What are your favourite historical movies/series and your least favourite?

Most:

A Bridge Too Far
Das Boot
Rome


Least:

Hitler the Rise of Evil - Are we really expected to believe that Hitler was someone with autism who treated everyone he met like complete (*)(*)(*)(*)?

The Pacific

 

Most liked

D-Day
Green Beret
Battle of the bulge


Least

the Blue and the Grey

 

I don't think I've heard of The Blue and the Grey.

 

It's about the civil war and it was a tv series.

 

The Longest Day is the best movie of any kind.
Camelot
The Lion in Winter (even though one line is unforgivable)
Pearl Harbor
The Missiles of October
The first half of I, Claudius
Lion of the Desert
The Adams Chronicles
Cleopatra (with Lenora Varela, not those other hams)
The Bounty
The Bunker
The Wind and the Lion
Napoleon (1920)
Worst:
The Winds of War (When Roosevelt told the fictional admiral things he wouldn't tell his secretary of war and sent him to Moscow, I had to stop watching.)

 

What line in The Lion in Winter is unforgiveable?

 

The Lion in Winter
Mary Queen of Scots (even though it had the two Queens meeting).
A Man For All Seasons
Beckett
Camelot
Queen Christina ( a black and white film starring Greta Garbo)
The Green Berets
Cleopatra
The BBC series of Elizabeth I starring Glenda Jackson
The Queen (with Helen Mirrin)
Lady Jane
Anne of a Thousand Days
The Robe
King of Kings
The Ten Commandments

 

Good -

Das Boot

Stalingrad

Paton

Bad

Brave Heart

U 537

 

The Last Emperor
Papillon
The Cruel Sea
Ghandi
Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee

 

Everyone's got a knife. It's 1183 and we're Barbarians.

 

There was a time when I was fascinated with the American Civil War. I think The Civil War by Ken Burns is brilliant. His Prohibition documentary is also very good.

Australian Lillian Roxon (niece of Australia's Attorney General, Nicola Roxon) who wrote The Rock Encyclopaedia, her doco Mother of Rock: Lillian Roxon is fantastic.

I love anything out of the Dark and Medieval ages Britain and Europe fascinating as long as shows some historical accuracy. The Tudor series is very good.

I'm also a fan of Arthurian Legends. As far as books go, the Mary Stewart series starting with The Crystal Cave is a great read.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crystal_Cave

Least favourite, anything to come out of America involving the Vietnam War. Funnily enough, Air America is totally fictitious but for entertainment value not too bad in a fun way. Mel Gibson's Lao language was terrible,, he was actually speaking Thai.

The Vietnam War doco Frontline by Australia cameraman Neil Davis is probably the best doco to come out of Vietnam.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMwOiruMrj4

 

History and movies rarely go together that well.

 

I'm having a problem with "historical". Most historical movies rarely get much right except the date and location.

 

Depends what you mean by 'historical films' but

"Saving Private Ryan" for giving a sense of what it took to go in on a landing craft on D-Day.

Big Red One for a feeling of what life was like for an infantry man.

Lincoln- again for a brilliant sense of period of time.

Das Boot- again for the feeling of what it must have been to be a submariner.

Wings- first academy award winner- and a wonderful silent film of aerial dogfights in WW1.

I am sure there are many I will think of later, or others will mention- and too many bad ones to mention- but "Battle of the Bulge" comes to mind- I hated the tanks they used....

 

With me, this is a hard one to answer. But there are many that tried to get the feeling of an era right, even if they had to change or omit details.

The Right Stuff
From The Earth To The Moon
Band Of Brothers
The Pacific
Flags of Our Fathers

Those were all good, and captured the feeling and the common concepts of their era. And I can watch all of them over and over again.

Saving Private Ryan
Forrest Gump
Letters From Iwo Jima

Now those are not "history" per se, each is a fictional "period piece" based around real events. But both can be viewed as "history", in that they showed what the events and culture was like that influenced the movies.

Letters From Iwo Jima featured a heavily fictionalized main character, but since only 216 of over 22,000 Japanese soldiers survived that battle, there was really no other choice.

 

Good
Waterloo. A few inaccuracies but largely faithful. Ironic that it was made by the Soviets and the Italians.
Khartoum. A bit of an epic.
Paths of Glory

Just fun
The young Indianna Jones. Yes I know it was trash. But it was a globe hopping adventure and there aren't many series that do that nowadays

Bad
The Patriot. I watch if I want to laugh. Bad from start to finish.
Gandhi. Sorry but there were too many inaccuracies and exemptions about the man.

 

I thought the new 'Lincoln' terrible. As exciting as last night's mash potatoes.

 

JFK by Olive Stone.best documentary movie ever.much closer to the truth than that fairy tale warren commission report.

 

I loved that Rome series on HBO. It had many different facets to it. That conscientious Roman officer was the real backbone of Rome and kept its corruption from destroying the Empire for almost 500 years. If anyone else liked it, they ought to read Thornbirds author Colleen McCullough's series on Julius and Augustus Caesar.

 

Worst: Little Big Man. White America has nothing to be ashamed of. This Hate Whitey fad shows an aristocratic attitude. We were thought of as the losers of Europe but came here, disproved Class Supremacy, and wound up saving Europe. Australians started even lower and also proved that a country based on worth and not birth can never have anything to be ashamed of.

 

Also Michael Collins, with Liam Neeson and Julia Roberts. It show how terrorism is justified if the cause is just. Americans don't know anything about war or else they never would elected unpatriotic cowards like Bush or Clinton, who pulled strings to weasel out of fighting their generation's war. Americans criticize the jihadists for terrorism when they should just accept that as normal in war. This is a red herring that distracts us from the fact that the jihadists' cause is the destruction of civilization.

In the end, at age 32, Michael Collins gets killed by an Irish extremist terrorist. Ignorant Americans might point that out as a lesson not to use terrorism, but Collins himself was the chief terrorist and put that all aside once he gained victory for the Irish. It is an insult to fighting men to say that killing turns them into killers. The IRA extremists had an evil cause; they weren't anything the Irish should be proud of. Nor were they driven to it by Collins introducing them to terrorism in a just cause.

Another thing I got from this movie is that the Irish people (as I myself have known them) in general were submissive, fatalistic, apathetic, and escapist. The Irish who deserved to be free were forced to use this uniquely effective policy of terrorism against non-combatants in order to gain independence both for themselves and for those who wouldn't fight for it.

 

400 years of slavery and the murder of millions and millions of Africans is shameful.

 

To be honest though, Little Big Man was a satire, and made no real attempt to be accurate in any way. Claiming this to be "historical" would be like trying to claim Blazing Saddles or The Reluctant Astronaut are also historical movies.

What this has to do with anything I have no idea.

 

read the thread first!

 

The Snob Mob turned them loose and they did to themselves far more damage than we ever did. Rwanda, Darfur, Zimbabwe, Detroit. The rap goes on. Multiculties don't feel guilty; they want to make other Whites feel guilty based on a comic-book idea of moral superiority.