Gladiator II - Just Why?

To say Gladiator 2 was a sequel no one asked for is an understatement.

The first Gladiator was fun, had some respect for historical accuracy, and was a pretty accurate reenactment of the Rome tactics and gladiatorial games of Marcus Aurelius' time.

 Gladiator 2, not so much.

To say it had so many blatant historical inaccuracies it would hurt a classicist's soul is accurate. Verily, it did.

Horrendously bad, it was. 

It begins with a Roman fleet attacking Numidia under the Emperors Caracalla and Geta sometime between 209 and 211 AD. The leader of Numidia at the time is named Jugurtha.

The problem is the Roman Republic's War with Jugurtha took place in 118 BC, prior to the Roman Empire, and Numidia had been under Roman domian and control since then.

This does let them get some DEI credit for the film though portraying Jugurtha as Black, rather than North African Berber so there's that. 

And no, the Roman generals at the time of Geta and Caracalla were not known to run ahead of their formation fighting enemies one-on-one.  Not how it worked.

It gets progressively, and dare I say diversely, worse from there.

Denzel Washington plays Macrinus, as the master of gladiators. He does a fine job chewing the scenery and basically portraying himself out of Training Day. He's an enjoyable actor, but it kills the history of the period all the more, but again awesome diversity DEI credit.

The real Macrinus was the commander of the Preaetorian Guard  and as far as is known was not involved in the death of Geta, but was involved in killing Caracalla and becoming Emperor for a short period before being killed himself.

Oh, and Macrinus, while from North Africa, wasn't Black, but again DEI cred.

Geta and Caracalla are portrayed as effeminate half-wit twin poofs.  Again for DEI credit I suppose, when the historical record is rather different. 

Also, they weren't twins with Caracalla being 11 months older. They were both active on military campaigns and Caracalla was held to be quite the military strategist and campaigner. They did hate each other though and far more than is portrayed in the movie.

Caracalla also never had a pet monkey.  Lawdog is likely happy to know that.

Gladiator 2 even literally jumped the shark by having sharks in the Colosseum during the nautical battle scene.

While Rome did stage a Naumachia in the Colosseum at least once, the Romans did not capture sharks and have them swimming around the Colosseum during such battles.

Hilariously and painfully the naval battle itself was announced as a remake of the Battle of Salamis and described as a battle between the "Trojans and the Persians".

The Battle of Salamis was between the Greeks and the Persian  - in 480 BC. The Trojan war was much, much earlier, in the 12th or 13th century BC between the Greeks and the Trojans.  

The movie then continues with more and more historical inaccuracies.

There's even people sipping coffee and reading newspapers during the movie. 

Coffee didn't come to Rome as a beverage before the 17th century AD,  and newspapers weren't invented until the 1400s AD - over a thousand years after the events in the film.

I mean you can take license with historical events, but asking the audience to disbelieve a thousand years worth of an anachronism is asking for a bit much. 

In short, if you haven't seen Gladiator 2 yet,  I recommend you disbelieve it ever existed.  Instead you can have a much better and more enjoyable use of your movie-watching time by watching Gladiator again.

Orange Isn't The New Black At The Oscars

Well it looks like Everytown's attempt to get all the stars to wear orange flags for gun bans at the Oscars fizzled. Lots of coverage that stars and starlets would be wearing orange pins for gun bans, but looking at the crowd at the opening, in the end it looks like not many if any did.

Even Jimmy Kimmel hosting the event wasn't wearing one. When even Jimmy Kimmel won't jump on board an emoting display to push for gun bans with no real substance then well....

It looks like the highest rated actors they could get to wear them were Lin Manuel-Miranda and Keala Settle. I know, you're asking "Manuel-Miranda and Settle Who?" Yeah, Me too, not exactly names on everyone's lips, those.

Speaking of #MeToo, it looks like the women of Hollywood weren't distracted by this new orange-aid shinyness to give up their black Times Up pins - after all Hollywood starlets are far more likely to be sexually assaulted or required to put out to get their career by the "men" (I use the term "men" loosely in this case - any man who sexually assaults a woman is no man) of Hollywood then they are to face "gun violence".

Desperate Shilling For Obamacare Reaches Hollywood

In the face of abject failure of the exchange website and millions losing their coverage, more propaganda was badly needed.

Some "What you gonna believe - What I said then or what I say now." from the President isn't going to do it.

So the progressives are going to pay Hollywood to insert pro-Obamacare propaganda into your weekly sitcom, dramas and relaity shows.

The Detroit Free Press: Boosters of health care law turn to Hollywood for help

The California Endowment, a private foundation that is spending millions to promote President Barack Obama’s signature law, recently provided a $500,000 grant to ensure that TV writers and producers have information about the Affordable Care Act that can be stitched into story lines watched by millions.

The aim is to produce compelling prime-time narratives that encourage Americans to enroll, especially young and healthy people, Hispanics and other key demographic groups needed to make the overhaul a success.

“We know from research that when people watch entertainment television, even if they know it’s fiction, they tend to believe that the factual stuff is actually factual,” said Martin Kaplan of the University of Southern California’s Norman Lear Center, which received the grant.

The statement that young people believe that the "factual stuff is actually factual" whether from the media or the Democrats, but I repeat myself, explains a lot of the problems with Obamacare and the stat of our nation right there.

But worry not, Hollywood will keep right on taking the Democrats' money and carrying the Democrats' water and lying to you. For your own good.

The Left Eats Their Insufficiently Progressive Own

Poor Lena Dunham, after performing exceptional lip service in support of President Obama's get out the vote efforts -- literally offering her all in the service of his reelection -- the poor empty-headed progressive can't escape the harsh scrutiny of the school of Marxist literary/film criticism.

Instapundit links to The Daily Beast's article: ‘Zero Dark Thirty,’ Lena Dunham, ‘Django’: Stop Politicizing Everything!. The article notes Lena Dunhamn's show Girls is getting flack for being insufficient in color content:

The latest and highest-profile target is Girls creator and star Lena Dunham, who, if you listen to her critics, might very well be Brooklyn Heights’s own Orville Faubus. A brief recapitulation of the story so far: It all started when Jenna Wortham, a New York Times reporter, writing for a blog call The Hairpin, reported that upon seeing a promotional poster for Girls her “heart dropped and I swallowed once, hard. Girls. White girls.” In response, America’s culture critics got to work sifting through the evidence of Dunham’s subterranean racism.

When Dunham said the all-white cast was “a complete accident”—she wrote about her friends, and these were her friends—a New Yorker writer responded that this was “maybe so” and allowed that the lack of black characters was “perhaps inadvertent,” two weasel words that left open the possibility the show was scripted and cast by bigots. Atlantic Wire writer Elspeth Reeve suggested that, if the show was indeed a reflection of Dunham’s social life, “she should expand her circle” of friends.

In response to the expanding controversy, Girls writer Lesley Arfin tweeted sarcastically, “What really bothered me most about Precious was that there was no representation of ME.” This too was deemed racist (she later deleted the tweet), as were a number of other things she had previously written. The narrative was established: the girls of Girls were rich, privileged, and, if the critic was feeling charitable, deeply insensitive.

Poor Dunham. Even after a public display of enthusiastic electoral jungle fever, she gets accused of racism by of all terrors, a New York Times reporter - in a blog, not even in the paper of record itself.

Being a good leftist and hewing to the dictat of her tribe, she and the show's writer, instead of telling this nobody to take a hike and quit inventing controversy where none exists, immediately confessed their thought-crimes:

In the face of this ferocious stupidity, Dunham performed her ablutions. “I take that criticism very seriously,” she told NPR. “As much as I can say [writing four white main characters] was an accident, it was only later as the criticism came out, I thought, I hear this, and I want to respond to it.” The new season of Girls assigned her character a black boyfriend, who also happened to be a Republican (a sly joke, perhaps, about tokenism). Arfin too offered a po-faced confession, adopting the language of her accusers: “Without thinking, I put gender politics above race and class. That was careless.”

Of course, in the leftist mind, all things are political or in service to progressive political goals. That means that "artists" like Dunham are always under a cloud of suspicion race and gender identity politics. Dunham, even while self-identifying as a leftist and being of service to the left found out her show fails to meet the latest in progressive performance requirements.

After all, it's hard out there being a vapid progressive.

Detroit 1-8-7 star gives a classy good-bye but really mixes up his metaphors

Actor James McDaniel wrote a farewll letter to Detroit after learning Detroit 1-8-7 would be cancelled. He should have seen it coming as using California's penal code section 1-8-7 for murders taking place in Michigan was always a bit Hollyweird.

However, Mr. McDaniel's letter starts off with a rather inapt description:

Dear Paris of the Midwest,

We will miss you.

Methinks he meant the Beirut of the Midwest and he was confused because Beirut used to be called the "Paris of the Mid East" a long time ago.....