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Quatermass
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02 Nov 2011, 5:53 pm

Jory wrote:
Quatermass wrote:
8O

Welp, now I've seen everything. John Hurt, in drag, dancing.

Excuse me, does anyone have any brain bleach? :|


What about Hugo Weaving, Guy Pearce, and Terence Stamp?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109045/

Or perhaps Wesley Snipes, Patrick Swayze, and John Leguizamo?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114682/


I've seen Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. A long time ago, but I have seen it.

It's not the drag act per se that freaks me out, it's the golden bikini and the worship and the mad dancing. Plus, Caligula in general freaks me out. We're talking a brain-fried incestuous hair-trigger homicidal megalomaniac with a god complex that make other such nutjobs have god simples by comparison.


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pandabear
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03 Nov 2011, 10:57 am

I highly recommend the book upon which the TV show was based.



Kraichgauer
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04 Nov 2011, 6:20 am

GoonSquad wrote:
^^^ Yeah, I could buy that. I think the accent certainly has a non English/Scottish/Irish origin.



On topic:

May I present Imperator Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus...

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tebTGIddPDk[/youtube]

8O


The scary thing is, this incident had actually happened - though only the two senators were present; Claudius' witnessing of this scene was entirely fictional.
These two senators had been rousted out of bed and brought to the palace, where they had expected they would never leave alive. It turns out, the looniest of Roman Emperors had only wanted to dance for them.

I first saw I, Claudius on PBS when I was in junior high (in my defense, my other nerd friends watched it, too), and I loved it. The last time I had seen the series was in a Roman history class I had taken in college, where our instructor played it for us, feeling that we deserved a break from the lecture. Unfortunately, some of my fellow students hadn't been reading their text books, and so mistakenly took the fictional content as actual history, which some of them wrote of as such in the essay tests.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer



GoonSquad
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04 Nov 2011, 2:39 pm

Kraichgauer wrote:
I first saw I, Claudius on PBS when I was in junior high (in my defense, my other nerd friends watched it, too), and I loved it. The last time I had seen the series was in a Roman history class I had taken in college, where our instructor played it for us, feeling that we deserved a break from the lecture. Unfortunately, some of my fellow students hadn't been reading their text books, and so mistakenly took the fictional content as actual history, which some of them wrote of as such in the essay tests.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer


Yeah, I think that's another reason why I resisted watching this for so long. I love Roman history and I don't like mixing it with modern fiction. Most Roman history contains enough ancient fiction as it is...

Still, it is really entertaining. :D


I wonder if there's a book or website that documents the factual and fictive elements of the series. I'm sure there must be...


PS

Hey! Here's ONE! <-click

Two of the sources it checks against are Suetonius and Cassius Dio. I have both of them on my kindle... I think it might be interesting to read the Graves books and those sources concurrently.


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Kraichgauer
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04 Nov 2011, 6:18 pm

GoonSquad wrote:
Kraichgauer wrote:
I first saw I, Claudius on PBS when I was in junior high (in my defense, my other nerd friends watched it, too), and I loved it. The last time I had seen the series was in a Roman history class I had taken in college, where our instructor played it for us, feeling that we deserved a break from the lecture. Unfortunately, some of my fellow students hadn't been reading their text books, and so mistakenly took the fictional content as actual history, which some of them wrote of as such in the essay tests.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer


Yeah, I think that's another reason why I resisted watching this for so long. I love Roman history and I don't like mixing it with modern fiction. Most Roman history contains enough ancient fiction as it is...

Still, it is really entertaining. :D


I wonder if there's a book or website that documents the factual and fictive elements of the series. I'm sure there must be...


PS

Hey! Here's ONE! <-click

Two of the sources it checks against are Suetonius and Cassius Dio. I have both of them on my kindle... I think it might be interesting to read the Graves books and those sources concurrently.


I admit, I've never read Cassius Dio, though I have read Suetonius, who my Roman history professor had likened to the writers of the supermarket gossip rags of today.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer



GoonSquad
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07 Nov 2011, 9:42 am

Kraichgauer wrote:

I admit, I've never read Cassius Dio, though I have read Suetonius, who my Roman history professor had likened to the writers of the supermarket gossip rags of today.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer


Suetonius' scandal mongering is the best part! :wink:

I've only read Cassius Dio in bits and pieces myself...

I like to check primary sources when reading modern history texts. If you check around Project Gutenberg and the like, you can find free translations of many classical writers/works. My kindle is full of them. It's like having a musty, old reference archive in your backpack! :lol:


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