Yes, I saw some of those, and thought it was an inane criticism. There was a female character, and a tangential love interest would not have helped the story. As for BAME representation, that would get right to my comment about sanitizing history and thereby missing something important.
I rather liked how ‘Greyhound’ made it absolutely clear that in the USN of 1942, African-Americans were largely confined to traditional servant roles. At the same time, there was real development of those characters.
I’m sorry if my post somehow conveyed the idea that I was denying the contribution bame soldiers made to the Allied effort in World War 1. They did, in their many thousands, and we should be eternally grateful for their sacrifice.
However, there was strict segregation i.e. there were no mixed race units, which would have been an anachronism had they been included in the film.
Yes, to blur the history of the struggle for racial equality by artificially altering history that predates much of that hard-won change diminishes it. Men of Honour is hard hitting (and could have been even harder) for a reason. Let’s not pretend that by the 1960s and 70s the battles fought by brave men such as Carl Brashear had already been won several decades earlier.
No worries, I hadn’t taken your post as denying contributions. I just wanted to further highlight how much there is about these wars and who served in them that we don’t really get to see or read about.
I’m sorry, but I haven’t the foggiest what you are on about? You seem to be arguing against points I haven’t made. I’m not ‘taking out’ anyone. My point is that the shit things men have to deal with have the same root causes as all the shit things women have to deal with. It’s all a result of prescribed roles and attributes that men and women are expected to adhere, which largely exist because our societies have been, for the most part, controlled by men.
If, as a man, you care about male suicide rates, equality in parental rights, Homelessness, and anything else that disproportionately affects men, then your fight is for an equal society, in so far as biology allows. That also means that men are going to have to give ground and accept they cannot continue to totally run the show, as they have for centuries.
We might have been at slight cross purposes, and I was certainly more philosophic about the problem. I for one point, disagree gender roles are programmable; I think they originate in nature, and have evolved apace with other developments, but came out of first society conditions. They have then been subject to a backward analysis imputing blame. I dont believe there are gender roles, as in parts in a play. This is in essence a problem of language, and reason, proceeding on without the balance of gut and intuition. its happening in numerous corners of the west; an over reliance on reason as a philosophy; but reason is a method!
I do care about equality; I just do not accept the nominalisation of male crises; especially done under the hands of vindictive females, that to many, dont even exist. They do exist; i remember them from as early as 5 years old in the school playground. They could cause a bother in a mortuary; well these twisted women, have nudged their way to the front, but they wont be there for long, along with Germaine fcking Greer.
Men have and are giving ground, and I am with you on the #metoo scandal. But we cant use that to justify false accusations of violence against men and long term psychological persecution couched in the ordinary vicissitudes of life. I think people need to recognise that some women, the worse ones, crave power over men like nothing else. These are the problem, and I wish the good women would stand up and call them out and take one half of the centre ground, but we just have the psychopaths for now, crying offense at any and every aspect of male strenght. Its actually cannibalisation.
I can assure you the last thing I want is to have men run the show, but you’re never going to get as close to harmony as possible until the feminazis have been fckd off.
I think you have to weigh up your intent. To achieve your vision how far do you have to take historical accuracy. And what are you willing to sacrifice the reach and commerciality of your film for the sake of accuracy.
Case in point, Spielberg is famous for two depictions of the Nazi’s. One of them is in Schindler’s List and one is the Indiana Jones trilogy. Obviously one of those has more need to be historically accurate.
So in Dambusters, the question is how important is the dog‘s name to the narrative. If the film were being remade today, does an accurate historical naming of the dog really affect story being told?
Well, I disagree on gender roles. We’re never going to eradicate biological facts from the issue, but really we’re nowhere close to getting to where we could be.
I think we overlook what women have to deal with on a day-to-day level, and how that has just been normalised to the point where it’s not even seen as a problem.
Even at the more serious end of the scale, 1 in 5 women in our country have been the victim of a sexual assault. I agree false accusations are unacceptable and only make things more difficult to understand , but they are still mercifully rare. The scale of the two problems are simply not comparable.
Do you realise this neo-liberalism we complain about cross-fertilises and distorts the gender equality issue?
Could there ever be a more noble service than growing a child in womb, birthing and raising it? But it seems that is now otiose and women would rather be chief executives, but then complain they have no time to have children.
I will sort this fcking aberration out once I come to power.
I have already said that the name of the dog, in, and of itself is a trivial matter.
But it is the principle, disregarding historical facts if they are inconvenient or inconsistent with mores of modern society that is the issue. How far should we be prepared to go, ignoring or distorting history just so that a modern audience won’t be offended?
There weren’t any bame airmen in 617 squadron; that doesn’t represent the modern demographic so should some be introduced, after all, wasn’t Anne Boleyn black?
How far can history be sanitised, or re-written before it ceases to be history and becomes propaganda?
Airbrushing an inconvenient dog out history is trivial, I agree, but it might just represent the thin end of the wedge.
I think the issue is not that we devalue the act of gestating a child, but that as it takes two people to create it, it shouldn’t be down to one of them to make all the sacrifices associated with raising children.
It’s one area that seems to be rapidly improving, but for too long it’s been assumed that children are women’s work, while the man should go out and earn the money. That’s why you end up with women hitting career ceilings and struggling to keep up with men, and men being negatively viewed in custody situations.
I agree with that. But you cant have both, and it has improved, and it was wrong, but when is the carping going to stop, when is enough enough. We dont devalue gestating a child, we overvalue a career.
And, when you reach the end of your life, I am told, you will cry for your Mother.
Are we talking about history or are we talking about entertainment? We don’t need the Nazi’s in Indiana Jones to be 100% accurate. We do need then to be accurate in Schindler’s List.
Who was criticising 1917 for that? Genuine question by the way, I tend to ignore reviews or news about films I like.
I did see a lot of crying from the gamer community about one of the recent Battlefield games having the player be a black soldier in France, and female guerilla fighting in Norway, during World War II.
I have not seen a criticism of racial representation, but the lack of female characters was a theme in a couple of reviews I read online before seeing it.
There was a deal of comment on social media, about the time of the BAFTAs, when the film industry in general was criticised for a lack of diversity. I’ll see if I can dig out a link or two.
I’m not a gamer, so I was unaware of such criticism or its specifics.
However, from a purely historical perspective, depicting a black soldier in France, in World War II, would not be anachronistic or inaccurate. For example, France deployed several thousands of colonial infantry. As for a female resistance fighter in Norway, again historically accurate; there were female members of the resistance.