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Reviews
August: Osage County (2013)
Not Osage County
I don't even know where to start with the deplorable inaccuracies of this movie. First of all, there's no distinction between "white" people and Native Americans in Osage County. Every Osage County family has Native American linage. Immediately in this film characters make some sort of artificial, contrived reference to racism. Easy emotional button, I'm sure, for an amateur writer but simply not realistic. Not because we're some kind of extraordinary people, but simply because we all have Native American relatives. It's simple; Osage girls are beautiful. Every Osage County white family had some boy in the last 100 years fall in love with a beautiful Osage girl. Typical Hollywood stereotyping suggest some sort of total segregation that couldn't be further from the truth. We grew up here, all good friends. If we had grievances with each other it was usually based on actual actions or words said, real events, not because some one was Native American. It's so funny because if someone in Oklahoma didn't like Native Americans, what the hell would they do? There are Native Americans EVERYWHERE. In Oklahoma, like everywhere, we call this lie Hollywood is portraying total bull&*^%. Personally, I'm too old to be offended, though. This kind of thing happens in movies all the time. I'm just disappointed that I can't find a good movie to watch.
As the movie progressed, I realized that I have never, ever known people who talked or acted like the characters in this film. That's fine if it's just some weird movie about a bizarre family. But it's not. It's title implies it's somehow a characterization of the people of this part of Oklahoma. Through my 51 years of life I have known people of all walks of life from my educated parents to the construction crew I worked on for a home builder when I was in high school. All of the problems families face existed here, just like anywhere. But, I don't recall ever experiencing people that behaved in that kind of hideous manner. Once again, Hollywood has simplified a complex demographic to the point of utter meaninglessness. Oklahoma is a crossroads. No one is "from here". Even the Native Americans aren't from here. Very, very few are. Most were marched here from states East of Oklahoma that wanted to be rid of the Natives. About half died along the way. And the European immigrants who came here are actually the first European migrants that actually lived with the Native Americans and now, about 115 years later, we are of them, a part of them, they are apart of us, there is no us and them. Our cultures are interlaced. One does not exist without the other here. You don't learn these things by driving through.
This movie should have a different title and not even reference anywhere. In my adult life, I have lived in Tulsa and worked for many years for an Engineering company that employs people from all over the world. I don't know anyone from any culture that behaves in this manner. This movie must be the product of some bizarre culture that exists in Hollywood that fabricates self righteous scenarios falsely based on some delusion that other people from other places are hideous, stupid, horrible degenerates. That's a tough row to hoe, because most people from everywhere are generally good. Seems like a person would have an easier time of it by simply writing an interesting story based on more real characters and events and walk away from this horrible habit of creating nasty, grotesque monsters in a sad, meaningless story.
Company of Heroes (2013)
The film raises a fundamental question
There are countless extraordinary stories from the war years. And many stories intertwine with other stories. A person involved in creating films would have thousands upon thousands of fantastic, harrowing stories to choose from. I've read many and I just read for entertainment. A true historian could lead one to thousands. Why can't Hollywood take advantage of technology and reproduce some of them accurately? They could make very entertaining, exciting movies. They would never run out of scripts. Truth is stranger, more unpredictable, much more fascinating than any fictitious tale, specially during the incredibly events of that time. The stories lie in the individual experiences. Not so much in the epic, major campaign, major battle subject manner. In this movie, the language/slang of the time, scenario, combat events, characters, equipment, geography, are all inaccurate. It serves as a display of how ignorant Hollywood is of history that is really hardly history at all being that the war ended just 20 years before I was born.