I never gave it a single thought. But now I have been cursed with this knowledge and will fly into a fury every time I hear it now.
But thanks anyway.
Using modern english phrases to convey meaning to modern audiences is usually fine to me, as long as they don’t reference modern history or events. but what really pisses me off is movies like “The Great Gatsby” that take place during the 1920s and have JayZ and Lana del ray playing at a rich person’s party
RoMeO aNd JuLiEt WaSn’T sEt iN CaLiFoRnIa
u rn
Yeah, We Will Rock you wouldn’t have even been written during A Knights Tale, so unrealistic.
They owned it though in Knight’s Tale…
Leithio i philinn!
Correct term was probably “loose!”
The slang term was “Fart in their general direction!”
Nobody was holding a ~90lb war bow at full draw waiting to hear “Loose”. Not possible.
Speaking of English longbow, the draw force could be a lot higher too, going upwardsof 130lb, and they were expected to shoot up to 70 arrows a battle at a rate of 6 per minute (at best).
I don’t think they’d struggle to hold an arrow for the initial volley, although I don’t expect they’d be drawn for as long as shown in movies to increase tension.
They also aren’t speaking Gaelic.
Given the fact that any language used in such a movie is going to be wildly unlike the language spoken in the time and place of the movie, I think that’s a mild anachronism
Old English / Norman French etc would be practically incomprehensible to anybody.
There was an interesting TV show called Barbarians a few years ago where all the Romans spoke Latin but with Italian accents but they had the Germanic barbarians speaking modern German. Not sure if that would please anybody.
Well, this is going to bug me for the rest of my life.
Thanks.
If you were commanding a mass of archers “Spaff!” was the correct command.
I don’t like this.
wow I’m glad that changed
The best part was when they said “ITS SPAFFFIN’ TIME” and spaffed all over those guys.
“So I started spaffing”
Spaffing Brits were the most underhanded of the lot.
“Ready your bows!”
“Nock!”
“Mark!”
“Draw!”
“Loose!”
Whoever decided to call it “Draw” instead of “Tighten” should be loosed out of a cannon. Into the sun.
Guy named Mark: “What?” *gets shot*
Volley fire wasn’t a thing with bows. You ever try holding a 90lb war bow at full draw waiting for someone to yell “Loose”? Never happened.
Wikipedia seems to disagree:
The Persians army employed volleys of arrows, slingshots, and javelins against the Greeks in Gaugalema[21] and Thermopylae.[22][23] Ancient Greeks and Romans used arrow volleys.[24][20][19] The goddess Artemis was called “‘of the showering arrows”.[25][26]
In medieval Europe, after the initial volley, archers would fire single shots at individual enemies.[27] Examples include the Battle of Hastings in 1066,[28] Battle of Crécy in 1346[19] and the Battle of Agincourt in 1415.[29]
I’d imagine it’s possible that a volley meant that they started drawing at the same time rather than drawing and waiting.
“Nock! Nock!”
“Who’s there?”
“Mark!”
“Mark who?”
Mark Oni, inventor of the wireless telegraph!
Yeah they would just spaff all over the enemy, multiple times.
Step enemy, help I’m stuck in the dryer…
Yeah, hearing “release” on screen might sound even more wrong…
Something I dislike in movies is when a movie is set in a non-English-speaking country, but all the characters are speaking English. I would rather have the characters speak the proper language for the country, with English subtitles. But I guess the movie execs have calculated that subtitles will make the movie less profitable.
The movie execs know about poor literacy rates :(
When I was a kid I saw The Longest Day and loved that all the Germans spoke German.
German in US movies has a wild array of quality levels.
The best ones are all from native German speaking actors. Movie actors don’t need native proficiency since the script is written out for them. The accents are really hard to nail down though and native speakers often have some regional dialect that second language learners almost never pick up.
Mac Steinmeir nails it in Saving Private Ryan and he’s Bavarian. Christopher Walz speaks flawless German. His French and Italian sound perfect to me but native speakers consider him “pretty good for a foreigner”. He’s Austrian.
Christian Slater has a very clear accent in Heathers but he’s not supposed to be a native German speaker.
Even worse in my opinion is when they use a generic British accent as a stand-in for literally any time and place in history. Ancient Rome? British accent. Ancient Greece? Also British accent. Ancient Persia? British accent again! Ancient Egypt? You guessed it! British accent! Even when the actors aren’t even British, the accent is. It makes no sense. It’s lazy and arrogant.
If I had a billion dollars, I’d make the most painstakingly realistic movie about Samurai in feudal Japan, and have all Japanese actors using a SoCal Chicano accent. Or maybe a hyper realistic Viking epic with a full Nordic cast, but they all talk like surfer bros.
The audience needs to be forced to see how insulting that shit is.
I would pay to see both of those.
No joke I’d watch that Viking epic for the lolz
Now I just need to secure about a hundred million dollars.
a hyper realistic Viking epic with a full Nordic cast, but they all talk like surfer bros
Jarl! My dude! We totally viking’d the shit out of that Irish monastery! It was fucking rad!
“Duuuuude… King Ælla’s a total boner. We gotta roll up on Northumbria and fully hack these posers to bits, brah. Then maybe, y’know, hit the mead hall and get wasted with some totally rad shield maidens.”
I swear to Odin, I would make this movie and only release a few short trailers with no dialog in them. Just brilliant cinematic shots of action, scenery, all the super authentic costumes and customs, and get some historians to endorse it (I know a few who would love the joke and the chaos). Then BAM, hit the audience with the most ridiculous shit ever.
Yeah! You gotta lull them into suspension of disbelief.
I’d invest some money into this. Someone has to be brave enough to write the script.
I would partner with a historian friend of mine to write it. I’m good with dialog, and he could keep it authentic. Write a rough draft like a normal script, then go back and fine tune all the dialog to surfer bro without changing anything else.
All the Nordic women would speak in Valley Girl.
Yeah I can understand speaking English and avoiding subtitles, but there are basically three options for accent:
- American, with some allowance for “urban” vs “country”
- Not American - English
- Evil - Russian or German, depending
Where does Australian English fit in?
Evil - Russian or German, depending
Or just vaguely Eastern European. Basically, do your hammiest Bela Lugosi impression, and you’ll have a bright future as Human Trafficker #1 in all the best shaky-cam action schlock Hollywood has to offer.
The English accent is often used for evil empires too, eg Star Wars.
Also lots of evil mastermind types in spy movies and whatnot. They also like to eat while being evil, which I have a whole theory about.
There are a lot of interesting discussions around the use of food in movies. Even ones that aren’t directly about food.
Regular food intake is critical for our survival so it makes sense that it takes a large social role.
As a general rule, making and sharing food is considered “good”.
- “Everybody eats when they come to my house.” - Cab Calloway
- “You can get anything you want, at Alice’s restaurant.” - Arlo Guthrie
Taking and consuming food is “bad”.
- “Get in my belly!” - Fat Bastard
- “Mind if I have some of your tasty beverage to wash this down with?” - Jules
The exception is when food is offered. In that case, graciously accepting the food is also good.
- ET and Sloth (from Goonies) accept the candy.
How does Valentine serving Sir Galahad McDonalds on a silver platter in Kingman Secret Service fit into that?
They’re made for an American audience, who are generally afraid of non-English languages
WHY ARE THERE WORDS ON MY SCREEN?!
Also generally terrified of reading
It’s true. I’m terrified of reading this thread right now.
I don’t mind this. I also don’t mind watching a movie in a non-English language so long as there are subtitles (Pan’s Labyrinth was awesome).
What I dislike are movies/series that decide to include a conversation in a different language without providing subtitles.
I hate this. Spending the next 5-10 minutes searching the internet to find a complete script of a show just so I have a complete understanding of what’s going on is annoying, not fun.
I think it is OK if the foreign language is just spoken for a few seconds and the protagonists are not supposed to understand the language.
oh man youd hate the star wars holiday special. wookiee is spoken for a good chunk of the film and there are no subtitles
Yeah. What’s the point of this exactly?
“Hang on, lemme exclude you from this bit of the story real quick…”
?!
It doesn’t fit a lot of movies, but some movies start in the foreign language and then switch to English
This was great to watch in The 13th Warrior.
I liked the solution used in Inglorious Bastards, all the Germans and the French spoke English because all the Americans were so bad at speaking German and French.
I disagree. I think that sometimes it is good to have a language that is correct to the setting of the movie but also it does make it harder to follow if you don’t speak that language and it does reduce from the visual aspect if you have to focus your eyes on the subtitles so it’s not always the best option.
I would say that for slow-paced movies or documentaries it makes sense use the correct local language
Or even worse, having to dub a movie, and the lip flaps are not matching up with the mouths. CinemaSins will give an infinite amount of dings for that.
Is CinemaSins even part of the conversation anymore? They had 1-2 good critiques and then been shoveling garbage for years.
“Let fly!”
One of a few movies that could’ve used a “Fire!” was the intro of Robin Hood: Men in Tights (fire arrows, get it?), AND THEY DON’T EVEN DO IT!
What term would have been used for archery?
I believe it was usually “loose”
Removed by mod
Loose!
They weren’t calling your mom
Nocked em
Begin!
Later…Stop!
Still incorrect. You wouldn’t have archers sitting there pulling thier bows getting tired until ordered to release
Who said anything about holding the bow nocked all the time?
Generally they would yell “DRAW!” And the soldiers would nock their arrows and take aim, then they’d yell “LOOSE” to release the arrows in one big salvo.
Where did you hear this? There’s so little information on archers through history.
I can’t cite a specific source since I was researching the subject for a fantasy novel I was writing at the time, and I’m not even sure the material I was reading was in English, but I remember the author was making a comparison to Roman legionnaires throwing their Pila synchronously to maximise their impact/psychological effect. And it made sense to me since every soldier only had two to carry.
Apparently shooting them in single massive salvos would force their enemies to crowd into one another (they’d have to push someone else into the path of a Pila to avoid one that’s coming at them) which devastated their morale.
You wouldn’t do that because why would you need it to be all at the same time? This is musket logic being applied to bows. Pulling a warbow isn’t something anyone can do. People who did that trained all their lives for it. They literally had a different bone structure and musculature because of it. You don’t get people to wait with a shitload of pounds of force trying to wriggle out and launch an extremely heavy arrow. Hollywood bows are shitty props with loose strings that resemble a child’s toy more than an actual bow.
I think you’re strawmanning here a bit. Just because they saying “ready - fire” doesn’t mean they’d always have a huge pause in the middle. It could just be to get a nice synchronus volley. Plus, even if someone’s arms got too tired during it they could just wait until fire was called and shoot a little late. Plus, the person telling the archers when to pull and when to release could easily be an archer themselves or someone familiar with the process and not do that dramatic “pull! … … … … … … … Loose!”
That said, I have no knowledge about how it actually happened. I’m just saying your arguing against the dumbest version of it.
Look at how actual warbow archers fire their bows. This isn’t the modern block bow that gets easier when you pull it back because of the pulleys. Some longbows had 240 pound draw weights. If your arms were to tire, you would be useless as an archer, so why the heck would they even try to do it. You let the arrow go immediately. And you would do that immediately when enemies got in range to prevent them from comming closer. Again, don’t apply musket logic to bows. You can shoot a bow much faster than a musket, but you had to train people all their lives, so when they were lost, you lost a lot. Crossbows changed all that, with basically anyone being able to draw them and aim them. Muskets then slowly replaced the bow and crossbow because they were able to go through armor better. So they beefed up the armor too. So to prove the armor stops bullets, a smith would use a pistol and shoot it. You’d look for the dent and see it works. Some bad smiths would then hit it with a hammer and punch to simulate it, and then people got hurt.
You don’t get people to wait with a shitload of pounds of force trying to wriggle out and launch an extremely heavy arrow.
If your arms were to tire, you would be useless as an archer, so why the heck would they even try to do it.
You’re contradicting yourself or just strawmanning my post as well. I wasn’t talking about tiring from a “fire when you want” scenario. I was clearly talking about tiring from “volley” fire. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, don’t archers use straw men as their targets typically?
Learn what strawmanning is, read up on how longbow archery worked. I’m done here.
What do you think the command would have been, then?
Why would you think there’d be a command at all, other than “when they are in range, kill them”? Why would you wait till people are closer when you start shooting them when you can shoot them when they are further away just fine. It’s not like someone would say “oh fuck these dudes in the front got taken out by archers, time to take out my shield”. They’d just walk with their shield out already. They’d use siege engines to hide from the arrows. They’d have barricades to hide behind. You wouldn’t simply go for the Futurama killbot limit, why would you give your opponent more time to walk towards you
If you can’t come up with any answers to those questions on your own then I don’t think it’s worth my time responding to this.
They’re not aiming at individual targets. They’re shooting volleys. That would require coordination.
Fire! Wait-
There are so many people in the fediverse who are just typing words because they like to see their name on a screen.
Can confirm, sigh… but at what cost.
Yeah I believe this as well, since a coordinated firing of arrows would be more effective, and because still today military commands largely consist of a prepatory phase and an executing phrase.
Like
"Company… ATTENTION"
"EEEEEYEEEEES… RIGHT.
“Preseeeent… ARMS”
etc
So it’d make sense. The commander just basically gives the tempo, but the commander knows what it feels like to do it, so you don’t get shit like “draw”… [extender pieces of dramatic faces and dialogue which symbolises a loaded gun held to someones face] and then “loose” /relax, because drawing a war bow takes some serious fucking muscle. So the “draw, loose”, would almost be in the same breath. Almost. But one breath apart. But so the voice synchronises them all. Just like it does with steps in modern militaries.
One still needs a person besides the form goin “left, left, left right left” to achieve the uniformity. Well from a well experienced group, less so, but you still need the starting “company… march” command to sync the starting step at least.
They were talking about ur mum
Loose!
Loose!
