Okay, movies

[drcpunk]

womzilla says it was lists plural he wanted. Well, let's start with movies, then.

The Fisher King is my favorite so far. Gorgeous shots of New York City. A nice, modern medieval tale -- it doesn't try to adapt any story on a 1-1 basis. It creates a new Grail story, the one narrated by Parry to Jack. There's a lot of works that have this odd little thing, new episodes described as having "always" been part of the Arthurian canon. Up and down angles are deliberate comments, and it has, intentionally or otherwise, a nifty version of the Kundry character from some of the Percivale / Peredur stories/.

Excalibur is perhaps the best straight rendition of the Arthurian story on screen. Perhaps. Now, it has a lot of flaws, inlcuding the scene that makes most people wince and say, "In his armor?!" But it unifies a couple of strands of the legend, making Arthur explicitly the Fisher King.

Knightriders is the kind of movie one either gets or doesn't get. I get it, but I had the advantage of having been shown it by Sir Emeric Wendell just before my first Pennsic. Ares Magazine commented on this and Excalibur quite positively, although there is a flaw in the overall moral philosophy, as it seems to be espoused. But full marks for trying something very complex, and 8 or 9 out of 10 for pulling it off.

Those are my top three.

Most recent interesting nod to the Arthurian corpus in a film: Matrix: The Third One.

Two good television nods to the legend:

The Doctor Who episode Battlefield
The Babylon 5 episode A Late Delivery from Avalon, which first got me hooked on the show -- I had to watch this episode, as it reflected on my dissertation, which I was then writing. A good statement of some of the appeal of the legend, and it won my heart when the characters noted that the self-proclaimed King Arthur could no way be the real thing, as he would never have worn that kind of armor or spoken that language. You know, the sort of writing that shows that the author is as smart as the audience.

Some bad stuff:

First Knight. This one isn't so bad if one remembers that it was intended as a Tristan and Isolde film. It works as a psychomachia, but as nothing else, and I wanted to make the creators write on a blackboard: Crossbows are not guns. There were no mass produced mini-crossbows in period. Oh, and we are supposed to believe that, in a time when mercenaries were in great demand, Lancelot couldn't get a job.

The Black Knight. This is the one where the Evil Saracens work with the Evil British Pagans. Their gods demand a blond sacrifice, but the captured heroine is a brunette. So, they pop a blond wig on her head. Actually, that part was clever.

Guinevere. Made for tv, loosely based on Persia Woolley's trilogy. I didn't like the trilogy, but the tv show did not do it justice. It was a bit of a travesty, IMO. And when Morgan Le Fay announced that EYE-graine (Igraine) was her mother before she was Arthur's, I muttered, "I didn't know EYE-graine was -anyone's- mother."

I never got to see a BBC miniseries that I'm told was fairly faithful to Malory. I did see a few episodes of The Young Warlord (I think), and they weren't bad. Brian Blessed as King Mark.

Comments

[drcpunk.livejournal.com]

Exactly.