Posted on 06/30/2004 9:58:21 AM PDT by orionblamblam
There are some lines of William Cowper inscribed on the plinth of the bronze statue of Boadicea near Westminster Bridge in central London: "Regions Caesar never knew/Thy posterity shall sway." The words have never been truer. Hollywood has four films in development about the British warrior queen. One of them, Warrior, is being produced by Mel Gibson, partly with money from the proceeds of his film The Passion of The Christ (a rare example of fundamentalist Christian money backing a project with a pagan heroine). Along with a DreamWorks project called Queen Fury, Paramount's Warrior Queen and another called My Country, the race is on to get what Variety magazine called "Braveheart with a bra" to the screen first.
(Excerpt) Read more at film.guardian.co.uk ...
P.S. This is a reposting... my original posting had the title all screwed up. D'oh!!!
I had really wondered for a long time why there was no major Hollywood pic on Boudicca ( the English one on PBS notwithstanding)....given all the female-empowerment woman kicking butt angles possible with it.
Bodicea's (sp?) role in battle is no more important than whether she wore a bra? Quite a condemning critique of Hollywood, and, sadly, not surprising.
Believe it or not, there are some who consider the invention of the bra to be a great feminist victory. Now does it make sense?
Add to your "list" the Wyatt Earp movies, and two takes on the Marine's at Guadalcanal, a couple of mafia movies....
Hollywood's herd mentality has been in place since the first movies came out.
That would make him "Alexthander the FAB-U-LOUTH"!
> there are some who consider the invention of the bra to be a great feminist victory.
Well, that doesn't seem like so much of a stretch... compare the bra with the corset The corset is not exactly... liberating.
The Left seems compelled to draw parallels between Boudicca's enemies and Bush. The BBC production was rife with this, and now this Greene character desires to draw comparisons between the rape of Boudicca's daughters and the Iraqi prison scandel.
She, as a historian, should know the comparison can't stand except in one respect: the commander who did the deed was way out of line with Rome's dictates; what he did was not a reflection of his Emperor's desires (not that Nero wasn't barking mad: see Acts).
However, the facts are these: Boudicca's husband was allowed to retain his crown until his death, at which time his kingdom would be absorbed into the Roman authority. He agreed to this. Boudicca made a counter proposal upon his death that she be permitted to keep some of his lands and treasure for her daughters' sake. The Romans said no (in a barbaric way that showed Boudicca what they thought of her precious daughters; she then went on to show Rome what she thought of it).
The reason Rome when to war rather than abandon Briton has a lot of factors, but principal among them was that Roman moneylenders had loaned a lot of money to British tribal leaders to buy them off, and wanted their loans repaid. More of a UN angle than Bush angle, if you ask me.
Good post.
The PBS Boudicca movie *stunk.* Hopefully the next versions will leave out the airy-fairy new-agey stuff.
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