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Sometimes people don't want to be told that the emperor's new clothes don't exist, or they, to mix metaphors, ignore the elephant in the room. I had no great desire to see the movie anyway, and now after watching Harlan Ellison have even less desire to see it.
Over the weekend I managed to gore some fans' sacred cow when I posted a less than flattering review of a beloved young singer, which made me the bad guy, when I was merely trying to be fastidiously honest about it. Harlan, if he is anything, is fastidiously honest, which has come back to bite him on the butt a number of times.
Thanks for posting this.
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what's up with the title?
who the eff is "Mr. Banks"
Private Ryan's father?
bruce
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A few hours after writing something above, I was thinking about what Harlan Ellison had said and decided that the main thing was that they had to mess around with the facts to make a more interesting story, which screenwriters do all the time when telling stories based on historical facts. But after reading what Robert Sherman's son wrote, it now seems that the screenwriters didn't just mess around with the facts, they rewrote history and did a disservice to the songwriters, and THAT is unforgivable.
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Or, they came up with a story they wished was true, decided it "worked" better than the true story, then bent the facts to match the fiction they'd concocted. I saw the film and was actually very moved by it. Now I feel cheated. In a way, I'm experiencing what P.L. Travers must have felt, firsthand. I understand Hollywood "magic" so much more now, ironically.
A couple of things irritate me in particular. One is the use of the authentic recording of Travers meeting with the songwriters and screenwriter over the end credits, as if to say (or brag?) see?-- it's all true, just the way we depicted it.
Another was the line where Travers asks why Robert Sherman walks with a cane. The Richard Sherman character says something like, "he got shot," to which Travers replies something like "I'm not surprised." What a cheap shot, I thought. This was, of course, a war injury. A genuinely dramatic fact about the character was lost for a sloppy screenwriter's cheap laugh.
There's still a very interesting movie to be made about the real-life Sherman Brothers. I heard talk that Ben Stiller's company was interested in doing it, shortly after the (very good) documentary "The Boys" came out. Now, it's probably been sidelined in favor of this whitewashing job. Sad.
http://filmscoremonthly.com/board/posts.cfm?threadID=69402&forumID=1&archive=0
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Posted: |
Dec 25, 2013 - 3:10 PM
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By: |
Octoberman
(Member)
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Next, Harlan rages about historical lapses in Braveheart!
Coming soon, Harlan dissects Mel Gibson's The Patriot! 
That would be awesome. I'd love to see him have a go at them.
Of course, the difference is that the MP movie deals with (un)truths that are easily verifiable because they are connected to events far more recent. Distant past... not so much.
Ideally, it would have been best if the Disney machine not be allowed to stick its finger in this particular pie. (Now THAT would have been a more interesting film, eh?) But because the story had to, by necessity, portray Disney, the result is what it is and there's no changing that. Which is why it's important that people (like Ellison, in this instance) get out there and remind everyone how things really went down.
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So what izzit that makes him especially unlovable?
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Harlan can be fun and Harlan can be tiresome and Harlan can certainly be self-serving, which he is in this tired video rant.
Saving Mr. Banks would have been unbearable if it had strictly stuck to the facts. So, the screenwriters did what they had to do to make it a movie audiences would like to see. As someone posted above, it is in a very long line of movies based on truth that have played fast and loose with facts - well, I mean, really, how many movies this year have we seen with that stupid line "Based on a real-life story" or "Inspired by true events" - most of those films manipulate facts to have the movie actually work - that's just the way it is.
Richard Sherman loves the film, and he knows precisely why they did what they did in the sections where things were manipulated. And he agrees with what they did because he knows that to have stuck strictly to the actual happenings and how Mrs. Travers actually was would have resulted in a one-note, strident movie that no one on the planet would ever want to see.
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[ Harlan can be fun and Harlan can be tiresome and Harlan can certainly be self-serving ... ]
In Other Words, Generally Just Like ALL of Us Department:
Which also falls under the heading: sometimes (scratch that, most tymes) it pays to separate the definitive difference between one's Talent and one's personality.
They have absolutely Nada to do with one another.
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