Luftwaffe Pilots and USA Today TV Critics
Horst Rippert, an 88-year old former pilot of Germany's Luftwaffe, thinks he may have shot down French writer and war pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupery in 1944, as Saint-Exupery flew near Marseilles. but the nerves of steel rat-a-tat-tat man isn't sure. So he's taking credit, backing away, apologizing, and saying what he big fan he has been all these years, while hoping he didn't kill him. That story is so odd, could I have been confusing the Times with the Onion?
The USA Today's television critic, Robert Bianco, also has me confused. John Adams was short, unattractive, often confounded, and brilliant enough to be vexed at being confounded. And that's what I'm seeing on my television screen. Perhaps the real problem is that Robert Bianco has a low tolerance for people unpretty. Meanwhile, David Morse (Washington) could have done just as well holding up the famous First Man's portrait and cutting out the lips to talk. I've only seen one expression so far from Stephen Dillane (Jefferson) - spoiled malaise - and hasn't the same actor played Franklin in every Franklin role, ever? It's a can't go wrong part. In fact, these three men were physically imposing figures who because of our familiarity with them can be portrayed almost as thinly as charactertures and be accepted. Adams couldn't get away with that in real life, and on screen he shouldn't be presented other than as he was just for the sake of our viewing tolerance. Review the work, not the looks. If I had wanted America's Next Top Model - God Save These United States - I knew what channel to select.
Oh, and "facts are stubborn things," is one of my favorite quotes, and it's his. I had forgotten.
posted by Cate at 11:40 fm
2 Comments:
Do they play the roles with American accents or American-at-the-time accents?
I don't know how Americans spoke at the time - and I'm not trying to be silly, but I did focus on that issue for a little bit during the movie. For characters that were supposed to have been on shore for a generation or more, there was only a subtle overlay of regional accents. The Irish accents and the accents of the British soldiers and government officials were the most obvious, perhaps with a thought that those characters (and I mean it in a nice way) had most recently arrived on shore. One trial witness of African decent had a Jamaican accent and it caught me by surprise because I'm dimwitted enough to have considered it a Bob Marley invetnion. But it was in there and it stood out in the Boston courthouse amidst the wigs and dockworkers. The Adams character throws in a dropped R on occasion, which got me wondering how the Boston accent actually developed over the centuries. The southern delegates sound southern, but not as we hear it today, again raising the question of whether the accents and dialects changed over time or if the producers decided to put more money into bloody prostheses than dialect coaches. See, I'm way more into this than I should be.
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