wizardneedsfood
First Post
I'm actually looking forward to it because it looks to me like it will be fairly entertaining.
Wombat said: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.
Mystery Man said: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.
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."Pseudonym said: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.
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 said: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.
Joshua Dyal said: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.
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.Wombat said: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.
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.Wombat said: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.