Posted by Doc M on August 17, 2000 at 13:23:51:
In Reply to: Re: Movie Mumblings posted by Rich on August 17, 2000 at 12:23:01:
I can say thisbook orders from is ... New York! SOMEONE up there must've liked the film!
: If your statement that movie making has nothing to do with authenticity is true, than why do you care about the authenticity of the setting, anyway?
: Having lived in New York for most of my life, spending 8 of those years in the Hudson Valley, and having visited the Adirondacks many, many times ... I TOTALLY disagree with you. One thing many folks comment on when they're here is how similar the mountains look to New York's. Now sure, a geologist or botanist can spot the differences. We had a geologist at this Gathering who knew, from her first watching of the film, that the last scene was NOT filmed at Chimney Rock Park ... just from the outcroppings! But, to the uninitiated, it's fine. Exact? Of course not ... it's 800 miles away! Michael Mann looked far and wide for a suitable setting. Old growth forest was tops. Population density & costs, of course, had something to do with the decision, as well.
: I used to cut and transplant rhodendron & mountain laurel right down the road from my home on East Mountain. It's THERE, folks! Pick up an Audobon Field Guide some day! To suggest this was a careless choice, ala "Northwest Passage," is ludicrous!
: Filmmakers will almost always choose the path that they feel will create the dollars. Without the dollars, there's no film ... at least not one that will be widely viewed. When the PUBLIC demands the "historical record" ... not likely in the foreseeable future when one sees what the biggest money makers are out there ... THEN the filmmakers will deliver.
: As films go, LOTM is EXTREMELY accurate in its historical details (uniforms, hair, etc.). The story IS fictional ... what do you want?
: Lou, your E-mails suggest an agenda ... care to disclose it?
Doc M is just a humble Frontier Psychologist and minister
to the seriously wacko, but to me the setting was perfect --
a sense of timelessness and *otherness.* The scene at the
end showing the three characters gazing out over endless
mountains and forests was as perfect a depiction of
what the early frontier settlers faced as I've ever
seen...beautiful, eerie, and sad, knowing as they
did that it would be totally changed in a few generations.
My knowledge of rocks is limited to pointy (can't sit
on it when about to collapse going up the Cliff Trail)
and non-pointy (thank God!! *kapploomph!*), but it
would seem to me the visual impact of the surroundings
as a whole is what matters, and LOTM -- expecially
when experienced on the big screen -- is overwhelming.
As far as "honoring" the location, I think Michael Mann
did so, as the increasing number of tourists visiting
not only Chimney Rock Park but Cooperstown and the
beautiful areas around Lake George proves. God may
be in SOME of the details, but not all.
Doc M
: : I liked LOTM, but I think it is flawed. Aside from plot changes, I also think filming in North Carolina was a mistake.
: :
: : Movie making has nothing to do with authenticity, but then Cooper's book is fiction. Still MOHICANS was a good film but for many of us here in the North Country, it was a dud in the topography dept. set incorrectly in a temperate Appalachian woods NOT an Adirondack boreal woods--afterall, the Adirondacks are a distinct ecosystem and not even geologically related to the Adirondacks. The rock outcrops in the movie were sedimentary not metamorphic and igenous as in the Dacks! Plus the Dacks are younger, steeper mountains with totally different forest cover. The rhododendrons in the film were an obvious visual clue that this movie got the setting WRONG!
: :
: : Also, why be a moviemaker who gets the costumes right then be so dumb as to set the drama in the WRONG forest! Like TV's MASH--supposed to be set in Korea but filmed in the San Gabriel Mts. of California. Ugh? Might as well have filmed MOHICANS in the Sierra Nevada like Spencer Tracy's NORTHWEST PASSAGE. At least Lake Tahoe today looks more like Lake George did in 1755 than a Carolina lake--the feel of the movie is just all wrong. Someday, moviemakers will not be allured by state film commissions and go to the authentic locales and honor the geography and the historic record.