{"id":502,"date":"2004-07-09T16:25:05","date_gmt":"2004-07-09T21:25:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/2004\/07\/09\/\/"},"modified":"2005-10-19T19:48:46","modified_gmt":"2005-10-19T23:48:46","slug":"le-yawn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/2004\/07\/09\/le-yawn\/","title":{"rendered":"Le Yawn"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I went to see King Arthur today. It’s been nearly universally panned by critics, but none of them, I think, have really hit upon the main problem with this film: It’s BORING. Spoilers to follow… I’ll blank them out, so highlight to read.<\/p>\n

Like Troy earlier this summer, this movie takes a myth and tries to create a story that might be the origin of said myth. It pulls out all of the magic\/gods\/mystical elements and instead attempts to create a realistic historical scenario that approximates the legend. I’m not against this idea in principle, and I think they did a passable job of it with Troy. And in examining where Troy went right, you can see easily where Arthur went wrong. Troy managed, in spite of having a very large number of characters, to imbue personality into them. You could tell them apart. Agamemnon, Odysseus, Achilles, Hector — by the end of the movie, you could identify each and knew a bit about the way he viewed the world, if not much backstory. By the end of Arthur, I was STILL having trouble telling the knights apart. There were 7: Arthur, Lancelot, Bors, Galahad, Tristan, Gawaine… and someone named Dagonet, whose name I just had to look up, because I couldn’t understand what they were saying during the movie.<\/p>\n

Galahad, Gawaine and Tristan were given virtually no lines and, for the purposes of the plot, were completely interchangeable. Bors was made more unique by virtue of the fact that he had some kids, Dagonet by the fact that he abruptly became medical personnel and died before everyone else, and Lancelot because he had more lines than the other knights. And, taking a tack opposite to Troy, which introduced romance where there was none, Arthur tried to remove the romance altogether. Which succeeded in putting an amusing (and probably unintentional) cast onto the whole Guinevere situation: by eliminating any connection between her and Lancelot (aside from her random assessment that he would be a tasty bit of ass for the Saxon invaders…), the script (and the looks Arthur and Lancelot were giving each other) managed to convey the idea that Arthur would never be able to commit to her and to Britain while he was tied down by this former entanglement. And so Lance bit the dust at the end of the movie, much to Arthur’s grief, and to Gwennie’s knowing (and smug) looks.<\/p>\n

But in all cases romance and character were subordinate to lengthy expositions about freedom and long, extra filled battle scenes. It was just… dull.<\/font><\/p>\n

One final note, which I found heartening, is that the woven halter top that Keira Knightly is wearing in all of the advertisements for this movie is NOT the actual costume she wears in the fight scene. In fact, her costume in this scene is highly unflattering and utilitarian — leather straps that bind her flat and make sense for someone who’s supposed to be shooting arrows.<\/p>\n

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I went to see King Arthur today. It’s been nearly universally panned by critics, but none of them, I think, have really hit upon the main problem with this film: It’s BORING. Spoilers to follow… I’ll blank them out, so highlight to read. Like Troy earlier this summer, this movie takes a myth and tries […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=502"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}