Posted: Mon Sep 22, 2014 9:39 pm
Firstly, Tish out of Doctor Who spent almost the entire movie wearing a corset. That by itself burns your argument.Malicious Wraith wrote:QUOTE (Malicious Wraith @ Sep 22 2014, 08:14 PM) Both movies probably blew.
I didn't even watch Transformers 4, but have little taste for most blockbuster action movies.
I stopped watching Belle halfway through.
Up to that point, it was a crappy movie, with an uninteresting and predictable premise, grandstanding with 21st century moral superiority in an 18th century setting.
It was also insulting, as the movie focused so much on the legal case, but was horribly anachronistic as to the level of sympathy that people at that time gave to the mass murder of individuals. It was generally accepted at that time that absolute necessity was a complete defense to murder. The concern was largely of a dispute between a shipping company and insurance on slaves, and whether the law would support a favorable outcome for abolitionists.
It wasn't until one hundred years later, in R v. Dudley and Stephens, that the English courts recognized that necessity did not excuse murder. The murderers received a 6 months prison term.
Tl;Dr Belle is like watching a bunch of socialites criticize neanderthals for clubbing each other over women. Monty Python is ridiculousness that only rarely approaches humor.
My lack of entertainment by other doesn't make me an ass, it just means I have other tastes.
If my different tastes make me an ass, lets grab some clubs and settle this.
Secondly, you do appear to have sort of missed the point of the film. Mansfield did make two (conflated down to one in the film) decisions which were at the time almost unprecedented in the history of imperial societies (the only other one agri has immediately to mind is de las Casas' debate with Sepulveda over whether the Indians were human or not). There was a sizeable number of people in British society at the time who objected to slavery in general and the Zong case in particular - they were after all able to win both cases, and eventually to both get rid of the slave trade in the Empire and ensure that the RN got rid of it everywhere else as well. It cannot really be described as "21st century moral superiority" to portray those people or their actions. The question of why he made those decisions is an important one, though there the film didnt help itself by portraying him as an amiable but distant patriarch who made the decision out of love.
agri loved the film though, it was everything that the excreable Hobbit 2 wasnt.
