Posted on 06/21/2012 1:41:20 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
The title, "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter," guarantees about 15 good minutes. Just on the strength and novelty of the gimmick - combining the real details of Lincoln's life with a secret antivampire history - the movie was bound to command a certain absurd appeal. The trick was in getting audiences past those 15 minutes, and that's what the movie does.
Based on the novel by Seth Grahame-Smith, "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" is a money-making stunt that its author - who also wrote the screenplay - wisely decided to treat with seriousness, or at least an attitude of seriousness.
Instead of getting smirky and campy and blowing out the joke in the first few scenes, Grahame-Smith and director Timur Bekmambetov straight-face it. They ask themselves, well, what would it be like if the main struggle of Lincoln's life were with vampires intent on taking over the new world? And they answer the question as realistically and soberly as they can within this loony framework.
A greater Lincoln
Further, they invest emotionally in the conceit of the story and in Lincoln (Benjamin Walker) as a man. Imagine: He didn't just save the union and free the slaves. Here was a man dedicated to the proposition that all vampires must be destroyed. That makes for an even greater Lincoln, one yet more worthy of reverential treatment.
Along the way, Grahame-Smith comes up with a metaphor that is appropriately descriptive of slavery and flattering to the Union. In this telling, the Old Confederacy was a hotbed of vampirism. Perhaps this should not come as a big surprise, given that the slaveholders were sucking the life out of their slaves.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
William Jefferson Clinton...Incubus.
“...We might now again be British colonists, but for Lincoln.”
It could have been sooner! Back in the 1840s the US and Canada almost went to war over the Oregon territories.
Great Britain attempted to get a treaty uniting Britain, Mexico, Canada and the new nation of TEXAS against the US.
Texas was so horrified at the proposal they immediately joined the US as a state, and Mexico ended up taking the brunt of the war as GB and Canada settled with the US over Oregon.
What you learn from thirty years of haunting libraries with real BOOKS!
There’s a French movie from 1919 that includes a scene with the dead of World War I rising and returning home to see if their sacrifice was honored.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%27accuse_(1919_film)
Too late for poor Mary Suratt.....
More like a Seneca.
Mary was almost certainly quite guilty, though prosecutors might not have been able to get a conviction in a civilian court.
No they would not have. What chance did she even have, when she could not even testify in her own defense?
Yankee justice.
One more reason Lee & Johnson should have fought a guerilla war.
There were dozens of witnesses called by the defense in this case. What leads you to claim she was not allowed to testify in her own defense?
Read the record. There was also a recent movie on the subject. Any court that denies a defendants rights to testify in their own defense is a kangaroo court.
This is the 167th footnote in the Wiki entry for Mary Suratt.
Neither Mary Surratt nor any of the other defendants testified on their own behalf. Although some sources claim that they were prevented from doing so, this is incorrect. At the time, the federal government and 35 of the 36 states did not permit defendants in felony trials to testify on their own behalf. See the discussion in Boritt and Forness, p. 352-353.
If accurate, this would mean she wasn't allowed to testify, but not because this was a kangaroo court. She would not have been allowed yo so testify in almost any court at the time.
The rule appears to have been a hangover from common law, in which nobody was allowed to testify who had an interest in the outcome. Since most if not all felonies were originally capital crimes, the accused obviously had a pretty strong interest in the outcome.
The qualification of criminal defendants to give sworn evidence if they wished came last. The first statute was apparently that enacted by Maine in 1859 making defendants competent witnesses in prosecutions for a few crimes. Maine Acts 1859, c. 104. This was followed in Maine in 1864 by the enactment of a general competency statute for criminal defendants, the first such statute in the English-speaking world. The reform was largely the work of John Appleton of the Supreme Court of Maine, an American disciple of Bentham. Within 20 years most of the States now comprising the Union had followed Maine's lead. A federal statute to the same effect was adopted in 1878, 20 Stat. 30, 18 U.S.C. 3481. Before the end of the century every State except Georgia had abolished the disqualification. 6
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=365&invol=570
Her trial may indeed have been, probably was, a kangaroo court. But her not being allowed to testify did not prove it so unless every other criminal court in the nation outside Maine also qualified as such.
Nor is her having possibly had an unfair trial any evidence for her innocence.
Ok, I concede that part, but on what basis was her supposed guilt? She ran the boarding house. Most accounts that I have read of this trial didn’t deal with hard evidence. Like Dr. Samuel Mudd, who had the unfortunate bad luck to have set John Wilkes Booth’s broken leg.
This whole thing was revenge based.
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