Universal Pictures

Robin Hood

admin — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 05:53:00 +0000

Being the rabid Ridley Scott fan that I am, last week I went to go see his new movie, Robin Hood, at the theatre. (Being the cheapskate that I am, I went in the morning and paid four dollars less than going at night, because really, ten dollars to see a movie is ridiculous.)

Robin Hood isn't Kingdom of Heaven, let's start with that. I know a lot of reviewers, myself included, went in thinking it would be much of the same material, and it wasn't... to a point. Robin Hood takes place about nine years after the events in Kingdom of Heaven, close to the end of Richard's wars in France, which come to an unforeseen halt when Richard dies. The main character, Robin Longstride, is an average man in the ranks of Richard's army, pulled to the king's attention when Richard, on a whim, goes through the camp looking for "an honest man." Scott set out to retell Robin Hood, and in that he succeeded. And while he was doing it, he took a lot of the fun out of the Robin Hood story and inserted a lot of politics.

I think the big draw of Robin Hood is that he's a man who exists outside of political interests, or if he is involved, his intentions are always very clear: he's King Richard's man, he supports Richard's causes, and he supports the people. Simple and easy to remember. Scott's Hood should be simple, but instead comes off as much more complicated and politically embroiled than a character who, up until a half hour into the movie, was just a common archer. He expresses himself much better than a common man would have. That's kind of a theme in Scott's movies, which Balian somehow got away with, but Robin's high-handed speeches just sound dull.

What's interesting about this movie is the extremely mixed response it got throughout the reviewing world. Most people disliked it, and I can see why. Two sources that liked it a little more than the rest, however, interested me. One major feminist blog reviewed it with evident enthusiasm, the writer reporting that she loved the strong female lead offered by Cate Blanchett (appropriate sentiments for a feminist blog) and the revolutionary aspects of the idea that you didn't have to be a noble to speak up an affect change in a society.

The other interesting review is from the National Catholic Register, which is the only weekly paper my house now receives. Their film critic, Steven Greydanus, said it was "more watchable in most respects" than Kingdom of Heaven (a statement I'd like to vehemently disagree with) and judged that "the moral issues [were] less muddled, the hero more compelling, the heroine more relevant, and the romance at least relatable, if not especially engaging."

As much as I love Blanchett and the idea of a feminist Marian, that was one of the elements in the movie that didn't sit well with me. Both critics bring it up as something to be praised in Scott's epic, and I'm going to have to disagree. Kingdom of Heaven had a strong female lead in Princess Sybilla, a woman who was interesting because she was hard to understand at times and remarkably transparent in others. Sybilla made sense in the context of her story; for part of her life she had been a political pawn and needed to continue being a political pawn (something that went against her personality) if she wanted to see her kingdom survive.

Marion, on the other hand, makes less sense. Even if her husband had been gone with Richard for ten years, the idea that she would have become this Amazonian leadership lady in that time didn't seem possible in England circa 1200. Is she more relatable? Yes, more people could probably relate to Marion than they could to Sybilla. That doesn't necessarily mean she belonged in the story. A woman taking up a sword at the end of the film? It doesn't even begin to make sense. The feminist element in Robin Hood contributes just as much to the revisionist view of history that Greydanus (rightfully) accuses Scott of as any of the other wildly inaccurate historical elements in the film.

As I tried to figure out how to write this review, I attempted to find some lesson I could take away from the different ways these different people reviewed this film. Anna watched it as a feminist and found something she liked. Steven watched it as a Catholic and found it lacking. As for myself, watching the film as both a Catholic and a feminist (as well as a lot of other things), I found my lens as an amateur historian taking more and more of my attention away from the others.

I won't claim that I took note of all the inaccuracies in Robin Hood, and I'll certainly admit to ignoring some of the revisionist elements in Kingdom of Heaven. Both movies inspired me to do more research on the period in question. I have four books from the library on William Marshall and a growing collection of literature on what life was like in Europe and the Latin East in the 1100s. To me, the idea that a piece of media can be a gateway into a wider world of fact checking and research is a valuable one, and one that is helping me find the joyful Middle Ages behind Hollywood's "faux-realist medieval world," the real links of mutual respect between the Muslim world and the Christian one, and the real proto-feminist figures in the medieval history (women like Eleanor of Aquitaine, Hildegarden of Bingen, and Queen Melisande of Jerusalem).

Overall, I'd recommend avoiding the admission price (however low) at the theater and waiting for the DVD if you were thinking of going to see Robin Hood. In the meantime, you're welcome to join me in reading Warriors of God by James Reston and Four Queens by Nancy Goldstone for a more historically accurate look at the the Crusades and women in the middle ages.

And if you must have your ridiculous but fantastic crusades, there's always the other Scott named Walter.

**Review by **

Cross-posted at The Village Wordsmithy

Written by: Mercury Gray, June 1st 2010

I Love You, Man / Duplicity

admin — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 07:03:00 +0000

Directed by John Hamburg, Tony Gilroy

DreamWorks, Universal Pictures

I can’t remember the last time that I went to the theater and saw two movies in one day. For that matter, I can’t remember the last time that I was even able to afford that; I live in Manhattan, land of the thirteen dollar movie ticket. However, there were two recently released flicks that I was absolutely dying to see. I also have two dramatically different friends with dramatically different tastes who wanted me to accompany them to two dramatically different movies.

I Love You, Man, starring Paul Rudd and Jason Segal, is a hilariously raunchy portrait of a passionate “bromance.” I found this movie to be a surprisingly intelligent take on how difficult it is for some men to form intimate same-sex friendships in modern America. Written and directed by John Hamburg, I Love You, Man presents the audience with a straight male protagonist who makes no bones about not adhering to traditional masculinity.

For anyone who was comatose during the late 1990’s, Paul Rudd played Alicia Silverstone’s socially conscious stepbrother/love interest in the blockbuster teen flick, Clueless. Rudd makes somewhat of a reprise of that iconic role, showing us what a thirty-something year-old Josh would be like if he’d scrapped his plans for law school and started selling houses.

Peter Klaven (Rudd) is a repressed real estate agent who becomes engaged to Zooey (Rashida Jones). After realizing that he has always been a “girlfriend guy,” Peter sets out on a series of disastrous “man-dates”. (Reno 911! alums Joe Lo Truglio and Thomas Lennon offer scene-stealing performances as two of Peter’s rejects.) He eventually meets Sydney (Segal) at an open house. Sydney, a shaggy beach bum who has lost his buddies to marriage, children, and maturity, is also looking for another man to hang out with. Sparks fly between the two men and they quickly become inseparable.

This causes a wrinkle in his relationship with Zooey. While Zooey is initially thrilled that Peter is branching out socially, she begins to resent the amount of time the two men spend together. This culminates in an argument that nearly derails the engagement.

A movie like this could have gone horribly wrong if it had been placed in the wrong hands. However, Peter’s painfully dorky malapropisms, Segel’s off-beat charm and excellent comic timing, and more or less believable storyline rescue what could have been nothing more than a series of obligatory gross-out jokes. Projectile vomit, dog poop, and masturbation have never been funnier.

A superb supporting cast only strengthens the movie. J.K. Simmons, Jane Curtin, and an unusually restrained Andy Samberg have some of the best lines as Peter’s lovably quirky family. Jaime Pressly and a nearly unrecognizable Jon Favreau get in on the act as the perpetually bickering married couple. Carla Gallo is a little one-note as the desperate single friend, but even she gets in a few zingers.

I Love You, Man wasn’t a perfect movie, but it defied all of my expectations and put a smile on my face. Don’t wait for the DVD, kids.

I watched Duplicity with a second friend who turned up her nose at I Love You, Man. Duplicity , starring Clive Owen and Julia Roberts, was funny in a radically different way. Instead of crude sexual humor, Duplicity's comedy rests on the witty repartee between its leads.

Ray Koval (Owen), an MI6 agent, aggressively hits on cool-as-a-cucumber Claire Stenwick (Julia Roberts) at a Fourth of July party in Dubai. They hook up and Claire, an agent for the CIA, steals a file from Ray after drugging him. Haunted by the mistake, Ray confronts Claire in Rome two years later. The two hook up again, this time spending three days together in a hotel room. After a squabble in which Claire accuses Ray of making her miss an important flight on purpose, the two come up with an overly clever scheme to pull off a huge scam so that they can leave the spy game for good.

The two “go private”, landing jobs in the corporate espionage business. Roberts works as a mole, spying for Dick Garsik (Paul Giamatti channeling Kenny “Pig Vomit” Rushton from Private Parts) while feigning loyalty to Howard Tully (Tom Wilkinson). The two men hate each other, doing just about anything to screw each other over. That explains Dick Garsik’s decision to hire Ray to find out about a new top-secret project that Tully’s company is developing. Meanwhile, Ray and Claire play their employers in the hopes of determining what the product is so that they can intercept it and sell it off to yet another competitor. However, the two don’t trust each other. After all, the relationship (if you want to call it that) started off with a betrayal and the two are absolute masters at keeping secrets.

The double-, triple- and quadruple-crosses soon become tedious. As Roger Ebert put it, “Duplicity is entertaining, but the complexities of its plot keep it from being really involving: When nothing is as it seems, why care?" I agree with him wholeheartedly on that, though I disagree with his claim that the two leads generate “fierce electricity.” Although Owen and Roberts are both highly skilled actors, their chemistry was off. I had a hard time believing that their characters felt any type of attraction to each other. Roberts was miscast. The casting director should have gone with someone who could convey a cold calculating inscrutability, bankability be damned. (Catherine Zeta-Jones did a remarkable job of that in the vastly underrated

Written by: Ebony Edwards-Ellis, March 21st 2009