(no subject)

[verbminx]

Was sick today... got nauseous late Sunday night, a little achy, a little feverish. Taking tylenol, taking it easy, spending much of the day in bed.

Excited for HBO's Rome, but they REALLY don't need to have focused it on the end of the Republic. Every damn Rome-based thing made in the relatively recent past is set then or in the first century of the empire, with the exception of Gladiator, which is set in and just after the reign of Marcus Aurelius. I'm so sick of movies & shows about Julius Caesar, his death, etc.

Comments

[uhlume.livejournal.com]

I suspect that it has something to do, at least in part, with film makers wanting to make social commentary by highlighting similarities between the U.S. under its current social and political regime and Rome just the collapse. 'Least, that's why I'd be making films about the fall of Rome, if I were a practicing film maker.

[verbminx.livejournal.com]

We're actually not talking about the FALL of Rome... we're talking about the transition between Republic and Empire after Julius Caesar's assassination. You could say it's cautionary on the basis of "when a supposed republic gets taken over by one person", but that isn't really as informative in metaphorical terms as fall-of-rome stuff happening 500 years later, about "the army is underfunded and undersupplied and nobody wants to join it, and oops they trained a lot of people they're fighting against."

Something about the actual FALL of Rome would probably be interesting, but they aren't making it. Something about one of the less well-known (but respected) emperors like Julian the Apostate or Vespasian might be interesting. Hadrian? Trajan? It's endless BS about Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, Marc Antony, Octavian, blah blah blah, the same story told dozens of times, and I think they like to do it because of the allure of Cleopatra and because Caesar's death scene is really dramatic. I can think of like five versions of this story, from one viewpoint or another, in the last five years or so.