← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · JoseyWales
Thread ID: 13078 | Posts: 8 | Started: 2004-04-08
2004-04-08 01:34 | User Profile
Opens in theaters this friday. Beware, it has some "historically questionable" scenes.
[url]http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=598&ncid=790&e=1&u=/nm/20040407/film_nm/review_film_alamo_dc[/url]
Still, regardless of the "questionable" parts, i think i will go see it.
2004-04-12 16:33 | User Profile
Me too.
"Lord of the Rings" wasn't perfect either, but better than anything else H-wood has been publishing.
2004-04-12 20:11 | User Profile
VDARE.COM - [url]http://www.vdare.com/sailer/alamo.htm[/url]
April 11, 2004
Thinking About The Alamoââ¬âAnd Those Self-Organizing Americans By Steve Sailer
[See also ÿOLVIDATE DEL ALAMO? [FORGET THE ALAMO ?] by Allan Wall]
The Alamo opened in theatres Friday dogged by some of the worst pre-release buzz since Titanic. Expensive talent Russell Crowe and Ron Howard dropped out when Disney cut the budget from immense to merely very large. And many Texans and conservatives are worried that Disney does not have the guts to make an accurate movie about Mexicans behaving badly.
A Texan with the wonderful name of John Lee Hancock, who had a surprise hit in The Rookie, pinch-hit as director. Hancockââ¬â¢s natural pace is slow: his fine little baseball biopic took over two hours to tell a story that a TV-movie-of-the-week would have zipped through in 88 minutes. His first version of The Alamo, a complex epic, clocked in at around 180 minutes. Hancock missed the planned Christmas 2003 release date as he struggled to cut The Alamo down to its current 137 minutes.
But I think the movie turned out decently. It lacks pizzazz, but it's quite respectable: a basic three stars out of four film. The main shortcomings are that the filmstock is intentionally underexposed, giving a slightly gloomy air to the proceedings, and that Dennis Quaid, who was so good in The Rookie, plays Sam Houston as if he has a painful intestinal disorder.
Of course, it helps if you have some level of interest in American history.
For example, when one character is introduced brandishing a knife bigger than Crocodile Dundee's, you'll be able to follow the complicated plot better if you immediately realize he's Jim Bowie of Bowie Knife fame. Unfortunately, Hollywood's most treasured demographicââ¬âthe male lumpen youth marketââ¬âgenerally doesn't know Jim Bowie from David Bowie.
I suspect the eventual DVD release, with the deleted scenes restored, might be even better. In the final cut, for example, there's no mention of the horrendous Goliad massacre when Mexican dictator Santa Anna treacherously murdered 400 American POWs. And some additional backstory on these larger than life characters would be fun. For example, something not mentioned in the theatrical release is that when Houston's new bride left him in 1829, he resigned the governorship of Tennessee and dragged his broken heart off to live with wild Indians for three years.
The last film version starred John Wayne as Davy Crockett, the frontier superman of comic legend. Here, the genial and loquacious Billy Bob Thornton is perfectly cast as David Crockett, the wry ex-Congressman who grows into the heroism of his popular but largely fictitious alter ego, Davy Crockett.
This Alamo uses the alternative story favored by some historians who believe Crockett did not die fighting, but was captured along with five others and executed. A Mexican officer's diary reads: "These unfortunates died without complaining and without humiliating themselves before their torturers."
Dying fighting suited the imposing Wayne, but dying smarting off to Santa Annaââ¬â"If your whole army surrenders to me, I'll try to see that my friend Sam Houston goes easy on you"ââ¬âsuits the witty Thornton.
Santa Anna is treated as the cruel, egomaniacal, and bungling villain he was. But the movie assuages Mexican pride by giving Santa Anna an adjutant who is an honorable old soldier and despises his commander's vulgarity and viciousness. And handsome Spanish actor Jordi MollÃÂ plays the Americans' Tejano ally Juan Seguin.
While Santa Anna was a uniquely awful leader in Mexico's history (and that's saying a lot), it's important to note that Santa Anna's career says something important about the difference between American and Mexican culture. He ruled Mexico five separate times. That's like Dennis Kucinich being President five times.
Paul Johnson wrote in A History of the American People about the subsequent Mexican War:
"It is difficult now to conjure up the contempt felt by most Americans in the 1840s for the way Mexico was governed, or misgoverned, the endless coups and pronunciamentos, the intermittent and exceedingly cruel and often bloody civil conflicts, and the general insecurity of life and property. It made moral as well as economic and political sense for the civilized United States to wrest as much territory as possible from the hands of Mexico's greedy and irresponsible rulers."
Mexican culture's inadequacies at self-rule help explain Santa Anna's bizarre, tragicomic career. Mexicans would grow sick of his dictatorial ways and overthrow him. After a few years of corruption and near-anarchy caused by their inability to trust anybody beyond their extended families, they'd start to long for a man on horseback, and bring him back. Then they'd find he only got worse with age.
As VDARE.COMââ¬â¢S Allen Wall has pointed out, the Texas Revolution is modern immigration's Worst Case Nightmare Scenario: immigrants (in Texasââ¬â¢ case, Anglos) flood into a border state, refuse to assimilate, secede.
But Americans were able to carve a Republic of Texas out of Mexico in just a couple of decades because of their talent for self-organizing, a knack that Mexicans seldom have down to this day.
The movie makes this American talent clear. The circumstances were certainly unpropitious within the Alamo: Several large and volatile personalities, each leading his own private army, were crammed together with almost no time to work out how they'd cooperate. And yet they did, putting up a unified 13 day defense that allowed Houston time to unite fractious units and capture Santa Anna six weeks later at the Battle of San Jacinto, freeing Texas from Mexicoââ¬Â¦permanently?
Walking around downtown Philadelphia a couple of weeks ago, it occurred to me that Ben Franklin started more civic institutions than have all three million people of Mexican descent in Los Angeles County.
As Gregory Rodriguez wrote in the Feb. 29 Los Angeles Times:
"For example, in Los Angeles, home to more Mexicans than any other city in the U.S., there is not one ethnic Mexican hospital, college, cemetery or broad-based charity."
This lackadaisical record at institution-building suggests that the danger of Mexican immigrants getting well enough organized to pose a credible threat of secession from America may not be high.
On the other hand, America's historic talent for civil society, displayed under such desperate circumstances in 1836, will be slowly eroded by mass immigration.
And that will make us ever more like Mexicoââ¬âuntil the lessons of the Alamo become irrelevant.
[Steve Sailer [email him], is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute and movie critic for The American Conservative. His website [url]www.iSteve.com[/url] features site-exclusive commentaries.]
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2004-04-12 22:34 | User Profile
As a result of reading the review at VDARE, as well as hearing another negative review, I do not plan on seeing this film.
2004-04-13 05:22 | User Profile
I don't know how a movie can be made in 2004 about a great American historical event without Political Correcntess ruining it, especially by the likes of the Disney company.
2004-04-14 01:14 | User Profile
havent seen it yet, but i did catch a "history vs hollywood" episode on the 'history channel' - i htink ill just buy the john wayne version instead
2004-04-15 21:45 | User Profile
I don't know the real history of the Alamo and can't comment on that, but as a movie I really enjoyed it. And I thought it portrayed a certain American character very well. The part most people were hung up on, as I understood it, was Davy Crockett not dying in the Alamo. The film pictures him captured (after he and the other last few survivors of the Alamo suicide rush an oncoming group of Mexican soldiers). And he is executed, but doesn't leave without telling Santa Anna off.
2004-04-15 22:30 | User Profile
The battle of Los Alamos is yet to be won,,,,,,, what in reality counts is who wins the war and not "a" battle.
They are coming more and more every day over our borders in order to reclaim what is theirs, and you know what?,,,,, they will get it back.
Don't blame them, but those in the White House who allowed for this to happen.
The only reason that the American Indians haven't claimed back what is theirs is that the white man killed most of them.
Aztlan is alive and well ,,,,,, and winning.
As you people know I am a Latin from Cuba and my words are not those of one who is with them. but of one who used to live in California and has lived among them and can see what is going on.