Victor, did you get up on the wrong side of the bed today? Does anyone actually take movies seriously? Not very often. Schindler's List, maybe. Most of them, no. Go reread what Rapaire said earlier. He got it right.

They do entertain, but the younger generation today read less books (which tend to record history with a little more accuracy) and tend to acquire their historic knowledge from the silver screen (or DVD)

That's quite a broad generalization, and I have to respond: Not the young people in my house, or a lot of houses. I've taught my kids to view these critically and not accept whole what they're viewing. Their friends seem to have picked up the same message at home--this is what I am aware of when I hear them talking about films.

LH, Independence Day is a campy hoot, and it's so busy casting nods to other films of the genre that though I haven't seen it all the way through, despite it's almost constant airing on the satellite channels, I have to laugh at it. Let me ask--what part of it did you believe, that makes the rest of it so offensive to you?

I can't say one way or the other whether little girls grew up wanting to be streetwalkers so they could encounter the Cinderella story of Pretty Woman. It's a dopey story. Sometimes if I pass over when flipping channels I'll watch bits of it. The clothes are fabulous, once the movie gets going. Julia Roberts in that red dress--I suspect that is what keeps people going back to watch it.

Films made from books and short stories come under scrutiny for their similarities and differences to the original written word. This is good and bad--the liberties that film makers take to give sad books happy endings is a form of bowdlerization, as far as I'm concerned. But to be fair and realistic, you simply can't take the flexibility and internal thoughts from a book and make it work on the screen without materially changing the way in which you convey the message. You're using two dimensions and sound versus ink on paper. The result needs to be judged on its own merits. A case in point, To Kill a Mockingbird. Both are excellent productions, but they are different in many ways. They had to be, because of the different mediums where they occur. Are they factual? They're fiction, set in a period. I suppose when it comes to Mel Gibson films, it's buyer beware. :)

On a kind of related note, I detest the programs turning up now on various History channels that have inserted modern actors in costume to portray these historic figures. I feel like they are liable to get it wrong, or build in cultural biases by doing it that way, when it is supposed to be "fact."

SRS