You Can't Handle the Truth

Historical extras on its Blu-ray edition fail to make the case for The Conspirator

by Tony Dayoub

Just out on Blu-ray and DVD, Robert Redford’s The Conspirator, about the plot surrounding Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, is the American Film Company’s debut feature. Throughout much of the new disc’s extras, the company touts itself as a production house interested in shepherding stories mined from the annals of American history in the most accurate way possible. And while watching the bounty of special features included in the Deluxe Edition Blu-ray disc, an American history nut like me would find ample evidence that Redford’s 2010 film had been vetted by numerous historians. Included are 10 featurettes that dig into specific aspects of the movie, like the production design, costuming, or its main characters. The hour-long documentary, “The Plot to Kill Lincoln,” provides the historical background behind The Conspirator’s inciting incident in exhaustive detail. A viewing of the disc’s main feature, however, proves that if the facts contradict the story the filmmakers want to tell, truth will still lose out to fiction...

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Revisiting Gone with the Wind (1939) and its Problematic Legacy

by Tony Dayoub

From my column in this week's Wide Screen:

Next month marks the 75th anniversary of the publication of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, and 150 years ago last month, the first shots of the American Civil War were fired. Here in Atlanta, now a mecca for many African-Americans well-versed in the rich history of the city’s civil rights movement, one can still find dubious organizations, like the Sons of Confederate Veterans, that refer to the Civil War as the War of Northern Aggression.

In fact, living in present-day Atlanta is a curiously dichotomous affair. The past and the present are constantly juxtaposed in the strangest of ways. Take our midtown, a thriving collection of gleaming, new buildings reaching into the sky and surrounding landmarks like the iconic Varsity restaurant (the largest drive-in joint in the world), Peachtree Street’s Fox Theatre (once – and sometimes, again – a luxurious movie palace), or the Margaret Mitchell House, the place where the author wrote a large portion of Gone with the Wind until moving out in 1932. The Margaret Mitchell House itself is emblematic of Atlanta’s and, indeed, the South’s tendency to rehabilitate its image in light of its dubious history before the civil rights era.

Mitchell and her second husband, John Marsh, never actually had the run of the entire house, affectionately nicknamed “the Dump” by the novelist. In 1925, when the building was a 10-unit dwelling known as the Crescent Apartments, Peggy Mitchell (as she was known to her fellow journalists at the Atlanta Journal) and Marsh moved into Apartment 1 on the ground floor. Last week, I took a tour of the small flat. I was shocked by its size, so tiny that the radiator is bolted to the living room ceiling. Much of the furniture in the apartment, though not actually Mitchell’s, is of the period. And many of the objects that occupy the rest of the museum are replicas, looking accurate despite not being the true antique objects of value.

So it is with Gone with the Wind (1939), a film that only approximates the truth about Southern society pre- and post-Civil War, distorting its more unsavory realities...

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Book Review: Avengers: The Initiative - Best Superhero Comic for Old and New Fans

by Tony Dayoub

Marvel Comics, home of Spider Man, Captain America, and the Hulk, has just been through a civil war.

After the nuclear destruction of a town, due in large part to the intervention of an inexperienced super team, Tony Stark, aka Iron Man, suggests superheroes register with the government. This will ensure that they are properly trained and registered as "dangerous" if their powers cannot be controlled. Captain America, libertarian idol to most of these superheroes, disagrees. He thinks that government control will easily be misused in the wrong hands, hands like government agent Henry Gyrich's. Heroes, led by the government-backed Iron Man, are then pitted against the revolutionary heroes, following Captain America, as everything is laid waste between them. Cap ultimately surrenders in order to avoid further destruction, leading to his assassination as he is being led to trial.