Boxed In
I posted on how I'd heard Pirate Radio, set in the mid-60s, plays fast and loose with the era. Having seen it, it's worse than I thought. There's a lot of talk about the spirit of rock and roll, but I never felt the movie was happening back then.
It didn't help that a number of phrases spoken did not seem to be from that era. In particular, early on, one character tells another to "think outside the box." That simply wasn't in common parlance then.I guess it could have been worse. Someone could have said their ship is stuck in a Kobayashi Maru.
(It raises the question how do you capture a period to begin with? Clothes and decor, certainly, but is it possible to get into the mindset of the time--and would it confuse the audience if you did? Movies by their nature have to be selective. It's also odd, because of movies, how we have a reasonable idea what life was like for much of the 2oth century, but before that it's a blur. Let's say you made a movie about Jane Austen--how many could say "that's ridiculous, people didn't act like that in 1795, that's much more like 1835.")
posted by LAGuy @ 12:02 AM
2 Comments:
My sister writes Regency-era fiction, and she always spots anachronisms in period pieces. But most people certainly can't tell 1795 from 1835.
I certainly know that "outside the box" wasn't current in the 1960s, though.
The period piece that impressed me the most was Apollo 13. I was a young kid in 1970, and my dad was an aerospace engineer. I certainly could not have described in advance what everything looked like in that year. But the moment the movie began, it stunned me: it was like going back in time. All the NASA folks were male, white, short hair (even medium length hair was unknown on professionals back then), and chain smoked without noticing it.
The smoking was the most amazing part. I know people who smoke, even today. But it has literally been more than two decades since I saw someone smoke without apologizing for it, or acting sheepish about it, or otherwise deferring to all the (real and imagined) non-smokers and smoker-haters in their vicinity.
The thing is big-budget Hollywood movies have millions to spend getting it right. So it's always weird when you see expensive sets and costumes setting up an atmosphere blown by an actor uttering a single phrse.
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