Despite our resolve to watch 1-2 movies a month (a goal that is more than realistic and attainable), we have been making a decidedly less impressive pace, watching only our second movie of the year.  This is impractical for two reasons — we will never reach our goal at this rate and we pay for Netflix just for the purpose of attaining the movies we need to watch.  So, we definitely need to pick up the pace, and start watching two movies per month.   We may be busy, but no one is that busy.

Moving on, Mutiny on the Bounty left much to be desired.  Starring Clark Gable and Charles Laughton, the film promised to be incredible.  The movie was based on a book which was based on mutiny that happened in 1871.  Extensive research (Wikipedia) showed that the movie was generally historically accurate.  The movie, however, portrays Captain Bligh as a violent tyrant (in one scene, he orders a dead guy to be beaten).  In reality, this was not true.  From what I inferred during my research (Wikipedia), the men who revolted really just wanted to go back to Tahiti and hang out with all of the beautiful women they met there (and married in some cases) and live carefree feelgood island lives.  Who can blame them, right?  I think that it would be difficult for audiences to understand these subtleties, and the tyranny definitely made the mutiny seem justified.

In the end, the movie had an interesting story line and decent character development, but this was not enough to keep Madison and I awake.  I can only conjecture it was due to the conspicuous lack of any pirates.  What kind of movie about a bunch of sailors doesn’t also have pirates in it?  Seriously, it took us three days to watch the movie, because we kept falling asleep.  I conjecture that this movies success may have been boosted by many oppurtunities to show Clark Gable (and the rest of the sailors) without their shirts on, as well as some scantily clad Tahitian women.  The movie lacked the character development we had seen in It Happened One Night and Grand Hotel. It seemed almost to be intended to glorify sailing and mutiny, and seemed to me a step backward in the progression of awesomeness of these Best Pictures.

If highly suggest reading the wikipedia page about the mutiny, as it is highly entertaining — I think I may have enjoyed it more than the film.  After reading the historical recount of events, I read the page about the film, including this line “Free from the restraints of Naval discipline the mutineers proved incapable of self-government. Pitcairn degenerated into a true hell on earth of drunkenness, rape and ultimately murder. Apart from John Adams all the mutineers perished, most of them by violence.”  I chuckled at the innacuracy (clearly all of them are dead now) and the emotional, loaded language.  Oh, Wikipedia.

As a final note, there is a part of the movie when the men are just shouting sailor things to eachother, in one of the “yay, we are sailing” scenes (I guess these scenes were impressive at the time.  This was, after all, the first movie we have seen them in).  I re-watched the scene 3 times, and remain convinced that sound bytes from this are included in Yellow Submarine by the Beatles.  While I have neither confirmed nor denied this, I did find this out about the Beatles TV Cartoon first season:

You’ve Really Got A Hold On Me/Chains: In Africa, Ringo ask a medicine maker named Jack to help fix the Beatles’ flat tire, then he turned a worm into a snake, and it lusts for Ringo; After getting knocked out, Ringo dreams about himself as Captain Bligh from the movie “Mutiny On The Bounty”. Sing Along: Slow Down/Honey Don’t

While this does not indicate anything really, I chuckled at this concise recap.  I will continue to look into this matter, but we unfortunately returned the DVD without saving the sound clip.  I suppose this concludes my “review” of the film.  I will hopefully be writing again in a few weeks.