumanji 2 doesn’t count because it was last year, so it’ll have to be Skyscraper. Which is good old fashioned disaster fun with a few clever touches, but a dumb McGuffin.

Weirdest Movie With The Rock In: Who in Hollywood actually comes up with an idea like “let’s make a movie vaguely based on that old Midway game, we’ll steal a few sequences from True Lies, and we’ll stick the Rock in it as a gorilla expert?” Apparently, the people behind Rampage, comfortably the most stupid yet somehow fun film of the year.

I think I’ve come to the end of all the possible awards with that. So let’s end with a little tribute section, because it’s been another very bad year for the arts.

RIP: Jóhann Jóhannsson. Anthony Bourdain. William Goldman. Ursula K. Le Guin. John Morris (who did the Young Frankenstein score). Lewis Gilbert. Nicolas Roeg. Isao Takahata (and if you’ve not seen Grave of the Fireflies, it’s one of those one-and-done films that sticks with you forever). Milos Forman. R. Lee Ermey. Raymond Chow (the Golden Harvest boss without whom we wouldn’t have Bruce Lee movies, at least not in the same way.) Burt Reynolds. Neil Simon. Penny Marshall. Harlan Ellison. Steve Ditko. Stan Lee. And probably more significant people I haven’t named here. So many.

And to play us out:

IBM 1401, A User’s Manual, by Jóhann Jóhannson.

Facetious Movie Awards, 2016 Edition

~ Inquisitor

…Well, since I’m here, I may well contribute some facetious movie awards that will be replicated nowhere else in this season. Behold!

Best Comedy: Assassin’s Creed. It’s a non-stop laugh riot, filled with cliché that goes on forever, Marion Cotillard monologuing,  a ponderous tone that feels more like Top Secret! or Airplane! than anything actually serious, completely unbelievable tech, artificially dumb villains, and suddenly convenient plot twists. Unfortunately, everyone involved in making it appears to have taken it completely seriously. Whoops.

It is thus the most entertaining video game movie since Street Fighter, for which we should be thankful. It’s not good, but it was never going to be – and at least, if you take it the right way, it’s not dull.

Actual Best Comedy: Sing Street, which is utterly delightful and everyone should go see. It wasn’t even ruined when I saw it on BA.

Best Superhero Movie: Captain America: Civil War. Just because of that airport fight and Daniel Brühl’s understated and chilling villain. And there is hope for Spider-Man yet.

Most Entertaining Superhero Movie For Certain Values Of Superhero: Deadpool, of course. Tight, doesn’t stay beyond its welcome and properly funny. Honourable mention for Doctor Strange, which has continued a recent Marvel tradition of actually having a better ending than it has a beginning (which was also the case with 2015’s delightful Ant-Man.)

Stupidest Superhero-Related Decision: Warner cramming ten minutes of trailers for potential future DCCU movies into Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, wrecking the film’s flow and any attempt to explain Lex’s motivations (and indeed that Lex is why they’re fighting in the first place). The title is almost up there too, and the question of who on earth is going to watch a Cyborg movie is as yet unanswered.

Best Lift Scene: High-Rise. Which also contains the best use of both Portishead and ABBA of any movie this year.

Best Sequel: Creed, a.k.a. Rocky VII (released in the UK 16th January 2016). And yet it’s vital, brilliant and touching quality film-making, the best Rocky sequel ever and standing up to the original. It is on Netflix; go see.

Honourable runner up goes to Star Trek Beyond. It’s not that well directed, but it’s far better written than Into Darkness (it actually has structure and character) and is a lot of fun.

Least Necessary Sequel: Independence Day: Resurgence. If you weren’t getting Will Smith, then seriously – why bother? Why?

Joint top with Bad Santa 2, which did get Billy Bob Thornton but forgot to actually be funny.

Most Disappointing Sequel: Jason Bourne. It’s the writing that lets it down, nowhere near as good as the three proper Bourne movies. I wasn’t expecting that it would actually be a debate on whether this or Legacy was better, and the title is just lazy…

Most Idiotic Fan Strop: Ghostbusters. It’s not great, but it is better than Ghostbusters 2. If remakes with ladies in are really going to get fandom to that level of enraged and entitled tantrum, we might as well declare it over.

Best Of Last Year’s Oscar Contenders Released In The UK In 2016: Room. If you haven’t seen this, do. You are not going to see that sort of material handled as sensitively and well for a very long time.

Ricky Gervais Award For Being Ricky Gervais: David Brent: Life on the Road. He’s definitely missing Merchant.

It’s Better Than The Prequels: Rogue One.

Wish for 2017: Good films, please. Especially the Oscar contenders, but just in general.

And in honour of one of our bigger losses last year, this Youtube quotes video to finish off:

A happy new year to you all.

Media Break: 28/02/2016

~ Inquisitor

I was meaning to do one of these every two weeks. That hasn’t really worked out, has it…

  • Out the serious Oscar contenders, I will be more than happy if Room wins. Really subtle and well done. Mad Max: Fury Road is of course the best film there, but it’s never going to get Best Picture or Best Director in a million years (even though it had as arduous a shoot as The Revenant did, only less talked about).
  • Idris Elba was robbed. So were Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan: Creed is just a Rocky movie really, but it somehow manages to breathe life back into the old carthorse through the traditional means of quality direction, a mastery of screenplay structure, and beautifully realistic, low-key performance.
  • Deadpool is far more fun than it had any right to be and absolutely is the best X-Men spinoff by far (it does help that it’s the only one that’s been written with any form of a sense of humour involved). Suicide Squad will have a lot to live up to.
  • I liked The Hateful Eight a lot, probably more than a lot of critics did: only Tarantino and Robert Richardson can get away with filming a cramped single-location film in Ultra Panavision 70 and not have it feel entirely like a gimmick. Like always, it improved a lot in his redrafting and, looking at the final draft screenplay the Weinstein Company have published for Oscars season, in the edit too. Wish Entertainment hadn’t fallen out with Cineworld though; but I don’t regret having to pay extra for once. (Note: I saw it on digital, with an intermission, at a Vue.)
  • What on earth is going on with Batman v. Superman? The only way they seem to be promoting it in Britain at the moment is with some appalling Turkish Airlines commercials that are on every ad break on Food Network and most ad breaks on every other Freeview channel. I will probably see it, but still…
  • Rise of the Tomb Raider can be recommended to anyone who enjoyed 2013 Tomb Raider: it plays the same, but adds better tombs, better side missions, optional NPC quests and fewer quick-time events of doom. A better rounded game.
  • Musically, I am enjoying Not to Disappear by Daughter, SVIIB by School of Seven Bells, Adore Life by Savages, and absolutely loving Synthia by the Jezabels. Check all of these out on your streaming service of choice. New Underworld, Pet Shop Boys and PJ Harvey coming imminently too.
  • Blackstar is also brilliant, but what did we expect really? David Bowie is the biggest, most devastating loss of the year.

It’s the list-makingest time of the year

~ Inquisitor

It’s that time of the year where everyone comes together on the Internet to argue about what everyone liked over the year and why they’re wrong. So it’s time for my contribution…

Music

Here is a Spotify playlist I’ve made of some of my favourite stuff this year:

This playlist is actually incomplete: for the sake of track-to-track flow it’s missing anything from Floating Points’ Elaenia, Laura Marling’s Short Movie, Errors’ Lease of Life, Hot Chip’s Why Make Sense? and Purity Ring’s Another Eternity, all of which are very much worth your time. Purity Ring provided the best live show I’ve seen this year (at Metropolis in Montréal).

Best comeback of the year is of course New Order (but then I’m biased), and best collaboration of the year is F.F.S. (managing to be better than both the last Franz Ferdinand and Sparks records – there has to be a future for it.)

Addendum 22.12.2015: Forgot to mention or include in the playlist The Race for Space by Public Service Broadcasting, which is a pretty big omission; or No Cities to Love by Sleater-Kinney.

Movies

Best biopic so far this year is the exceptional Love & Mercy. Only just behind that is Straight Outta Compton, which did well to try to get a consistent narrative line into the complicated and multifaceted N.W.A. story with nicely kinetic direction from F. Gary Gray and the year’s best producer credit (Ice Cube p.g.a., because of course he’s in the union.)

It’s actually been quite a good year for spy and spy related stuff. Kingsman is by turns nasty, compelling, outrageous and very, very funny (even if Vaughan and Goldman didn’t quite manage to downplay the bad bits of Millar’s writing as much as they did with Kick-Ass.) The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is massively uneven but its 60s atmosphere is spot on and when it sparks, it really works (the scene where Napoleon Solo finds safety while a massive action scene goes on in the background is utterly unique).

Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation is the most consistent narratively since the first one and is brilliantly directed and constructed, even if there’s not a single overall sequence as good as the Dubai sequence in Ghost Protocol. Spectre is the third best Daniel Craig Bond film, but  I’d still be happy if Mendes came back on the condition that he brings back Roger Deakins and Stuart Baird and finds some better writers.

Out of the two Marvel films this year, Ant-Man is better (completely in inverse to my expectations): off the wall and willing to try new things, it is also the rare Marvel film that gets better and better as it goes on, although it’s a shame we didn’t get to see Edgar Wright’s version. It’s effectively a low-stakes version of Iron Man and all the better for it. Age of Ultron drags a bit and feels overly breezy and fluffy, although it’s still pretty and Elizabeth Olsen is great in it.

Since I haven’t seen Star Wars yet I can’t quite classify that. The Revenant should be interesting too: the trailers give an utterly unique feel.

Addendum 22.12.2015: The Force Awakens is very much worth watching. I missed The Martian, which was a lot of fun and Ridley Scott’s best film in years. And of course, how could I forget Fury Road, by far the best sequel of the year? (That piece is unblocked and I’m working on it again, by the way.)

Games

I haven’t played that much this year – I have time constraints, I don’t play MMOs and I hate military FPS with the force of a thousand suns, so the only big budget games I’ve played through this year are the hilarious Saints Row IV (finally giving up any pretence of being a serious game and going for all out comedy) and the PC version of Arkham Knight. Because I have a 4790K, 16GB of RAM and a GTX970 I was just about able to run it acceptably, which continues to show that if the PC is not dead as a gaming platform, it’s at least in the resus room.

For the record, it played OK after the first patch and some of what it does is brilliant (and unfortunately its best element is a spoiler), but it is the least of Rocksteady’s Batman games. Still better than Arkham Origins and most other games though, and it still handles its No Man’s Land inspiration better than Dark Knight Rises. So I would recommend giving it a go if you have a machine that it it will work on, or one of the current-gen consoles.

I do not own any of the current consoles, so Rise of the Tomb Raider will be 2016 for me. Let’s hope Crystal don’t screw that port up.

The distinguished competition

~ Inquisitor

At the point when I am writing this in 2015, the world is heading towards Peak Superhero. Both Marvel and DC, both owned by major media conglomerates, are developing movie universes to match the ones they have built on paper. Both plan to release many comic book films over the next few years; Marvel of course having had a considerable head start. But, considering history and the upcoming slate, is this going to work out for either of them?

(Warning: This piece is quite long, has a few minor spoilers which you probably know anyway, but does contains ranting about The Dark Knight Rises. So read it at your own risk…)

Continue reading “The distinguished competition” →

Media Break: 26/08/2015

~ Inquisitor

Here’s what I’m watching, listening to, reading etc. at the moment, in an article which I plan on posting at least once every few weeks:

  • Health’s “Death Magic” is still brilliant after however many listens: a massive improvement over much of the rest of their career (as they have discovered tunes). Recommended.
  • Tangentially related: Alice Glass has released a solo single called “Stillbirth”, produced with the aid of Health’s Jupiter Keyes. It’s industrial, angry, wrenching, emotionally draining and yet compulsively listenable – a real shout along. It bodes well for more, especially when compared with the unmemorable post-Glass Crystal Castles material.
  • The John Grant single, “Disappointing”, isn’t. Has a lovely duet with Tracey Thorn too.
  • Looking forward to the New Order album, and the ability to still frame Fury Road. (Article about Fury Road is coming up, along with one contrasting the Nolan Batman films with the Arkham games.)
  • I have Netflix at the moment, and by far the best original show I’ve seen so far is Bojack Horseman. A brilliant study of celebrity ennui, as handled by anthropomorphic animals. Fans of Venture Bros and Archer should look in. (Also, the Comic Sans-O-Matic tie in web site is nothing short of genius.)
  • The Great British Bake Off. Because. Plus University Challenge and Only Connect.

A dilemma.

~ Inquisitor

Am I wrong for wanting to see Star Trek as soon as possible? The trailers and the interviews have been encouraging, the new Enterprise is plain cool, I like the idea of Simon Pegg as Scotty and Sylar as Spock and then I think about it and realise that, from the information I know…

  • It’s time travel, again
  • The gimmick this time is that it’s destroying the entire Star Trek universe as we know it, except for Enterprise. I repeat: Enterprise is apparently valid continuity for the new Trek movie. If you’re going to retcon out a series, why couldn’t it be that one?
  • And this means that retcons Picard out of the universe as well.
  • And DS9 too, and even the first few series of Voyager.
  • It’s written by the people who ruined Transformers (excepting Michael Bay).
  • It’s at least partially a variant on the age-old ‘Starfleet Academy’ idea, which was repeatedly rejected during the Berman era as a lame idea.
  • And how can the tech difference…

…and so on, goes the reasoning side of my mind. But the geek side just goes “new Star Trek, cool spaceship, MUST SEE.” It feels wrong, somehow, but I’ll still go – eager in the hope it won’t suck as much as it sounds. And when I find out, I’ll get back to you…

Fitter, happier, more productive

~ Inquisitor ~ 1 Comment

Things I’ve enjoyed, or found interesting, recently:

  • The Wrestler is really, really good. Possibly more truth in it than in almost all documentaries about the actual wrestling scene, although Jon Ronson had a good go in his Guardian piece about the aftermath of Chris Benoit’s killing spree. Really a must see.
  • The Springsteen album (featuring the excellent and appropriate credits song from the above as a bonus track) is also pretty enjoyable. Excellent graphics for the DVD version, too; shame about getting the discs out.
  • I like the Franz Ferdinand album, and the end of Lucid Dreams is a gloriously unexpected moment that should not be spoiled by anyone. The dub album is also an interesting bonus.
  • Spotify is awesome, even after they took down a lot of the indie-label material; nothing much in my field of interest, thankfully. Nice that they gave us an OS X version too.
  • I have a Mac laptop running Leopard and a desktop dual-booting Windows 7 beta and various Linux distros-of-the-month. Soon I will also have a media centre box running 7 MCE and XBMC/Windows, when the parts come in. My email is shared over IMAP, so all I need is for my documents directory to be the same between the two. Unison is somewhat broken for synchronising between the two and pretty much isn’t developed any more… so what I find is Windows Live Sync, which has both Windows and OS X versions and quietly syncs my machines’ documents directories on the fly. Transparently. For a Microsoft product, it really does do the job it’s intended to really quite well…
  • My software development day job is developing back-end software (Linux, C++) to get data from format A to format B in the cleanest and least visible way possible, but occasionally I do get the opportunity to develop front-end utilities. Which I write in Python for command-line stuff whenever I can, tcsh when it’s extremely simple, C++ when I can’t and C++/Qt for GUI stuff. I’ve seen enough bad GTK code (not just in our codebase) to know what I like, and Qt is it. Python is even more it, but a lot of our code needs every bit of CPU it can get so heavily threaded C++ it is…
  • And since I’ve just put forward my position on GTK/Qt: vi over emacs, Python over perl, tcsh over bash, Firefox over any other web browser, fluxbox over KDE/GNOME, and painful death over PHP.

More soon.

Is it just me…

~ Inquisitor

…or wasn’t Indiana Jones and the Belated Sequel (insert that crystal skull thing here) actually not that bad? Definitely not worth the fanboy outrage you can see on AICN, and most certainly not prequel awful; it’s actually quite endearingly old-school. And Shia LaBeouf isn’t nearly as bad as he was in Transformers, although he most certainly is unnecessary.

It does get a whole lot better once Karen Allen turns up, though. And John Hurt always does a good nutbag. And… oh, what the hell, it’s OK. You could definitely do worse right now.

Mel Gibson has a lot to answer for

~ Inquisitor ~ 2 Comments

Scotsman.com: Hero Wallace voted greatest Will in history (8th January 2008)

SCOTS legend William Wallace has been voted the “greatest Will of all time” in a new poll.

English poet William Shakespeare, often considered the best playwright in literary history, was pushed into second place in the Co-operative Legal Services (CLS) survey of 3000 people.

Nothing whatsoever in Braveheart is actually at all anything like what Wallace actually was and did; he was from a Borders noble line and would thus have been an English/French/Latin-speaking non-clansman, his family wasn’t massacred when he was a kid (which is a massive corruption made by the movie from even the hideously unreliable Blind Hary), he spent much of the period 1298-1303 in France lobbying the Pope rather than hanging out with a useless guerilla army as the movie implies (which he only did for a matter of months in 1304-05 before stupidly getting himself captured, and he wasn’t betrayed either), ordered a series of slash-and-burn raids on northern England’s villages and monasteries that would nowadays be seen as a war crime and he didn’t shag Isabella of France – and a good thing too, as she was ten at the time he died and hadn’t even met the future Edward II yet.

Worse than all the historical inaccuracies, the movie isn’t even any good; it’s clichéd rotten, has some awful acting (only Patrick McGoohan seems to be having any fun, hamming it up as Edward I, or “Longshanks” as the movie keeps on repeating) and is quite possibly the worst film in my lifetime to win the Oscar for Best Picture. At least the battle sequences work, and Hollywood hasn’t made a hagiography of Robert Bruce yet (although Braveheart does go some way in that direction).

Wallace is only #1 on this list because of the publicity around Braveheart making people believe that it was actually the True Story; what I’m bitter about is that this has pushed Shakespeare, a figure of infinite importance to English-speaking culture who happened also to write some bloody good plays, to #2 in favour of a minor historical figure blown up by romantic delusion, hagiography and Mel bloody Gibson.

And as for the Scotsman’s headline, one thing is definite: he was no hero. Hardly anyone actually is.