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Jul. 19th, 2004 02:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ldhensonLast night I went to see Arthur and His Band of Pretty, Pretty Men, a movie whose title was inexplicably shortened by its producers to the more prosaic King Arthur. (Presumably so it'd fit better on the theater marquees.) Well, it's not my new favorite movie, but I did enjoy it much more than Troy, which is the only other period big-battle movie I've seen this year and therefore the target of possibly unfair comparison.
Beyond having a general admiration for its period trappings, being able to recite most of Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott," and having seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail more times than I can remember, I have virtually no knowledge of Arthurian Legend. I mean, aside from the whole "Round Table" thing and a few names, I don't know dates or what roles people played or who lived and who died or what specifically they were supposed to have accomplished. So, frankly, I couldn't tell you whether this movie should piss off or delight the knowledgable film-goer, because I'm simply not one in this regard.
[A brief aside: I am not such a fan of Grail, or indeed of the rest of the Python movies, although this is my favorite of the bunch. I do enjoy the movie, and will readily concede that it contains a great many fantastically funny quotable bits; it's just that hanging out with certain crowds more or less ensured that I saw the movie many more times than I otherwise would have been motivated to on my own. I am a big fan of the MPFC TV series, though.]
First things first: We kicked things off with a trailer for Sean Bean's new movie National Treasure. I hadn't been keeping up with Bean news, so this was an unexpected thrill.
This is, obviously, not as big a battle movie as Troy, and therefore doesn't suffer from the latter's "Hey look at me, I'm CGI!" issues. Granted, 1) how else was Troy supposed to depict its vast troops? and 2) having flipped through the current issue of Cinefex, I admit there were many many CGI instances I didn't even notice. Still, the visual marvels, being sometimes rather cold and impersonal, only served to highlight the fact that I was watching a long, unwieldy movie with very few likeable characters. Keeping firmly in mind that I'm comparing apples and oranges here, I have to say it was refreshing not to see a "historical" movie with such apparent in-your-face CGI.
Speaking of likeable characters, Arthur and his band of pretty, pretty men provide them in spades. Some of them may crack more jokes, some may be a bit more taciturn, and some may know how to tjuze better, but to a man they all have hearts of gold. A little too good to be true, perhaps, but there is the whole "legendary noble knights" thing. So I was able to buy into them, 24K hearts on their sleeves and all. More important, I was able to buy into rooting for them.
As a troop who've stuck together and fought with extraordinary success for years, they're convincing. Incompatible members would believably have been weeded out by then, leaving only the truest of friendships forged by the fires of war, etcetera, etcetera. So yeah, I bought it. Watching them effortlessly back each other up was a pleasure and gave the battle scenes that extra bit of satisfying oomph.
I wish we'd gotten more scenes between Lancelot and Arthur, though. (And not just because I'm a bit of an Ioan Gruffudd fan.) Aside from the two confrontations and that lovely little wordless bit where Lancelot figures out the Arthur/Guinevere connection, the Lancelot-Arthur "best buddies" thing verged on, to borrow a term from Ken Begg over at Jabootu, an "informed attribute." (Not that this is an attribute per se, but you get the idea.) That is, the ratio of talking about the friendship to simply showing the friendship seemed unfortunately high. Maybe I'm a little spoiled when it comes to portrayals of close friends, but I felt I was constantly looking for more.
As for Clive Owen, he sold me on Arthur. (I thought I'd never seen him before, but IMDB tells me I've seen him in both Bourne Identity and Gosford Park. Whoops.) It wasn't until afterwards that I realized he has a thoroughly thankless role: he never once, IIRC, gets to crack a joke or even say anything remotely witty. His character remains a bit of a stiff throughout, and I rarely warm up to straight-arrow leads, so it's entirely to his credit that I found Arthur as compelling, if not more so, as the rest of his pretty, pretty men. Capable military leader whom men would follow to their deaths? Yep. Bought that too.
The ice fight threw me for the sheer number of implausibilities. The refugees and wagons make it out all right with relative ease, don't they? Well, if there is an alternate safe route, why the heck don't they take it in the first place? And A&HBOPPM's plan to face off against the Saxons right there might seem like a good one if they think they can get the Saxons to fall through the ice, but a very bad one when you take into account that it requires the Saxons to be a pack of complete morons. It just doesn't seem likely that an experienced fighting force like the Saxons would willingly engage in a battle that requires them to tramp out en masse onto a large sheet of ice. Fragility aside, ice is darn slippery and no combatant could ever hope to get good traction on it. Had A&HBOPPM somehow lured their foes unsuspectingly onto the ice, or disguised the ice with loose snow or done anything other than try to coax the Saxons out into a plainly-visible trap, I might be able to see it. Then again, the Saxons proceed to do exactly what common sense says they shouldn't, so maybe Arthur does know what he's doing and I should let him get on with his job of leader-ing.
For that matter, if the Saxons harbor no reluctance to stomp all over the ice anyway, then maybe A&HBOPPM's best plan would have been to hide and just let them march across it with no interference. Maybe they'd match the resonance of the ice with their marching and drumming and chanting and shatter it all by themselves.
Lancelot's lion's-head amulet fails to make a re-appearance after his death, causing me to lose a few Cliche Detector points.
I had a mixed reaction to Kiera Knightly in POTC but I like her better here; she pulls off the mysterious nature of her character well, though the fact that she has virtually no interaction with the BOPPM--does she even trade dialogue with any of them?--nor any moments of internal conflict made me miss her less when she wasn't on-screen than I might otherwise have done.
It was neat to see Sean Gilder share a film with Gruffudd.
The ending doesn't pack as much of a punch as I hoped; the movie pretty much goes from Arthur bemoaning (again, with not quite enough payoff) the loss of Lancelot and Tristan and telling his remaining Knights that he has failed them, directly to the happy wedding. Buncha fiery arrows, a trio of lovely galloping horses, another quick v.o. from Lancelot, and...that's it. The horses are a nice touch after the setup at the beginning of the movie, but the entire thing ends on a strangely unemotional note.
All in all, an enjoyable movie, though I wasn't blown away. Still, getting to see Lancelot stride out in full armor with twin swords casually slung over his shoulders was probably worth my nine bucks.
Beyond having a general admiration for its period trappings, being able to recite most of Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott," and having seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail more times than I can remember, I have virtually no knowledge of Arthurian Legend. I mean, aside from the whole "Round Table" thing and a few names, I don't know dates or what roles people played or who lived and who died or what specifically they were supposed to have accomplished. So, frankly, I couldn't tell you whether this movie should piss off or delight the knowledgable film-goer, because I'm simply not one in this regard.
[A brief aside: I am not such a fan of Grail, or indeed of the rest of the Python movies, although this is my favorite of the bunch. I do enjoy the movie, and will readily concede that it contains a great many fantastically funny quotable bits; it's just that hanging out with certain crowds more or less ensured that I saw the movie many more times than I otherwise would have been motivated to on my own. I am a big fan of the MPFC TV series, though.]
First things first: We kicked things off with a trailer for Sean Bean's new movie National Treasure. I hadn't been keeping up with Bean news, so this was an unexpected thrill.
This is, obviously, not as big a battle movie as Troy, and therefore doesn't suffer from the latter's "Hey look at me, I'm CGI!" issues. Granted, 1) how else was Troy supposed to depict its vast troops? and 2) having flipped through the current issue of Cinefex, I admit there were many many CGI instances I didn't even notice. Still, the visual marvels, being sometimes rather cold and impersonal, only served to highlight the fact that I was watching a long, unwieldy movie with very few likeable characters. Keeping firmly in mind that I'm comparing apples and oranges here, I have to say it was refreshing not to see a "historical" movie with such apparent in-your-face CGI.
Speaking of likeable characters, Arthur and his band of pretty, pretty men provide them in spades. Some of them may crack more jokes, some may be a bit more taciturn, and some may know how to tjuze better, but to a man they all have hearts of gold. A little too good to be true, perhaps, but there is the whole "legendary noble knights" thing. So I was able to buy into them, 24K hearts on their sleeves and all. More important, I was able to buy into rooting for them.
As a troop who've stuck together and fought with extraordinary success for years, they're convincing. Incompatible members would believably have been weeded out by then, leaving only the truest of friendships forged by the fires of war, etcetera, etcetera. So yeah, I bought it. Watching them effortlessly back each other up was a pleasure and gave the battle scenes that extra bit of satisfying oomph.
I wish we'd gotten more scenes between Lancelot and Arthur, though. (And not just because I'm a bit of an Ioan Gruffudd fan.) Aside from the two confrontations and that lovely little wordless bit where Lancelot figures out the Arthur/Guinevere connection, the Lancelot-Arthur "best buddies" thing verged on, to borrow a term from Ken Begg over at Jabootu, an "informed attribute." (Not that this is an attribute per se, but you get the idea.) That is, the ratio of talking about the friendship to simply showing the friendship seemed unfortunately high. Maybe I'm a little spoiled when it comes to portrayals of close friends, but I felt I was constantly looking for more.
As for Clive Owen, he sold me on Arthur. (I thought I'd never seen him before, but IMDB tells me I've seen him in both Bourne Identity and Gosford Park. Whoops.) It wasn't until afterwards that I realized he has a thoroughly thankless role: he never once, IIRC, gets to crack a joke or even say anything remotely witty. His character remains a bit of a stiff throughout, and I rarely warm up to straight-arrow leads, so it's entirely to his credit that I found Arthur as compelling, if not more so, as the rest of his pretty, pretty men. Capable military leader whom men would follow to their deaths? Yep. Bought that too.
The ice fight threw me for the sheer number of implausibilities. The refugees and wagons make it out all right with relative ease, don't they? Well, if there is an alternate safe route, why the heck don't they take it in the first place? And A&HBOPPM's plan to face off against the Saxons right there might seem like a good one if they think they can get the Saxons to fall through the ice, but a very bad one when you take into account that it requires the Saxons to be a pack of complete morons. It just doesn't seem likely that an experienced fighting force like the Saxons would willingly engage in a battle that requires them to tramp out en masse onto a large sheet of ice. Fragility aside, ice is darn slippery and no combatant could ever hope to get good traction on it. Had A&HBOPPM somehow lured their foes unsuspectingly onto the ice, or disguised the ice with loose snow or done anything other than try to coax the Saxons out into a plainly-visible trap, I might be able to see it. Then again, the Saxons proceed to do exactly what common sense says they shouldn't, so maybe Arthur does know what he's doing and I should let him get on with his job of leader-ing.
For that matter, if the Saxons harbor no reluctance to stomp all over the ice anyway, then maybe A&HBOPPM's best plan would have been to hide and just let them march across it with no interference. Maybe they'd match the resonance of the ice with their marching and drumming and chanting and shatter it all by themselves.
Lancelot's lion's-head amulet fails to make a re-appearance after his death, causing me to lose a few Cliche Detector points.
I had a mixed reaction to Kiera Knightly in POTC but I like her better here; she pulls off the mysterious nature of her character well, though the fact that she has virtually no interaction with the BOPPM--does she even trade dialogue with any of them?--nor any moments of internal conflict made me miss her less when she wasn't on-screen than I might otherwise have done.
It was neat to see Sean Gilder share a film with Gruffudd.
The ending doesn't pack as much of a punch as I hoped; the movie pretty much goes from Arthur bemoaning (again, with not quite enough payoff) the loss of Lancelot and Tristan and telling his remaining Knights that he has failed them, directly to the happy wedding. Buncha fiery arrows, a trio of lovely galloping horses, another quick v.o. from Lancelot, and...that's it. The horses are a nice touch after the setup at the beginning of the movie, but the entire thing ends on a strangely unemotional note.
All in all, an enjoyable movie, though I wasn't blown away. Still, getting to see Lancelot stride out in full armor with twin swords casually slung over his shoulders was probably worth my nine bucks.
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Date: 2004-07-22 10:29 pm (UTC)That long moment where Lancelot watches Guinevere at night through the gauzy curtains? That was completely "Oh, now I see why Arthur's attracted to her" and not at all "I'd like me some of that." I had to actually think about it afterwards to realize they probably meant it the latter way. But it sure didn't play like that onscreen!
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Date: 2004-07-22 10:33 pm (UTC)