Braveheart 28 Years Later

The last time I watched Braveheart was probably right before I entered college, give or take. I loved the movie. Yes, it was very violent, but I thought the main theme was really well done, and I watched the movie multiple times. That said, it’s a three hour commitment, and it’s not exactly a movie that leaves you with a spring in your step once you’ve watched it, so it’s not that surprising that I haven’t watched it since. Denisa had never seen it, though, so I thought it warranted a rewatch. The experience was much different than I expected–enough that I felt it warranted a blog post.

It’s still a good movie. The themes I remembered are all still there, and it’s still moving. A few things were very, very changed for me, however.

First, the violence is still bloody, but compared to what’s happening in epic medieval-style war movies today, it’s much tamer. Compare it to the scenes in All Quiet on the Western Front, for example, and you’d think one was PG-13 and the other was a hard R, if that makes sense. The biggest difference was the time the film would give to the actual violent scenes. It would give you a glimpse, and the movies these days just show the whole thing and dwell on it. This is not a criticism of Braveheart. If anything, it’s a criticism of modern movies. You just don’t need that much violence, plain and simple.

For example, in my head, the torture scene at the end of Braveheart was extremely graphic. I remembered them actually showing him getting disemboweled. In reality, they show the weapon they use, and they show it going up to his stomach, and then they cut to his face and show his reaction to what’s happening. There’s no doubt what’s going on, and it’s still brutal, but you never see the innards, so to speak. You don’t need to.

Another change was in me. The last time I watched the movie, I had absolutely no clue the prince was gay. It completely sailed over my head, despite it being heavy-handed to the point of being insulting and stereotypical as I watched it now. This isn’t a change in the movie. It’s a change in me. I was surprised just how sheltered I was back then.

Watching the film, its influence on later movies was clear. I found much of the cinematography and design echoed by the Lord of the Rings movies, for example. Right down to the armor and the fight scenes and how battles played out. You can also see it in Game of Thrones. True, some of that is just because the movies are presenting the same sort of warfare, but there’s different ways of presenting those scenes, and Braveheart felt like it paved the way for later movies, if that makes sense.

The biggest change, however, was in the way the themes no longer felt as heart-warming as they used to. The idea of a rebel willing to do anything to secure freedom for himself and his people. How the quest for freedom overrides pretty much anything else, and how it justifies all manner of atrocities. Frankly, much of that rhetoric has been usurped by the far right these days. So much of what was being said by Wallace in the film felt like it could be said by any of the people who stormed the capitol. Wallace felt that he was wholly in the right, and so he’s justified in doing whatever he needs to do in order to make sure his goals are achieved. I’m not saying he’s not justified within the bounds of the film, but it’s important to realize how easy it is to use that justification as a weapon. The Crusaders were convinced God was on their side as they invaded a country and killed people left and right. The same mindset happens today all the time.

It’s tricky, because there really have been regimes in history where the right thing to do was to fight against them. But that same mindset can be used by anyone to justify fighting back against anything. Just convince your followers that something is wholly evil, and then they’ll go on to do whatever they need to do to try and stop that evil from happening. I don’t have the answer for how to deal with it, but I do know that thinking about it definitely impacted my Braveheart experience. Go figure.

In the end, it’s still a great movie. But I was very much surprised at how much my personal experience of that movie had changed, in large part due to the experiences I’ve had since I last watched it.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, as well as PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking this DON’T GO TO SLEEP Amazon link. It will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Tomas Update: Week 24 in Žilina

Ahojte všetci! It’s been a really good week out here in žilina as usual, so I’ll fill you all in on what’s up.

Tuesday we got out into the woods to film a video and also taught our English class, which as our responsibility this week as the Ottos were gone to Germany to visit the temple. That went way better than expected so I’m glad we didn’t mess it up too bad. There were some very questionable drawings of a “dog” that confused everyone when playing pictionary but aside from that it went well!

Wednesday was a killer day, the zone leaders were over for exchanges and I headed out with elder Wagner for the day. We had a bunch of really good conversations, one guy we only saw his head because he talked to us over his fence for 15min, and we got invited to play volleyball sometime by another guy. Then to finish off the day we had a lesson with one of our friends (the guy from the bus stop if anyone remembers) and he accepted the invitation to be baptized! I mean I say accepted but he pretty much asked us. He is a wonderful man and is so sensitive to the spirit, and it’s been incredible to see his journey this transfer. Also, it’s opened my eyes more to the prejudice that Roma face here in Slovakia at the very least, he was so surprised to hear we weren’t judging him for the color of his skin. That was kind of sad to hear, everything is so against them here.

Thursday was cool and also not particularly special in any way I can remember, just a decent day. 

Friday we bailed on English to head out to a little dedina (village) called Stará Bystrica to visit a man that the sisters had taught over the phone before us. It was a weird meeting. He put us on challenge mode because the longer we were there the more drunk he got and we just didn’t really get anywhere. That was strange and I don’t think we will be back anytime soon although he promised he’d read the Book of Mormon. Anyways after that we were just feeling weird and the buses were strange so we headed outside back home for a bit and then finished off the day. It was strange. Also he said the cops would arrest him if they saw him sooooo

Saturday was a good day, that morning we went and cleaned out some DISGUSTING barrels of old food at the farm we go to weekly, they smelled SO BAD. But it was kinda fun too. The dogs were there as usual although they were pretty into the whole rotting food thing so that was definitely weird. We also stacked some wood, missed our bus, and finished off the barrels. There were like 40 of them, it was bad. But we were happy to serve our guy Igor out there, he’s cool. And the birds that hang out there are like purple and blue and stuff.

Sunday was good too! We had 2 more people at church, and a nice discussion for our 2nd hour. Got a lot of work done on our ad for Facebook and checked in with everyone we had to.

Monday was also pretty laid back, the sisters have to save money to go to Prague 3 times this pay period… We pretty much just played 2 games of Catan (Wagner won the first, I took the 2nd) and shopped at Kaufland for once. Nothing crazy, although we do only have one more normal pday this transfer.

Okay, that’s about it. Photos as usual

https://photos.app.goo.gl/qYoYaKPmkqFZHoVM7

Hope you’re all well, tearing it up on the track, and enjoying the pretty spring weather. 

S láskou, 

Starší Cundick 

Movie Review: All Quiet on the Western Front

Back when it came out, I heard a fair bit of positive buzz around the new German adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front, playing on Netflix. Then the Oscar nominations came out, and it garnered 9 of them, which isn’t normal for an international film. It went on to win 4: best cinematography, production design, music, and foreign feature. So it’s been on my “to watch” list for a while. After the excellent Churchill-focused WWII Darkest Hour (very good, and highly recommended, if you haven’t seen it), Denisa and I felt like going for another historic movie.

Why not All Quiet?

Two and a half hours later, and I have very mixed feelings about the movie. It’s absolutely brutal. Think of what Saving Private Ryan did for D-Day, and now do the same thing for trench warfare. I’ve seen a number of WWI movies (1918 comes first to mind), but this takes those and makes them feel like they were watered down for kids. There’s machine guns, tanks, bayonets, gas, flame throwers, shovels, mortars, daggers, and more. All of them very gruesome. It was not a pleasant experience by any use of the word, even if it was very well filmed and presented.

My biggest complaint about the movie was just how heavy handed it was. “WAR IS BAD!” It says that over, and over, and over, and just when you think it can’t possibly think of another way to say it, it comes up with one. Its characters stop really being people and become more archetypes than anything else. The evil general. The plucky commander. They make decisions that strain credulity, and of course the worst thing always happens as a consequence of each decision.

So where does that leave the movie? If a piano is extremely well-made and perfectly tuned, but it only has one octave, then it’s not a very good piano, is it? This film felt like that to me. If you’re a WWI buff and interested in seeing what trench warfare was really like, then by all means have at it. But if you’re not in that small section of people? I don’t think I can really endorse the movie.

Overall, how would I rate it? It’s very, very difficult to do so, since it feels like the presentation and the content scores would be so different. A 9/10 for the film-making itself, and a . . . 5/10 for the content? I guess we’ll give it the average and go with 7/10.

Anyone else seen it?

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, as well as PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking this DON’T GO TO SLEEP Amazon link. It will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

The Power of Serendipity

Yesterday I headed off to the University of Maine at Augusta for a Faculty Development Institute. Basically it was an all day conference focused on a wide range of topics on teaching and collaborating more effectively. I went for a variety of reasons. There were some presentations that touched on the role of libraries in that process, and I was interested in learning more about ChatGPT in education, but most importantly, I went because I never know ahead of time what meeting will end up being helpful or not. All I know is that if I never go to meetings and conferences like that, I’ll never make the connections that can best serve me in my job.

Some circles talk about this using the term “luck surface area” (coined by Jason Roberts back in 2010). Basically, the more you’re out doing things in public and talking to people and working with them, the greater your odds that you’ll “be lucky.” Often it’s tempting to look at someone else’s success and say they just got there through a stroke of luck. And it’s true, happenstance sometimes plays a big role in success. But you can place yourself in a spot where you’re more likely to have that luck fall your way.

For example, back when Brandon Sanderson was just another aspiring author, there was nothing necessarily about him to make it seem likely that he’d become a behemoth in fantasy. He didn’t have some pre-made connection in the industry. But he actively worked on doing things that would make it more likely that he’d one day have a big break. He wrote many (many) words. He went to conferences. Once he was published, he blogged regularly. And on that blog, he wrote a tribute to Robert Jordan, which Jordan’s widow happened to read while she was trying to figure out who to finish The Wheel of Time. That post caught her eye, and she ultimately selected Brandon for the job.

Was Brandon lucky? Definitely. But if he hadn’t been doing the things he was doing, he never would have been able to catch that lucky break.

Personally, I just call this serendipity. (No need for surface areas) I can’t count the number of times I’ve gone to campus lunches and ended up having a discussion about something really important to my job, but which I had no clue about previously. I got to presentations and events, and I talk to people. Often, those discussions just end up being nice chats about things that don’t necessarily matter in the long run, but even then, I never know when a friendship or relationship I started at one of those events will end up helping me solve a problem later on.

It’s not that I go through life looking to see how other people can benefit me. It’s more that I recognize that there’s so much I can’t do by myself, and so the more people I’ve got on my side, the more likely it is I can accomplish the things I set out to do. This is a principle that’s at work in research, as well. You go to the shelf to get a particular book, and you happen to see an even better book right next to it that you didn’t know existed. (It’s why we shelve books by subject in the first place.) I can’t think of an area of my life that this doesn’t play a part.

So I keep going to things. Keep talking. And even if there are panels or presentations or lunches or whatevers that don’t turn out how I’d hoped, I don’t look at it as wasted time. You put yourself out there, because you never know when that lucky break is going to come along. Wouldn’t it be a shame if you’d decided to stay home that day and it just rolls by?

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, as well as PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking this DON’T GO TO SLEEP Amazon link. It will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Tomas Update: Week 23 in Žilina

Ahojte všetci, another week another week or whatever it is they say. It’s been good out here in žilina but I’ll just get right into it!

Tuesday was nice out although also kinda rained. But we went a ways out into the city, saw a nice lady and her dog, and renewed our bus passes.

Wednesday we went out to Čadca to teach the Italian family, as usual we ate good and the lesson went well. After that we stopped by a little town on the train back but there weren’t many peoe out. Petted a very nice dog though so not all was lost. 

Thursday was a fun one, we had a meeting with one of our friends before he leaves to Iceland and he was late so we ended up getting talked to by a very very drunk man who was upset a priest had wronged him 10 years ago. Weird guy. He said it was Jesus’ fault that he wasn’t paid or something to that effect. I gave him a Book of Mormon and a few verses about free will and why bad things happen to good people and he seemed pretty satisfied with that. After that we talked to some teenagers who were wondering what we were doing here, they had the fastest Slovak I’ve ever heard. They were chill though. Then we met with our friend and sent him off, got some good ice cream with him and just sat for a while. I’ll miss him.

Friday Prezident Skousen visited so we actually got to see some cool graphs and he helped us teach a lesson to another one of our friends, that went super well and he is progressing wonderfully. Also having Prezident along is like cheating, his Czech is really good and he just teaches so well.

Saturday we headed out to work on the farm again in the morning, we did a lot of sweeping this time in a big ol warehouse. That was pretty fun actually and the birds weren’t yelling at us this time. I think we’ve made this into a regular appointment so that’s good. Also the floor looked way better than last weeks wall did when we left it so that’s probably good. Then for game night I played a round of monopoly deal, like fast card monopoly. I got all my stuff stolen again and used against me to win, which is fun to do but being on the other end is not as funny… 

Sunday was cool, an old missionary from 10 years prior came back and visited so our attendance was doubled because he brought his family. Cool guy, served here in žilina for a long while so he knew some of the spots we still go to. 

The today, Monday, for pday we just played some more games and got food at a restaurant. I am not gonna let myself play monopoly deal anymore because it’s just never gonna go well but at least I got em in Bananagrams. Not a ton to say about the day.

I’ll throw the photos on, got some good ones this week and I really like my new camera. 

https://photos.app.goo.gl/qYoYaKPmkqFZHoVM7

Still needs a name, trying to come up with one. Anyways, hope you’re all well and having fun with the wonderful spring weather!

S láskou, 

Starší Cundick