Review of Six Days In August

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

Oh boy. If anyone has a clip, I'm happy to run it by my elderly Gaelic-speaking in-laws. They will be amused, I am sure.

Your wish is my command: https://youtu.be/b7JN3YQZoxQ?t=59

I gotta hand it to the actor, he actually took that crap sandwich and made it look like a magical crap sandwich. Good on him for doing the best he could do with that.

- Doc

[Marcus]

I checked with friends who are vocal hardcore online critics of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They’re not aware of it. Perhaps someone here made a passing remark a year ago and the Proprietor printed and filed the comment in a creepy dossier.

It's obvious the Afore is lying again in a desperate attempt to gain sympathy and get people to post fake positive reviews. There is a good reason why many call SeN the factory of fiction and falsehood.

Afore, if you can provide a CFR for this alleged campaign to flood various review websites with negative reviews, I will publicly apologize to you.

Maybe he was remembering himself. From June 2021:

...It would not be at all difficult, I expect, for a small group or even a single individual possessed of middling social media skills and a burning, driving, obsessive animus to register multiple times on “Rotten Tomatoes” and, repetitively thereafter, to post myriads of really short negative comments attached to abysmally low ratings.

In fact, I think it likely that something very much along those lines has actually happened.

And here's his proof:

For instance: Would multiple people, independently, have come up with the idea of falsely using the names of friends of mine (e.g., Louis M and Hugh N and Blake O), and even of my wife, and of commenters here at Sic et Non who have definitely not seen the movie (such as gemli and Fred K and noel h)? A similar phenomenon commonly occurs, in an impotent and somewhat pathetic way, with the rating of comments to this very blog.

So, naturally, he remembers that as... 'it will happen again! Or at least, it's very likely. So likely that...yes, I definitely remember somebody saying it would happen again. Just like I imagined last time.'

[Doctor Scratch]

Wow.... Quite an angry reaction over your review, Stake President Chung:

A review of Six Days in August has appeared online that was written by my anonymous Mini-Stalker, who has been posting criticisms of me for many years now — especially of things (this is his particular specialty) that he’s invented about me. To my completely disoriented surprise, he didn’t like the movie. Color me astonished.

That’s fine, of course. There are even people who dislike the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Leo Tolstoy detested Shakespeare. My Mini-Stalker hates me. De gustibus non disputandum est.

But I do appreciate accuracy.

Among other things, Mini-Stalker comments on a scene in which Joseph Smith explains the principle of eternal marriage to Hyrum Smith and Brigham Young and their wives. By that time, both Hyrum and Brigham were widowers who had married again after the deaths of their first spouses. Hyrum had married Jerusha Barden in 1826, and they had six children together. But Jerusha had died in 1837. Later that year, he married the English-born Mary Fielding. Brigham had married Miriam Angeline Works, but she died of tuberculosis in 1832 at the age of twenty-six. She left two children behind. In 1834, Brigham married Mary Ann Angell.

In the scene to which Mini-Stalker alludes, Hyrum was in the room with Mary and Brigham was there with Mary Ann.

The subject was eternal marriage, not polygamy as such — although, plainly, postmortem plural marriage is entailed by the idea that spouses can be sealed together for eternity and that (as Joseph says in the film) such sealings can be performed vicariously, on the same principle as baptisms for the dead. Hyrum, in particular, is shown as being moved by the idea that he hasn’t lost Jerusha forever. (I won’t spoil things by describing Brigham and Mary Ann’s reaction.)

Mini-Stalker accuses me of dishonesty because I represent the two women, Mary and Mary Ann — and, by extension, early Latter-day Saint women more generally — as being “happy,” “ecstatic,” “excited,” and “utterly joyful” at the idea of polygamy. Two or three of his followers then join in, denouncing me for my dishonesty in misrepresenting those women as being “enthusiastic” about it. Perhaps, one suggests, I feared excommunication if I didn’t depict them as absolutely giddy with delight at the prospect of sharing their husbands with other women.

However, as I say, Mini-Stalker is grossly misrepresenting the scene, where the emphasis is on the continuation of marriage relationships beyond the grave, not on polygamy in this life — which isn’t so much as mentioned by either Joseph or Hyrum or Brigham or Mary or Mary Ann.

And he certainly knows that the film doesn’t actually suggest that Latter-day Saint women were enthusiastic, happy, excited, joyful, and ecstatic about plural marriage, because he himself cites a scene — in order, of course, to mock and criticize it — in which Emma tearfully expresses her pain and sorrow to Joseph about the agonizing test of her faith that plural marriage poses.

It’s always ironic to be accused of dishonesty by (of all people) my Mini-Stalker. Perhaps, in this case, even more so than usual.

[Marcus]

Wow.... Quite an angry reaction over your review, Stake President Chung:

A review of Six Days in August has appeared online that was written by my anonymous Mini-Stalker, who has been posting criticisms of me for many years now — especially of things (this is his particular specialty) that he’s invented about me. To my completely disoriented surprise, he didn’t like the movie. Color me astonished.

That’s fine, of course. There are even people who dislike the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Leo Tolstoy detested Shakespeare. My Mini-Stalker hates me. De gustibus non disputandum est...

I had to stop there. "Even"?? Did he just put his little movie in a category with works of Bach and Shakespeare?????

Unbelievable. Well, the Afore also thinks he is the innocent victim of the person who hates him so much ( ) she documented his plagiarism, so this is no surprise. It's never what he does that is the problem, the problem is always the people who see what he does and who don't stroke his ego. They HATE him, clearly. What other reason is there to not approve of all he does?

[Dr Exiled]

I think DCP knows it's going to be another loser. Bach, Shakespeare? No, hell no.

[Dr Exiled]

My believing family doesn't want to see the selling of history any more and the members at large don't either, so it seems. The internet killed this. DCP simply doesn't get it. It seems believing members, post internet, more and more, are about what does the church do for people, community, etc., and not about history, due to the nonsense of the past.

[drumdude]

Wow.... Quite an angry reaction over your review, Stake President Chung:

I had to stop there. "Even"?? Did he just put his little movie in a category with works of Bach and Shakespeare?????

Unbelievable. Well, the Afore also thinks he is the innocent victim of the person who hates him so much ( ) she documented his plagiarism, so this is no surprise. It's never what he does that is the problem, the problem is always the people who see what he does and who don't stroke his ego. They HATE him, clearly. What other reason is there to not approve of all he does?

DCP doesn’t realize that even if this was the greatest movie about Brigham Young ever made, very few people would care.

What about the greatest movie for Lou Midgley, or Hugh Nibbley? Put some beautiful drone shots, and a score that makes you weep. At the end of the day it’s still a movie about someone most people care nothing about.

[Doctor Scratch]

In a sense, DCP is lucky that he never gained widespread recognition or appreciation. He’s fortunate that even his own church leaders fundamentally saw him as an irrelevant tool and a hack. Because, can you imagine what would happen if this guy was operating on a big stage? What would happen if (e.g.) The NY Times reviewed “Six Days in August,” and DCP flew off the handle and went off complaining about how A.O. Scott is an anti-Mormon and a liar who is misrepresenting some minor scene in the film?

Put that way, it’s easy to understand why the Brethren won’t publicly support any of his projects.

[Moksha]

I think DCP knows it's going to be another loser. Bach, Shakespeare? No, hell no.

I was delighted to hear that LDS members are helping to escort the Haitians of Springfield to keep them safe from Trump's Proud Boys.