The movie Lincoln is getting a lot of press, most likely movie of the year and all that goes with it, Spoiler Alert it end badly. don't tell Moi.
So has anybody seen this movie yet?
Reviews?
Yes I know how it ends.
River
Lincoln the movie
-
Riverwind (imported)
- Articles: 0
- Posts: 7558
- Joined: Sun Dec 30, 2001 1:58 pm
-
Posting Rank
-
bobover3 (imported)
- Articles: 0
- Posts: 893
- Joined: Sat Nov 08, 2008 12:39 am
-
Posting Rank
Re: Lincoln the movie
Haven't seen it yet, but I will as soon as it reaches my area. Day-Lewis is a great actor.
I can guess the end: Lincoln becomes a Democrat at the last moment; Nancy Pelosi arrives in a time machine and carries him off, despite protests by Abraham's wife Mary Todd (a 1%er); Abe and Nancy shack up and beget a generation of ugly liberals (the girls all have beards, the boys all have shellacked bouffant hairdos); Abe and Nancy eventually move to the south of France and forget they ever knew America.
I can guess the end: Lincoln becomes a Democrat at the last moment; Nancy Pelosi arrives in a time machine and carries him off, despite protests by Abraham's wife Mary Todd (a 1%er); Abe and Nancy shack up and beget a generation of ugly liberals (the girls all have beards, the boys all have shellacked bouffant hairdos); Abe and Nancy eventually move to the south of France and forget they ever knew America.
-
Dave (imported)
- Articles: 0
- Posts: 6386
- Joined: Tue Dec 04, 2001 6:06 pm
-
Posting Rank
-
Slammr (imported)
- Articles: 0
- Posts: 1643
- Joined: Fri Sep 06, 2002 12:21 pm
-
Posting Rank
Re: Lincoln the movie
I saw this movie today, and I liked it.
This is a movie about getting the 13th Amendment, the abolition of slavery, passed in the House of Representatives. It had already passed the Senate. In it, Lincoln did what was needed, bought votes and twisted arms, to get it passed. He even pretty well lied about ongoing negotiations with Richmond to end the war, fearing that the Amendment wouldn't pass, if people knew peace was close at hand.
I won't give all the particulars, not wanting to spoil it for those that haven't seen it, but if it's accurate, I did learn a little about history I didn't know.
Daniel Day Lewis was an excellent Lincoln. We saw a very human side of Lincoln in this movie. Go see it.
It’s the voice that gets you.
On first acquaintance, it hits a lot of people as wrong. We’ve seen so many Abe Lincolns on screens of various sizes that, whether we like it or not, we have fairly rigid ideas of what he sounded like.
Raymond Massey, probably, as he was in “Abe Lincoln in Illinois,” full of vocal sonority that matched the plain, prairie power of the words. Or Henry Fonda, in John Ford’s great “Young Mr. Lincoln,” described by Ford as “a jack-legged young lawyer from Springfield.”
Here is Devin McKinney’s description of Fonda as Lincoln in his excellent, recently published Fonda biography “The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda” (St. Martin’s Press, 428 pages, $29.99): “Seldom have movies achieved, through makeup or miracle, so arresting a combination of attributes as this, so bizarre and fixating a meld of physical actor and imaginative presence. The face is Lincoln’s; the voice is Fonda’s.”
Exactly. Which is why Fonda in “Young Mr. Lincoln” will always be immortal in American film. But Lincoln’s voice from contemporary descriptions was something else: higher than our vocal archetypes, more nasal, softer.
And that’s what gives Daniel Day-Lewis tidal power before Steven Spielberg’s big new film “Lincoln” is over.
You spend two-plus hours looking at Day-Lewis as a physical incarnation of Lincoln – ridiculously tall and skinny, all 6 foot 4 inches of him in 19th century black (three inches taller than Day-Lewis really is), topped off by that stovepipe hat adding about six more inches.
But we’ve seen so many other actors who looked like Lincoln. He is, quite literally, an American icon. Lincoln exists in the American imagination. Almost any attentive pretense at a resemblance persuades us for a while.
Even the sneakily serious “Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter” – which paid a surprising amount of biographical attention to our 16th president for a film of such humble, comic book origins – gave us long, lanky Benjamin Walker as a suitably apt apparition of Lincoln.
But it’s the voice that gets you. It’s the voice that puts Day-Lewis’ portrayal of Lincoln up there with Massey’s and Fonda’s in crucial ways. It’s the high, soft voice we’ve been told about, as full of the Midwest as Fonda’s but always seeming to seek new low volumes of maximum conversational intimacy.
At the same time, all that vocal sweetness doesn’t prohibit Day-Lewis from oratorical conviction. Nor does it prevent him from displaying mountainous anger as he plays Lincoln in his final months in office, preoccupied with getting the 13th Amendment to the Constitution through the House of Representatives so that slavery would be forever prohibited in America.
And that’s what makes Spielberg’s “Lincoln” unlike any other Lincoln film you’ve ever seen. It is impossible on screen to give us a Lincoln entirely without echoes of all those other Lincolns we’ve always known from movies, TV and books to the very pennies in our pockets.
But this isn’t a Fordian folk-tale Lincoln, this is an attempt at a historical Lincoln based on a small section of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals.” (A book President Obama supposedly used to spur him on to asking Hillary Clinton to be his secretary of state, just as former Lincoln rival William Seward had been Lincoln’s.)
Spielberg’s historical “Lincoln” is in earnest. It’s a film about political process, 19th century style – the uphill 1865 struggle to get enough votes in the House of Representatives to ratify the constitutional amendment that would do for all time in America what Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation could only do during the actual duration of the Civil War.
In one of the most startling scenes in the movie, the screenplay by Tony Kushner – the playwright who gave the world a convincing Roy Cohn in “Angels in America” – presents us with the former “jack-legged young lawyer from Springfield” explaining in full the legalities of why a constitutional amendment could do for good what the Emancipation Proclamation, for all its landmark drama, could only do provisionally.
Lincoln’s explanation is very lawyerly and bound to be an inch or two over the heads of a lot of the audience. But then so is a small but decidedly stubborn part of a screenplay very attentive to the small details of American legislative process in 1865.
These may be Spielberg’s John Ford years as a movie director (Spielberg’s last film “War Horse” was the most Fordian film he ever made and as much a clear-cut Oscar bid as “Lincoln”), but he seems determined to give you a film where you can almost smell the fires in the White House fireplaces; the dusty, unlaundered suits of congressmen; the snifters of brandy on the table and the cigars of Secretary of State William Seward (played with worldly panache by David Strathairn).
Spielberg’s “Lincoln” is just as attentive to the pungent aromas of 1865 legislative maneuvering, with a decidedly funky trio of lobbyists running around Washington trying to buy crucial lame duck Democratic votes with low-ball job offers. (Why buy a vote with a postmaster general post when you can get the job with a lowly local postmaster position?)
The trio of grubby vote buyers is led by a bloated-looking James Spader in a small performance as convincingly corrupt as Day-Lewis is convincingly shrewd and noble in the film’s central performance.
Herman Melville famously observed that to write a great book you need a mighty theme. Obviously, Spielberg believes a cinematic version of it. Few films these days are as self-evidently ambitious – and therefore as blatantly Oscar-bait – as Spielberg’s “Lincoln.”
There are extraordinary moments in it – noble ones, heart-rending ones, harrowing ones (Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Lincoln’s son Robert watching Army hospital orderlies moving a wheelbarrow of blood-dripping amputated limbs out of the hospital to dump it into a giant pit of discarded body parts behind the building).
The movie yearns to be great. It is almost desperate to be as important a film about its subject as Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” is forever likely to be about the Holocaust (to name another film that clearly came from the books in Spielberg’s library).
There’s something heartening about such yearnings in our movie world, so full usually of demographic pandering and quick-kill box office that give us all manner of revenue-gobbling blockbusters with all the capacity of remaining in your memory as a lunchtime sandwich purchased from a vending machine.
And there is so much in “Lincoln” that equals Spielberg’s ambitions – not just Day-Lewis’ performance, which does the unprecedented thing of completely reinventing a cornerstone American icon, but in bits and pieces of surpassing eloquence (not just Lincoln’s either) in Kushner’s script.
Nor is Spielberg left out of the fulfillment of his own highest yearnings. Who is likely to forget a father as tender as Lincoln lying down next to his youngest son asleep in front of the fireplace, kissing him awake and then carrying him off to bed on his back?
This is the Lincoln we’ve long known about – the one who liked bathroom jokes and was good at telling them, the one who, at the same time, wrote some of the most beautiful and elevated prose in the American language for public occasions.
This is a film about the immense tactical cunning and naked power-wielding of a man devoted to society that would always provide freedom for “the better angels of our nature.” But for all that, I must confess there are things that miss – and miss broadly – in Spielberg’s “Lincoln.”
For all the cleverness with which the film gives you, at the beginning, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, the film’s way of giving us his assassination is an errant bit of false cleverness that desperately needed rethinking.
In fact, the film’s ending – which is brave enough to hallow those words which were the body and soul of his legacy – is so much less imaginative, even in content, than it should have been.
This is a movie about getting the 13th Amendment, the abolition of slavery, passed in the House of Representatives. It had already passed the Senate. In it, Lincoln did what was needed, bought votes and twisted arms, to get it passed. He even pretty well lied about ongoing negotiations with Richmond to end the war, fearing that the Amendment wouldn't pass, if people knew peace was close at hand.
I won't give all the particulars, not wanting to spoil it for those that haven't seen it, but if it's accurate, I did learn a little about history I didn't know.
Daniel Day Lewis was an excellent Lincoln. We saw a very human side of Lincoln in this movie. Go see it.
It’s the voice that gets you.
On first acquaintance, it hits a lot of people as wrong. We’ve seen so many Abe Lincolns on screens of various sizes that, whether we like it or not, we have fairly rigid ideas of what he sounded like.
Raymond Massey, probably, as he was in “Abe Lincoln in Illinois,” full of vocal sonority that matched the plain, prairie power of the words. Or Henry Fonda, in John Ford’s great “Young Mr. Lincoln,” described by Ford as “a jack-legged young lawyer from Springfield.”
Here is Devin McKinney’s description of Fonda as Lincoln in his excellent, recently published Fonda biography “The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda” (St. Martin’s Press, 428 pages, $29.99): “Seldom have movies achieved, through makeup or miracle, so arresting a combination of attributes as this, so bizarre and fixating a meld of physical actor and imaginative presence. The face is Lincoln’s; the voice is Fonda’s.”
Exactly. Which is why Fonda in “Young Mr. Lincoln” will always be immortal in American film. But Lincoln’s voice from contemporary descriptions was something else: higher than our vocal archetypes, more nasal, softer.
And that’s what gives Daniel Day-Lewis tidal power before Steven Spielberg’s big new film “Lincoln” is over.
You spend two-plus hours looking at Day-Lewis as a physical incarnation of Lincoln – ridiculously tall and skinny, all 6 foot 4 inches of him in 19th century black (three inches taller than Day-Lewis really is), topped off by that stovepipe hat adding about six more inches.
But we’ve seen so many other actors who looked like Lincoln. He is, quite literally, an American icon. Lincoln exists in the American imagination. Almost any attentive pretense at a resemblance persuades us for a while.
Even the sneakily serious “Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter” – which paid a surprising amount of biographical attention to our 16th president for a film of such humble, comic book origins – gave us long, lanky Benjamin Walker as a suitably apt apparition of Lincoln.
But it’s the voice that gets you. It’s the voice that puts Day-Lewis’ portrayal of Lincoln up there with Massey’s and Fonda’s in crucial ways. It’s the high, soft voice we’ve been told about, as full of the Midwest as Fonda’s but always seeming to seek new low volumes of maximum conversational intimacy.
At the same time, all that vocal sweetness doesn’t prohibit Day-Lewis from oratorical conviction. Nor does it prevent him from displaying mountainous anger as he plays Lincoln in his final months in office, preoccupied with getting the 13th Amendment to the Constitution through the House of Representatives so that slavery would be forever prohibited in America.
And that’s what makes Spielberg’s “Lincoln” unlike any other Lincoln film you’ve ever seen. It is impossible on screen to give us a Lincoln entirely without echoes of all those other Lincolns we’ve always known from movies, TV and books to the very pennies in our pockets.
But this isn’t a Fordian folk-tale Lincoln, this is an attempt at a historical Lincoln based on a small section of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals.” (A book President Obama supposedly used to spur him on to asking Hillary Clinton to be his secretary of state, just as former Lincoln rival William Seward had been Lincoln’s.)
Spielberg’s historical “Lincoln” is in earnest. It’s a film about political process, 19th century style – the uphill 1865 struggle to get enough votes in the House of Representatives to ratify the constitutional amendment that would do for all time in America what Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation could only do during the actual duration of the Civil War.
In one of the most startling scenes in the movie, the screenplay by Tony Kushner – the playwright who gave the world a convincing Roy Cohn in “Angels in America” – presents us with the former “jack-legged young lawyer from Springfield” explaining in full the legalities of why a constitutional amendment could do for good what the Emancipation Proclamation, for all its landmark drama, could only do provisionally.
Lincoln’s explanation is very lawyerly and bound to be an inch or two over the heads of a lot of the audience. But then so is a small but decidedly stubborn part of a screenplay very attentive to the small details of American legislative process in 1865.
These may be Spielberg’s John Ford years as a movie director (Spielberg’s last film “War Horse” was the most Fordian film he ever made and as much a clear-cut Oscar bid as “Lincoln”), but he seems determined to give you a film where you can almost smell the fires in the White House fireplaces; the dusty, unlaundered suits of congressmen; the snifters of brandy on the table and the cigars of Secretary of State William Seward (played with worldly panache by David Strathairn).
Spielberg’s “Lincoln” is just as attentive to the pungent aromas of 1865 legislative maneuvering, with a decidedly funky trio of lobbyists running around Washington trying to buy crucial lame duck Democratic votes with low-ball job offers. (Why buy a vote with a postmaster general post when you can get the job with a lowly local postmaster position?)
The trio of grubby vote buyers is led by a bloated-looking James Spader in a small performance as convincingly corrupt as Day-Lewis is convincingly shrewd and noble in the film’s central performance.
Herman Melville famously observed that to write a great book you need a mighty theme. Obviously, Spielberg believes a cinematic version of it. Few films these days are as self-evidently ambitious – and therefore as blatantly Oscar-bait – as Spielberg’s “Lincoln.”
There are extraordinary moments in it – noble ones, heart-rending ones, harrowing ones (Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Lincoln’s son Robert watching Army hospital orderlies moving a wheelbarrow of blood-dripping amputated limbs out of the hospital to dump it into a giant pit of discarded body parts behind the building).
The movie yearns to be great. It is almost desperate to be as important a film about its subject as Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” is forever likely to be about the Holocaust (to name another film that clearly came from the books in Spielberg’s library).
There’s something heartening about such yearnings in our movie world, so full usually of demographic pandering and quick-kill box office that give us all manner of revenue-gobbling blockbusters with all the capacity of remaining in your memory as a lunchtime sandwich purchased from a vending machine.
And there is so much in “Lincoln” that equals Spielberg’s ambitions – not just Day-Lewis’ performance, which does the unprecedented thing of completely reinventing a cornerstone American icon, but in bits and pieces of surpassing eloquence (not just Lincoln’s either) in Kushner’s script.
Nor is Spielberg left out of the fulfillment of his own highest yearnings. Who is likely to forget a father as tender as Lincoln lying down next to his youngest son asleep in front of the fireplace, kissing him awake and then carrying him off to bed on his back?
This is the Lincoln we’ve long known about – the one who liked bathroom jokes and was good at telling them, the one who, at the same time, wrote some of the most beautiful and elevated prose in the American language for public occasions.
This is a film about the immense tactical cunning and naked power-wielding of a man devoted to society that would always provide freedom for “the better angels of our nature.” But for all that, I must confess there are things that miss – and miss broadly – in Spielberg’s “Lincoln.”
For all the cleverness with which the film gives you, at the beginning, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, the film’s way of giving us his assassination is an errant bit of false cleverness that desperately needed rethinking.
In fact, the film’s ending – which is brave enough to hallow those words which were the body and soul of his legacy – is so much less imaginative, even in content, than it should have been.
-
bobover3 (imported)
- Articles: 0
- Posts: 893
- Joined: Sat Nov 08, 2008 12:39 am
-
Posting Rank
Re: Lincoln the movie
Saw it last night. Excellent. Strong sense of historical accuracy. Day-Lewis conquers by avoiding the orotund vocalizing of past Lincolns, who spoke as if Lincoln was self-important and solemn. The one thing which rang false was the repeated assurances of those around Lincoln that he was great and loved. That's the judgment of history. While alive, Lincoln must have been as controversial as any modern President. Probably more so because he presided over a civil war which, with about 625,000 dead, was by far the bloodiest war in our history. Still, well worth watching.
-
Losethem (imported)
- Articles: 0
- Posts: 3342
- Joined: Tue Dec 25, 2001 9:01 am
-
Posting Rank
-
bobover3 (imported)
- Articles: 0
- Posts: 893
- Joined: Sat Nov 08, 2008 12:39 am
-
Posting Rank
Re: Lincoln the movie
The movie is clever about Lincoln's assassination. We don't see it. We see him leave for the theater; we see his younger son with an aid at another theater when someone comes on stage to announce that the President has been shot at Ford's Theater. This spares us the usual melodrama.
-
Riverwind (imported)
- Articles: 0
- Posts: 7558
- Joined: Sun Dec 30, 2001 1:58 pm
-
Posting Rank
-
moi621 (imported)
- Articles: 0
- Posts: 4434
- Joined: Sat Jan 19, 2008 6:23 pm
-
Posting Rank
Re: Lincoln the movie
Articles are coming out questioning and affirming the accuracy of the movie.
I found this copy / paste worthy to share.
"Lincoln's voice was described as being fairly high-pitched, rather than the deep baritone used by earlier actors. I think Lincoln may have had a little bit more of an Indiana-Kentucky twang than Mr. Day-Lewis has. Lincoln rarely if ever used profanity, and some of the dialogue calls for him to do that."
I guess Hal Holbrook should have dubbed in the voice. Or we are sold as a nation on the baritone Lincoln.
Moi
Truth. You want the truth.
Sorry, truth doesn't sell.
I found this copy / paste worthy to share.
"Lincoln's voice was described as being fairly high-pitched, rather than the deep baritone used by earlier actors. I think Lincoln may have had a little bit more of an Indiana-Kentucky twang than Mr. Day-Lewis has. Lincoln rarely if ever used profanity, and some of the dialogue calls for him to do that."
I guess Hal Holbrook should have dubbed in the voice. Or we are sold as a nation on the baritone Lincoln.
Moi
Truth. You want the truth.
Sorry, truth doesn't sell.
