5 posts tagged “fantasy”
Starring the Beastmaster, Marc Singer, and Babylon 5's long lost commander, Claudia Christian, how can you go wrong? Well you might go wrong by having the Beastmaster in it or having it some stupid time travel storyline where the Beastmaster, aka Lancelot, gets transported to the modern age and has to save King Arthur. Only Arthur isn't king yet because before Beastmaster went forward into the future he went into his past before Arthur took the sword from the stone and both of them as well as a couple evil guys went into the future. See, the bad guy took the sword in the stone with him into the future and if if they remove the sword in the future Arthur will never have become king. Luckily, Claudia Christian is all in love with chivalry and crap and helps Lancelot defeat the evil bad guys.
If you like cheese, then you will love this. If you like good things then you won't like this. It is cheesy in the extreme. It been has Christian swooning for Lancelot and lamenting that chivalry is dead. So is gender equality apparently...
one thumb down
Beastmaster sans beasts
I hope Claudia didn't
Leave B5 for this.
Like Gaimain's Stardust (which I'm sure I reviewed but seems to have disappeared) I had low expectations for this movie going into it. I liked Gaiman's early stuff. Sandman, Black Orchid, Signal to Noise, pretty much everything he's done with Dave McKean. But the stuff he's done lately like American Gods, 1602 and Eternals hasn't thrilled me. Luckily, like Stardust, I was pretty pleased with Beowulf.
I've read Beowulf but it has been a long long time ago and I don't really remember much about it. From reading wikipedia after seeing the film I gather there were some pretty big changes to some of the details. Oh well. I certainly didn't mind. I was a bit curious as to why Beowulf was wearing Roman-style gear, especially since it was so cold there.
Certainly the most remarkable thing about the film is the animation. It is really good. There are certainly moments where it is easy to forget that it is computer generated. Then there are moments when it is painfully obvious that it is not a real person and it just sucks you out of the whole film. Overall it is more good than bad.
Ignoring the computer graphics, while watching the film I found it very difficult not to think about the Lord of the Rings. And of course it shouldn't be a surprise since Tolkien stole a lot from Beowulf. But there is some weird circular intertextuality going on because the Lord of the Rings references the earlier Beowulf whose movie version references the Lord of the Rings. Not only in story -- and I'm sure that they had to work hard in pre-production on how to make Grendel look humanoid without looking too much like Gollem -- but also in style the film evokes the parts of the Lord of the Ring films that take place in Rohan -- the culture most heavily influenced by the people depicted in Beowulf. I'm not sure that one could avoid comparisons with the Lord of the Rings films but with using overhead shots and big buildings on top of hills, they certainly didn't go out of their way to avoid it.
The most idiotic thing in the entire movie happens when Beowulf decides that he is going to fight Grendel naked. They go to outlandish and unintentionally hilarious lengths to hide his schlong. Wouldn't it have been easier just to have him leave his pants on?
Other than that, if you liked Lord of the Rings films you will probably like Beowulf.
four thumbs up
Beowulf fights nude
but please whatever you do
don't look at his junk
There's this "gelfling" which is really just an elf and he has to go find a shard of the Dark Crystal and put it back into the crystal to make it whole. So there isn't anything special about the story. But all the muppets are wonderfully strange and fascinating. They ride around on these creatures that have long legs like a giraffe but the body of a rabbit. The bad guys are some sort of evil birds. There's this great big model of the three sunned solar system and lots of other weird stuff.
There's so much in this movie that it actually seems kind of rushed. Sure it was for kids and it is probably a sign of good story telling that they can make this world seem to rich. However, I would have liked a bit more time on the way to ending the quest. They are supposed to be making a sequel that is going to come out next year, so I suppose I'll get my wish.
five thumbs up
Skekses are evil
and they are also ugly
nice stereotype...
Basically, this is the story of Moses, if Moses were a girl, mashed into the Lord of the Rings. A girl is born and a prophecy says a kid will kill the evil Queen, so to protect her the mother puts the baby in a boat in the river. Downstream a group of Hobbits --err, Nelwyns -- find the baby. Willow is tasked with taking the human child back to humans. Along the way he finds out about the evil queen, meets up with Strider -- err, I mean Val Kilmer -- some little fairies, and a woman who dresses as a man who for some reason I didn't really notice turns good.
So the story is highly highly derivative. And it is really too long. Unlike Lord of the Rings there are touches of cheese with the fighting and the fairies are played almost entirely as comic relief.
The movie is most known for being the first movie to use morphing. And even now it doesn't look too bad. As the cursed sorceress turns from animal to animal it still looks pretty cool. There is also the giant two headed dragon thing which is pretty memorable.
However these two things also include my least favorite thing in fantasy movies: magic. Throughout the movie Willow struggles to use magic to turn the sorceress human again. He has a few nonsense magic words that the sorceress taught him but on the occasion when he succeeds in turning her human again he says some other words in English. Now how did he learn those words??? WTF??? Stupid magic crap.
I give Ron Howard and George Lucas props for using actual little people instead of trickery like Lord of the Rings did. But there are also some scenes in the beginning with WIllow's kids which were so bad I almost turned off the movie. Luckily he quickly leaves them behind.
Two thumbs up.
Willow is a tree
But the character is short
Is that irony?
Where to start? I'm not a fantasy fan. I liked playing Dungeons and Dragons back in the day but mainly because of the swords and killing dragons and other monsters. All this elf stuff and magic just makes me want to gag. There's something about elves that just irritates me. Their pointy ears and silly better-than-thou attitude. Why can't they talk like regular people?
I'm a sci-fi fan. I can't stand magic because I feel like it is just lazy. There doesn't have to be any cause and effect or reason why things happen or rules. "Its magic!" is the answer to everything. So random pointless crap can happen and they don't even have to pretend that it makes sense. And don't even get me started on riding dragons...
There's also one final aspect of fantasy that I hate: the fascination with royalty. Call me crazy but our country had a war so that we wouldn't have king, queens, princes, and princesses any more. There is always this elitist upper class pampered life people who are born to save the world. Can you get more elitist than stories all about royalty?
So I"m not the person this movie is intended for. It is all about a princess who sings crappy songs and unicorns and half naked boys, people talking in fake-sounding voices and Tom Cruise. Tom Cruise is some wood nymph thingy and there's a devil. Tom shows a girl a unicorn and the devil's minions kill one of them and then devil wants to hook up with the woman. Luckily Tom finds some little people and half naked boys to help save the day.
Now the film wasn't all bad. The special effects and visual design were great. Very very cool. But there are people talking in rhyme and pointless magic. Every time I thought it couldn't get worse it did.
five thumbs down.
I can't stand Tom Cruise.
and I can't stand fantasy
why did i bother???
