History channel and the movies...King Arthur

[wizardneedsfood]

I'm actually looking forward to it because it looks to me like it will be fairly entertaining.

 

[ssampier]

history bleh!

Sure it's not "historical" in any way shape or form, but I'm hoping it will be decent at least (. I like they are setting the movie in an earlier period than before and the customes are an attempt to look the part. As long as it's better than First Knight I will be happy (not hard to do).

I wouldn't worry about people accepting history. Those are the same people that watched the god-awful Pearl Harbor.

 

[The_lurkeR]

This movie has rotten cabbage written all over it. It's total summer box office trash, trying desperately to cloak itself in some sort of guise of respectibility with this "true story" nonsense.

A modern feminist Guinivere... Lancelot dual-wielding swords... come on people?!?

 

[mmu1]

Actually, the moment I saw Kiera Knightley running around covered in woad and wearing a battle bikini, I knew I'd probably see it, rotten cabbage or not.

Given that the director's pretty good, and that they actually got some decent actors (rather than wasting all their money on a big A-list star), I think it might turn out to be all right. I take it as a given they'll mangle the King Arthur legends, but I don't really care - it's not as if it's actual history they're messing with. (I've had no problems with the liberties Troy took for the same reason.)

 

[Kahuna Burger]

there have only been a couple of movies about the legends (in the widest sense) that are any good: Monty Python & the Holy Grail, The Fisher King, and Perceval.

Don't forget that cool ep of Babylon 5 With the guy who connected his role in the first encounter with the Mimbari with the (less well known) ending where a knight destroys the peace talks by drawing his sword on a snake he was afraid would bite Arthur.... That was a great bit, with Delenn bringing him the sword as the stand in for the lady of the lake.

Besides the Holy grail and the Fisher King, the only King Arthur movie I've seen was Excalibur. Which I liked. And which had Patrick Stewart in a minor but cool role, making his narration of the history channel show kinda fun.

Kahuna Burger

 

[Villano]

Excalibur kind of grows on you. One thing that really bugs me about that movie is that no one ever takes off their armor. Ever.

IIRC, Lancelot and Guinivere aren't wearing any armor when they meet in the woods.

 

[Desdichado]

From the moment I saw a woad-covered Guinevere in a battle bikini, I kew it was going to be a bad film. Well, as a generic pseudo-historical, generically medieval, fantasy-esque movie, I'm sure it will be fine. As an Arthurian story, it's going to suck.

Eh, so what? I liked Braveheart, but certainly not because it was a documentary of the life of William Wallace. I liked Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story too. I remember asking one of my friends who was really into Chinese martial arts and actually knew a thing or two about Bruce Lee what was accurate in that movie. He thought for a while and said, "He really was Chinese. They got that right."

That didn't make it any worse a movie, though.

 

[Desdichado]

Given the thousands (literally) of volumes just of retellings of the legends, not to mention those with allusions to the legends, even sorting through that could take a while: the Athletic Christianity of Tennyson, the semi-historicity of Stewart and Cornwell, the High Fantasy of White, the Neo-Paganism of Bradley and Paxson, the multitude of poets from Epic to Doggerel, the many comic books, etc.

Pseudo-historicity is where I'm at. I'm rereading Cornwell at the moment, as it turns out. That's why I actually am excited to see this movie; I don't care if it's "accurate" or not (especially since all the details of Arthur's life, if there even was such a person, are completely unknown). I'll take a pseudo-historical movie set between britons and saxons any day and enjoy it assuming it doesn't blow completely. For my money, they didn't even need to have characters named Arthur, Merlin, Guinevere, etc.

 

[Wombat]

Pseudo-historicity is where I'm at. I'm rereading Cornwell at the moment, as it turns out. That's why I actually am excited to see this movie; I don't care if it's "accurate" or not (especially since all the details of Arthur's life, if there even was such a person, are completely unknown). I'll take a pseudo-historical movie set between britons and saxons any day and enjoy it assuming it doesn't blow completely. For my money, they didn't even need to have characters named Arthur, Merlin, Guinevere, etc.

I love Cornwell's books, which I didn't expect given the fact that I prefer the PBS version of his Sharpe's tales to his books. I love a good story; Braveheart was awful history, but a fine movie.

I must admit to being more troubled by Disney's insistence on marking this movie as the "real" and "historical" Arthur -- personally I don't think there is a "real" Arthur, in that I do not believe that there was a single person at a single place who lived in a place called Camelot with a Round Table, etc. I am quite willing to believe that there was one (or more) person (people) roughly during the period of the Saxon (et al) invasions of Britain who fought them succesfully for a while, but eventually lost. If Disney just called this Arthur or King Arthur or something like that without pushing the "reality" aspect, I would probably have less problem with it.

Part of this also comes back to my main theory of history -- What people think happened in history is far more important than what actually happened, because people will pattern their lives and make decisions based on their opinions, rather than on what might be the truth.

 

[Desdichado]

I must admit to being more troubled by Disney's insistence on marking this movie as the "real" and "historical" Arthur -- personally I don't think there is a "real" Arthur, in that I do not believe that there was a single person at a single place who lived in a place called Camelot with a Round Table, etc. I am quite willing to believe that there was one (or more) person (people) roughly during the period of the Saxon (et al) invasions of Britain who fought them succesfully for a while, but eventually lost. If Disney just called this Arthur or King Arthur or something like that without pushing the "reality" aspect, I would probably have less problem with it.

True, that's a bit of a stretch, since the "real" and "historical" Arthur can't even be proved to have existed. I can only assume that what they really mean by that is "realistic" and true to what we know of history of the period, without regard to any "truth" of the actual events of the movie.

That seems an odd position to take for the marketing arm, though. Seems anyone with half a brain and access to a public library (or the Internet) could disprove the claim. And anyone who can't probably doesn't care.

Part of this also comes back to my main theory of history -- What people think happened in history is far more important than what actually happened, because people will pattern their lives and make decisions based on their opinions, rather than on what might be the truth.

Exactly true. "History" is as much about the politics as it is about what happened. There's a book, Strange Footprints in the Land about the Viking colonization of America that quite interestingly explores the politics of how the Viking presence in Pre-Colombus America has gradually become (and is still becoming) more accepted in the historical record.