MovieChat Forums > Shooting the Past (1999) Discussion > Didn't Care For It - SPOILERS

Didn't Care For It - SPOILERS

posted 15 years ago by davegering
2 replies | jump to latest

I hate to cast a damper on a mini-series everyone seems to love, but I couldn't finish it. I watched the first half or so, and then had to give it up when it became clear that the writers were completely forsaking any semblance of plausibility for the sake of manipulating the audience. What finally did it for me was the scene where Marilyn dolled herself up and went out to dinner with Christopher in an attempt to get him to buy the collection for $1 million. Can anyone explain to me why in the world he would even consider paying $1 million for a collection HE ALREADY OWNED? That's right. Marilyn didn't own the collection, but only the right to dispose of the remainder (worth 160,000 pounds) to keep them together, and only AFTER the valuable (400,000 pounds) mini-collection had been removed and liquidated. However, in her pitch to the ad agency, she asked for 700,000 pounds for the ENTIRE collection, specifically including the valuable ones, and in her pitch to Christopher, she asked for $1 million. If she is just interested in keeping the collection together, why is she asking premium prices? And more to the point, when did she suddenly acquire title to the collection? I can't speak for British law, but in America, selling something you don't own is known as fraud, and practitioners thereof find themselves as guests of the state for predetermined periods.

Other problems included:
1. As pointed out in another thread, the fact that it seems unlikely a businessman would be taken by surprise by the fact that they had not begun to move out. A purchase of that magnitude would have had someone on site well prior to the beginning of renovation.

2. Why would Oswald fail to pass the communications on to his compatriots, while there was still time to do something about it?

3. During the interview on the first evening, when Oswald made his veiled threat to burn the collection, in real life, he would have been escorted out under armed guard and prevented from ever setting foot on the premises again. In the series, he keeps returning like a bad penny.

4. Nobody seemed to take seriously the obvious possibility of moving the remainder of the collection into storage while a buyer was found. It was passed off as being "too expensive," with no research whatsoever, the owner apparently prepared to destroy 160,000 pounds of unique property without so much as a phone call. In real life, this is almost certainly the option which would have been chosen, but apparently the writers wanted to escalate the conflict, even at the expense of reality.

5. Though I didn't finish the series, I read the ending here in these threads, and I'm glad I didn't waste my time. Out of 6 billion people on the planet (or 6 thousand million for you Brits), they just happened to have a picture of the new owner in the collection. How convenient! How bloody unbelievable! And even if they did, so what? Would that really save the collection?

The pictures were interesting, but deserved a somewhat more believable story.

[–] aletharch 15 years ago

I share a lot of your grievances with the setup - it's a totally unrealistic portrayal of both business (in order to renovate an old mansion there would have been surveyors everywhere for MONTHS beforehand) and of the archival profession (we've been digitised for a long time, and, as you say, it wouldn't have been a problem to move everything into a warehouse until a buyer was found).

It's also smugly anti-American (I'm British, by the way). It sets up a conflict between America (Money/Greed/Modernism/Heartless Bastards) and the UK (We're oh so quaint here, cup of tea?), but in doing so it ignores A) Margaret Thatcher, and B) the fact that America takes far greater care of its heritage than the UK at present (just walk into the great PC void of the National Maritime Museum, where I used to work, and you'll see what I mean).

I like to think of it as a highly contrived situation that has been generated to best tell a story of a couple of people coping (or not) with change. Put it this way, the story of Oedipus killing his father and marrying his mother is UNBELIEVABLY silly, when you think about it, but it sets off the tragedy of self-recognition perfectly.

[–] Molly-31 12 years ago

"It sets up a conflict between America (Money/Greed/Modernism/Heartless Bastards) and the UK (We're oh so quaint here, cup of tea?),"

I thought one of the points of the whole thing was that Christopher wasn't a greedy modern heartless bstard, in fact he despised that stereotype, and the English people weren't really all rumpled eccentrics out of an Ealing Studios picture with Margaret Rutherford like Oswald said. You had to look beyond appearances.

You want sausage? I've got sausage, too.