I’m a hard man to get out to the theatre when I get a free DVD of most of the year’s fare to view at home for Oscar judging. Nevertheless, I’m not the only one who has been avoiding the multiplex these days. It’s been a terrible Spring at the movies or – as Variety puts it in their headline this morning – ‘B.O. Far From ‘Heaven’” (meaning that ‘famous historian’ Ridley Scott’s version of the Crusades, which just opened this weekend).
When films stink it up at the box office, the marketing types at the studios ritually pop up with explanations like “The audience doesn’t like baseball pictures.” Nonsense. What the audience doesn’t like is bad baseball pictures, just as they don’t like bad historical epics, etc. Usually they like just about good anything. That’s what we’ve evidently had a dearth of. But that will change. Or it won’t – in which case the movies are really in trouble.
A few years ago I used to go to a breakfast of film types at LA’s Farmer’s Market. It was then known as the “grosses table” because one guy, a journalist who worked for Variety, would show up every Monday with “secret information” – the weekend grosses of Hollywood films. That information is now about as “secret” as testimony at the Michael Jackson trial. But I find this site – Box Office Mojo – particularly useful because it gives the estimated budget (including prints and ads) next to the culmulative gross. That tells us that the big hits so far are Amityville Horror and Robots. The latter, as an animation, should have a long life on DVD as well.
CAIR did the revision on this one and made it historical comedy. If you like movies where the Moslem’s have the religion of peace and the Christians have dirty underwear you’ll love this one.
And yet you still won’t get behind Zapped! 3: The College Years…
Kingdom of Heaven is a pretty good adventure film—if you ignore the historical inaccuracies. I pretended that it was nothing more than a Star Wars circa the 13th Century, or even sometime in the distant future after a major catastrophe had destroyed civilization. The film makers, of course, took themselves far more seriously. They put together a message film that is suppose to turn us into better human beings.
We are expected to conclude that all of our recent troubles are the fault of right wing Christians.
I lack talent as a screen writer or actor. Still, I can almost infallibly (perhaps 95% of the time) tell you whether a movie will succeed or fail at the box office. Often Iíve left a theater wondering, ìWhy was this film released? What were they thinking?î It cost $150 million to produce Kingdom of Heaven! Thatís a lot of money. Anyone using common sense could foresee the resulting train wreck. What type of idiots make these decisions? Donít the investors give a damn about their money?
Roger,
A few years ago I used to go to a breakfast of film types at LA’s Farmer’s Market…
So you weren’t just “making up” that early scene at breakfast in Director’s Cut?
Jamie Irons
Since we are talking movies, a topic I enjoy. I add this comment.
I watched the movie called “My Architect” on DVD about Louis Kahn, the visionary American architect who collapsed and died of a heart attack in a mens’ room in Pennsylvania Station in New York in 1974. Nominated for the Academy Award in 2003, it lost out to “The Fog of War” about interviews with Robert McNamara. “My Architect” lost because the Academy in Hollywood voted for the “The Fog of War” in the midst of the Iraq War and wanted to send a message to Washington.
“My Architect” was written, produced and filmed by Kahn’s bastard son, Nathaniel Kahn, it is wonderful especially the ending with the scene
of the capital of Bangladesh. A beautiful riveting two hours about the author’s search for his father. I trust that you will be carried away in this film like me.
Hmmmm.
If I want moralizing I’ll go to church. I go to movie theaters because I want to be entertained. If they can’t accomplish this then I have no intention of watching their tripe.
Frankly it’s been months since I last watched a movie in a theater and it’s unlikely that I’ll be going within the next few months.
With the Internet that Al Gore gave them, why don’t the Hollywood preachers atleast get the history right? Is it because we, the audience, are thought too dumb to ‘get it’ unless we’re clubbed over the head with the message?
As Ed said, I’ll go to church to get my sermons, thanks.
I’m with David. I don’t understand how all these supposedly smart, talented people can’t recognize when they’re in the middle of a train wreck. Maybe they just don’t care. Perhaps we can blame it the foreign market. Apparently any dreck Hollywood produces has an audience somewhere overseas.
(Last movie I saw was The Upside of Anger which was quite well received by the critics. I personally couldn’t wait to get away from the many unpleasant, unhappy characters wallowing in their self-imposed victimhood. Yech.)
I am waiting for the DVD cos I missed it when it was out, too busy.
The most disgusting puppet sex that has ever been filmed.
I can’t wait.
Next week!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Robots – saw 2x.
Much more enjoyable than the Shreks and Shark’s Tale.
What a waste of money.
When I heard that CAIR vetted it a couple weeks ago, it went on my avoid-at-all-costs list.
If CAIR thought it was balanced it must be certifiable rubbish. I wonder if the Knights of Columbus got a pre-screeening too???
Jedrury, The local cinema here showed “My Architect” and “The Fog of McNamara” at the same time, and was that an easy choice between docs on a flawed great artist and a flawed flim-flam one.
Favorite Kahn building is the Kimball in Ft. Worth, TX, where stockyards go zen in transcendent utilitarianism.
I can’t recall the last time I went to a movie theater to actually see a movie (in fact, the last time I was even in a theater was a year and a half ago, and that was for some mandatory food safety training thing.) I think the last actual movie I saw in the theater might have been Monsters, Inc. Part of this can be attributed to my short attention span (I can rarely manage to pay attention to anything for two hours, but most of it could be considered a rejection of Hollywood in general. If anything interesting shows up I can always grab the DVD and fast-forward through the boring parts.
I think Orlando Bloom is cute, but the truth is if the folks who made this movie did a realistic take on the Crusades or Saladin, Orlando might lose his pretty little head. for real.
The guy who plays Saladin can not do an interview without trashing America and CAIR has shown a lot more support for this movie than they have for the march against Terror. I actually heard Orlando talking about how the Crusaders were after land and power blah blah blah. Like he knows anything about it.
Tolkien was a Christian and if it had not been for the Christians who went and fought there might well never have been a Lord of the Rings. And where would that leave pretty boy Bloom?
And no I am not saying the Crusaders were always the good guys. The truth is The Crusades took place over many centuries and there was no single story. It can not be encapsulated in a movie in a seamless coherent fashion.
Roger:
The biggest mistake is to quibble over the historical accuracy of this film. The crusades were bad enough from a Christian perspective that bitching that the filmakers have whitewashed the way Saalidin used military conquest to spread the Muslim faith is counterproductive. The true stupidity is claiming that the centuries old crusades could in any way justify the actions of the Islamo fascists. In certain aspects Salidan was a tad less brutal then the crusaders but the sorry fact is that for a significant, at least in the matter of power and control,faction of the Muslim countries they have made little or no progress from the time that this film was made about.
A century ago my fore fathers were forced off their land in Ireland by a combination of land theft, starvation and other tactics by the British. Since this was only a couple of 100 years or so would this justify me kidnapping British citizens, sawing their heads off, and claiming that a Catholic jihad against the Brits was God’s will? This notion is absurd because Christiianity, for all it’s faults, has given up the notion of war as a tactic for conversion or to remedy century old conflicts. Many Muslims have seen the stupidity of this tactic also. Scott and some of the actors promoting this film are subtly stating that this representation of this period has some kind of connection to modern geo politics. They seem to be using something that happened thousands of years ago to rationalize the behaviour of the Islamo fascists today. Last time I checked their have been no plans to torture or kill Muslims unless they convert. As soon as the security forces are set up we will leave Iraq. I have seen no Christian symbols put atop any mosques in Iraq. So how the crusades have anything to do with the war in Iraq is moronic. The attempt by Hollwood to slime America and the religous right of trying to bring back the crusades and the inquisition is very popular today but anyone has any knowledge of these institution would laugh at anyone who would seriously try to connect those century old practices to anything that is happening today.It makes for great propaganda but as far as historical accuracy it is absurd. By getting us to argue about the crusades they are able to get us to ignore what they are doing today.They have to use this period of history to argue about because if they used today they know they will lose.
Roger;
I do not consider the IRA a catholic institution. It is a marxist group using the catholic religion as a shield.
And where would that leave pretty boy Bloom?
Assuming we’d all be alive and doing what we’re doing (though for some reason Tolkien would never have written The Trilogy) he would, presumably, still have played Pfc. Todd Blackburn in the Ridley Scott directed Black Hawk Down.
October 3, 1993 3:42 PM The Assault Begins. The boys hit the target house and four Ranger chalks rope in — one Ranger, Private Todd Blackburn, misses the rope and falls 70 ft. to the street.
It’s in the movie.
…
Despite his fierce opposition to the Christian powers, Saladin achieved a great reputation in Europe as a chivalrous knight, so much so that there existed by the 14th century an epic poem about his exploits, and Dante included him among the virtuous pagan souls in Limbo. The noble Saladin appears in a sympathetic light in Sir Walter Scott’s The Talisman (1825).
The name Salah ad Din means “Righteousness of the Faith”, and through the ages Saladin has been an inspiration for Muslims in many respects. A governorate centered around Tikrit in modern Iraq, Salah ad Din, is named after Saladin.
Patrick:
I wouldn’t have a problem with a historical look at Salidin. It can be argued that at certain points during that part of history the Muslim community had certain advantages over the Christian countries.But they also used their milatary for conquest and conversion. My point is the propaganda aspect of saying “See it was those nasty Christians back then and it’s the same now” does not hold up under scrutiny. Although far from perfect the Christian world no longer uses force, submission and the military of their countries to force fidelity to Christ. We tried it, it failed, we dumped it it. Not all Muslim countries can say they don’t.
To add to Patrick Tyson’s comment, Saladin was actually respected and even admired by his Christian foes, in large part because he never broke treaties. One might add to the tally of his cultural influence the character of Sir Palomides, the virtuous Saracen who joins King Arthur’s knights, in the Morte d’Arthur. Without his reputation among Europeans, I doubt that such a character would have existed.
I haven’t seen Kingdom of Heaven, but from what I hear, Reynald de Chatillon appears as one of the bad guys. This is not entirely ahistorical, as the actual Reynald was little more than a cutthroat who did the Frankish kingdom a lot of harm by provoking the Saracens at a time when the Christians needed peace to rebuild their strength. Even historians who are fairly sympathetic to the Crusaders imply that he kinda got what was coming to him when Saladin personally beheaded him after the Battle of Hattin.
As for the Crusaders’ motives, well, they *were* after land and wealth and power, *and* they also came to serve their faith. Many of them were pious medieval Christians, and they were also younger sons of nobility who weren’t going to inherit their fathers’ lands in Europe. In the feudal way, they set out to conquer new lands that they could rule themselves. That’s how things were done in those days. Among the lords of the First Crusade, Baldwin LeBourg never even made it to Jerusalem. He stopped at Edessa, carved out a principality for himself, and was perfectly happy to stay there.
The problem is that it’s difficult to judge the Crusaders (and their Muslim foes, too) by contemporary moral and ethical standards and still be fair to them. The Crusades were a product of a very different time, when people thought very differently from us. Even by the 14th Century, less than 200 years after the First Crusade, that mindset was passe in Europe. Hence, the absence of crusading after 1300.
That’s also why it gripes me when contemporary Arabs use the Crusades as an axe to grind. If you’re going to have a memory that long, why stop arbitrarily at 1100 AD? Why not go back to the 7th Century, when their ancestors used the sword to take Palestine from the Byzantines? Aren’t the Orthodox Greeks entitled to that land? And before then, it belonged to… The Jews…. Would a contemporary Arab whining about the Crusades agree that the Orthodox Greeks have a legitimate gripe against the Turks? After all, they took Constantinople from the Christians in 1453, long after the last Templar was killed in Palestine. Get over it.
I would think it would be hard to make a truly historically accurate blockbuster movie about the Crusades from the Christian perspective because in the long run, there isn’t a happy ending. There were heroes and saints among the Crusaders, but too many of the Christian lords of Palestine squabbled amongst themselves and made bad decisions, squandering assets they could not afford to lose.
I should have added, re: my last point: When you read about the Battle of Hattin in 1187, the catastrophic defeat that enabled Saladin to recapture Jerusalem, you can’t help but throw up your hands and wonder just what the heck King Guy and the Templars were thinking!
If you guys think this history is bad and incorrect, watch Hollywood portray the Bataan Death March and still manage to blame the US!
“1945 Tokyo/Philippines. Four young military lawyers receive the least desirable assignment in the entire postwar occupation of Japan from Supreme Commander Douglas MacArthur – they are to represent a Japanese General who has been accused of being responsible for the notorious Bataan Death March.
At first they do their best to evade their new career-destroying assignment. Then they begin to discover that General Homma, known as the ìBeast of Bataan,î is a good and honorable man who was not, in fact, involved with the crimes for which he was accused. But MacArthur, bears a secret grudge against Homma, who was the only Japanese officer to ever defeat him in battle.
The young American military lawyers endeavor to save Homma from his obvious fate. Fighting not only their own commanding officers but also Homma himself, who knows he is destined to die.
This is a story in which villains turn out to be heroes, heroes turn out to be villains, and a group of young soldiers, along with an imprisoned alleged war criminal, provide a lesson in courage.”
Doug S, the issue I have is from what (admittedly little) I’ve read about this is that the Crusades wouldn’t have even happened without Muslims using war to colonize Christian lands. This is from the comments section of another site. Is the information correct? It would be interesting to see a film about why the Crusades started:
“At the time of the death of Mohammed, Islam controlled the Arabian Peninsula. The Caliphs who assumed control continued the process of spreading Islam by the sword. Arab armies were unleashed from the Arabian peninsula conquering modern day Jordan, Israel (Jerusalem fell in 638 AD), Iraq, and Syria. Much of this area was under the control of the Christian Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire and have been Christian for centuries from the earliest days of Christianity. Arab armies continued through Egypt, north Africa and into Spain. These areas were Christian, I guess Mr. Honeycutt is not familiar with St. Augustine of Hippo (in modern day Tunis). They continued into modern day France where the Franks defeated the Arab army at Tours in 732 AD (Probably the only good thing the French ever did in history). The Arabs also tried to take the capital of the Byzantium Empire, Constantinople, where the Arab invasion force was destroyed in 718 AD. For almost a century Islam launched a unrelenting attack on Christianity conquering the birthplace of the Christian churches in the East.
What lead Urban II to call the Crusades? Seljuk Turks, converts to Islam, attacked the Byzantium Empire destroying the Byzantine army at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071 (near Lake Van in Eastern modern day Turkey). The result of the battle was the conquering of the Anatolian heartland of the Byzantine Empire which was the area of great economic importance and the main source of manpower for the Byzantine army. The Turks established the Sultanate of Rum in Anatolia in 1095, The Byzantium Empire never recovered from this defeat and started its long spiral downwards until Constantinople fell in 1453. The Byzantines sent diplomats to Urban II to request assistance to prevent a total collapse of the Eastern Roman Empire. Urban II responded to this request for help by calling for a Crusade to reclaim the Holy Land at Clermont in 1095. There we have it. After centuries and centuries of attacks by Islam on Christianity where the West played defense only in the 11th century did Christianity actually attempt to take the fight to Islamic held ground.”
Doug S and Patrick:
Over the years the west has made a point of beating itself up over the Crusades. Fine…but my point is that the Muslims were an empire and they rolled over entire countries and demanded death or subjegation.
Many of the Crusaders lost everything including their lives to answer the call of their faith. They did not all get rich, far from it. To assume that all those knights abandoned everything to go off and die in a foreign land for money is simply not true. And considering they fought in what is the Balkans and France today and that the last battle was fought at Vienna in 1648 I also think it is safe to say that not all the Crusaders were fighting in a part of the world alien to them.
My point is that if the Crusaders had not defended Europe there might be no Europe. And without Europe there would be no Enlightenment, no Age of Reason, no Reformation, no Renaissance, and hence no Lord of the Rings. I doubt the imams would have approved.
I was reading an interesting article in the American Thinker about a millenium of jihad beginning in the 7th century. There have also been historians such as Jonathan Smith say this film is Osama’s veiw of the Crusades.
The truth is the Crusades have to be divided into seperate conflicts and fought for different reasons by different people over a very long period of time.
The only thing we can count is that the west will apologize and talk about how bad and evil the Christian church was the fanatical Islamists will use those apologies and this movie to feed their victim culture.
In current American usage, the phrase “that’s history” is commonly used to dismiss something as unimportant, of no relevance to current concerns, and, despite an immense investment in the teaching and writing of history, the general level of historical knowledge in our society is abysmally low. The Muslim peoples, like everyone else in the world, are shaped by their history, but, unlike some others, they are keenly aware of it.
—Bernard Lewis, THE REVOLT OF ISLAM, The New Yorker, 11/19/01 http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?011119fa_FACT2
I’m not going to take up a lot of Roger’s bandwidth trying to explain something as complicated as The Crusades. Will Durant covers The Crusades in Book V: The Climax of Cristianity 1095—1300 of Volume 3: The Age of Faith of his The Story of Civilization. He does it less than 30 pages.
He begins thus:
The Crusades were the culminating act of the medieval drama, and perhaps the most piceresque event in the history of Europe and the Near East. Now at last, after centuries of argument, the two great faiths, Christianity and Mohammedanism, resorted to man’s ultimate arbitament—the supreme court of war. All medieval development, all the expansion of commerce and Christendom, all the fervor of religious belief, all the power of feudalism and glamor of chivalry came to a climax in a Two Hundred Years’ War for the soul of man and the profits of trade.
He ends thus:
New markets in the East developed Italian and Flemish industry, and promoted the growth of towns and the middle class. Better techniques of banking were introduced from Byzantium and Islam; new forms and instruments of credit appeared; more money circulated, more ideas, more men. The Crusades had begun with an agricultural feudalism inspired by German barbarism crossed with religious sentiment; they ended with the rise of industry, and the expansion of commerce, in an economic revolution that heralded and financed the Renaissance.
What lays in between is well worth reading. Another taste:
Meanwhile the feudal leaders who had taken the cross had assembled each his own force in his own place. No king was among them; indeed Philip I of France, William II of England, and Henry IV of Germany were all under sentence of excommunication when Urban preached the Crusade.
Here are a couple of things to consider given what has been written by others here:
Western Civilization is not Classical Civilization and it is not Christianity though both played their parts in its formation—as did Islam and….
Western Civilization is ascendent and omnipresent today. It won’t always be thus, but it will be during our lifetimes and that is just fine by me.
Civilization will always have its enemies and some of them will have been given good cause for their enmity. The wish to return to some mythical “golden age” is not, in my opinion, good cause.
For myself, I will resist any effort to keep a single word from being written or a single frame of film from being shot just because it might give comfort to or increase the malevolence of those with whom I disagree or, for that matter, agree.
…more money circulated, more ideas, more men.
Amen.
Lindenen, I agree with your point that the Arabs themselves used violence to seize the Holy Land from the Byzantines, although I buried it in the 4th paragraph. So, yes, I agree that the Arabs don’t have any moral high ground here. That’s part of my point. They took it from someone else, so why get all uppity about it? Why not give it back to the Jews, who had it before the Byzantines and Romans?
Yes, the First Crusade was launched by Urban II as a response to a call by the Byzantine Emperor to help roll back the Muslim tide in the Near East. And genuine faith did motivate those who took up the cross, but that’s not to say that only piety motivated them. A major problem that emerged during the First Crusade was that the Byzantine Emperor expected the Crusaders to capture lands for him, and the Crusader lords wanted to keep those lands for themselves.
Terrye, there were knights who gave up much to go crusading and ended up with very little, but you’re probably thinking of the Templars and Hospitallers. The fighting orders were a different breed entirely, and they took vows of poverty and lived as warrior-monks. Steven Howarth’s history of the Templars is quite informative in this regard, IMHO, as is Robert Payne’s more general history of the Crusades, The Dream and the Tomb. They didn’t yet exist when the First Crusade happened, though, and the lords who led that effort were very much products of feudalism (Bohemond of Tancred appears to have been a classic Norman adventurer). Once established in the Holy Land, they and their descendants acted as European feudal rulers, for better and for worse. That doesn’t make them right or wrong, good or bad in my judgement. It simply makes them men of their time.
My overall point (and I gather, Patrick Tyson’s, too) is that the Crusades are a complex phenomenon, and the Crusaders themselves were complex. To me, that complexity makes that period of history so interesting. Don’t mistake me for one of those self-hating Westerners who wants to use the Crusades as a scourge. But I think that romanticizing them so that one can praise them as heroes by contemporary standards is as intellectually dishonest as wrenching them out of their time so one can revile them as villains. When I say that many Crusaders were driven by self-interest as well as faith, I don’t judge them harshly for it. I don’t see anything wrong with that at all.
But if *all* of the Crusaders had been completely pure of heart, the Christian barons of Palestine would have held together a lot better than they did, and the Fourth Crusade would not have ended in the sack of Constantinople. Even the Templars and the Hospitallers had a rivalry thing going. They all needed to stand shoulder-to-shoulder to keep the more numerous Arabs at bay, especially when support from Europe was not forthcoming. Unfortunately, that’s not quite how it played out. the Christian warriors in the Holy Land fought a good fight, but their misjudgements and failings are maddening to read about.
BTW, another interesting general-interest source about the Crusades is an article that Richard Berg wrote for Strategy & Tactics magazine about 20 years ago, as well as the accompanying wargame that he designed (Jim Dunnigan, now of Strategypage fame, edited that publication). IIRC, Berg said that his game worked best with 6 players–1 for each of the 4 main Crusader factions and both of the main Muslim factions. That says a lot about the strategic and political overview of the First Crusade.
Doug S: Good synopsis of the Crusades.
other points: Everyone going on a Crusade had to hock his personal wealth (land and estates) for the cash,equipment and transport of himself and his vassals (too bad we don’t have the space to enumerate the venality of the Pisans, Genoese, and Venetians). So, it was only natural that they had a weather eye out for some booty to offset their mortgages. Second, the Spanish continuously ‘crusaded’ for 500 years until they were freed from the Islamic yoke in 1492.
The West has forgotten John Sobieski, Don Juan of Austria, Charles Martel and the coutless others to whom they owe the debt of freedom.
Another irony is that the legend of Salah Din owes more to western literature than Islamic. Without W. Scott et al he would be forgotten among the Muslims.
Any way your post hit about every sore point I had
about the ‘modern’ interpretations of the ‘Crusades’.
Well done
The irony that struck me about this movie was that Mel Gibson has demonstrated that if a movie is made that takes the concerns of believing Christians seriously, it will make a fortune. Instead, they make a movie that sympathizes politically with Islam and religiously with secular agnositcs, apparently under the apprehension that these two groups are the largest and most desirable demographics for swordfighting flicks. Who lends these people money?
Jeff,
Wait ’til the Narnia series restores Disney’s name. Hollywood – insular, inbred and driving by looking in the rear view mirror.
Great comments…I can only add that western guilt over the Crusades doesn’t seem to be reciprocated by Muslim guilt over having utterly obliterated Byzantium. The devoutly Christian Eastern Roman Empire as merged into Hellenism had prospered benevolently for a millenium, until the Muslims sacked Constantinopal (later Istanbul), killed the King, and erased that civilization forever. This was after the last Crusade, and much more consequential to our current times, and should’ve been pay-back a-plenty for whatever insults were perpetrated by the Crusades.