Quotes from recent Salon article about the Patriot and my increasing frustration with Hollywood film-making:
The prizewinning historian and biographer Andrew Roberts called the film Patriot “racist” in the Daily Express, and pointed out that it was only the latest in a series of films like “Titanic,” “Michael Collins” and “The Jungle Book” remake that have depicted the British as “treacherous, cowardly, evil [and] sadistic.” Roberts had a theory: “With their own record of killing 12 million American Indians and supporting slavery for four decades after the British abolished it, Americans wish to project their historical guilt onto someone else.”
- Pullquote: The Evil English
Now I don’t like the Daily Express, and I’m not claiming for one moment that the British haven’t been culpable for some pretty bastardly things in the past (but no more so than the Dutch, the Spanish, the French – in fact every other major Old World Country). But you know – I can’t help thinking the guy above has a point. The British have been the bad-guys too long – there is simply no need for this characterisation by Hollywood. No need at all. We’re either effeminate fops (Hugh Grant), Nazis or we are dirty people who live in mud huts without electricity and speak in “impenetrable” regional accents. Any visitor to these shores would see that it just ain’t so.