Robin Hood

Free Tickets Hooray

Long time reader Bugle handed me some free tickets to the cinema so off I went, rushing to see Robin Hood. I am so grateful because really, it's a terrible thing to fork over money for a film that you suspect is a bit of a stinker.

So Bugle, thank you where ever you are for the tickets, they were most appreciated!

What's Good About It

It's sort of interesting and it's kind of entertaining. If you're into meaningless diversions, this film is for you. It's probably not the film to watch and take seriously after 'Come ad See'.

Mark Strong is good as the bad guy. He's making a lot of mileage playing bad guys and dark heavies lately. Sort of doing the Jason Isaac role from 'The Patriot', so to speak, but he has a much more brooding screen presence. It's one of the best thing going in this film.

The combat scenes at the beginning are interesting. It's always cool to see medieval siege action on the screen. This might be even better than the stuff Scott mounted for 'Kingdom of Heaven'.

The 'stylish medieval' is also quite good. The recreation of the Tower of London sitting on the Thames as Robin arrives back is also very well realised on screen. Not too much with the glossy makeup or the rich fabrics in the wardrobe. There's a lot of fine eye for detail filling out the edges of this film. It's worth it just to watch this stuff, forgetting the story - which I guess is damning with faint praise.

Also, 2 geese do some waddling action in 2 shots and the cuts match. It's pretty impressive that they got the geese to do that.

What's Bad About It

Russell. Cate. The script. The music.

I probably should go into it with a bit more depth but I feel so bad doing it. These superstar vehicles are a terrible danger for the director, but they're worse dangers for the superstars themselves. If you cast a big name, you're committed to using them for s certain amount of screen time so you end up generating meandering subplots and lousy narrative sections just to make space for their presence.

When Cate Blanchett's Maid ('Mad'?) Marion turns up on the beach dressed as a black knight leading a pack of kids on Shetland ponies, the film is fully groan-worthy. Some people are saying Cate Blanchett steals the show. In my opinion, they gave her too much stupid screen time instead of giving those moments to something to make more sense out of the meandering lugubrious story.

What's Interesting About It

Now that we've dealt with the good and the bad, it's thankfully time to deal with the ugly and interesting; and surprisingly there is much of interest in this film by comparison to that which is good or bad. It's a very strange film that way.

First off, this is the second time Ridley Scott is dealing with the Crusades. While 'The Kingdom of Heaven' was rather bombastic and mixed with a dose of orientalism, the Crusades in this film are more prosaic and much less romantic. In a blunt way Ridley Scott's imagining of the Robin Hood story tries to encompass the complexities of the Norman Kings of England, especially with the passing of Henry II and into the reign of Richard I the 'Lion Heart'. The depiction of Elanor of Aquitaine and Richard's brother John is nice, and almost segues off the 1968 classic 'The Lion in Winter'.

You wonder if all this is really necessary to talk about in a movie about Robin Hood, but Scott and company belabor the point. And belabor they do as the story winds its way through the background to the Magna Carta; the film manages to wind its way through the events surrounding Phillip II of France's attempt to invade England. Now, this is where the fiction takes over from history because what really happened was the Phillip II of France actually sent his son, who landed in Kent and marched on to London unopposed.  The colossal whallopping on the beach we see in the film has no historic basis. The question then is, why did they have to come up with this stuff?

It's quite bizarre because the French disembark on Dover with boats that resemble the ones used in WWII to land in Normandy. The picture quickly loses all credibility to realism but what can you do? It seems really unfair that the picture presents so much historic stuff, only to retreat into fantasy land, using the excuse that Robin Hood after all is a fictional character. If you ask me,it's cheating.

Max Von Sydow

One of the treats in this film is the presence of Max Von Sydow. Yes, I know I recently said he sometimes phones in his performances these days, but he is and always will be the Knight Sir Antonius Block - the original disenchanted knight who returns from the Crusades - in 'The Seventh Seal' for me. This time it is this fine venerable Swede who gets to play the donor figure to Russell Crowe's Robin Hood - which is a re-play of Richard Harris' Marcus Aurelius in 'Gladiator'. Yet, almost lost in the mists of time also is Max Von Sydow's turn as King Osric in 'Conan the Barbarian' who is a sort of donor figure to Arnie's Conan. I kept thinking, this is so strange how Max Von Sydow keeps on giving to these Hollywood heroes. The distance between King Osric to Sir  Walter Loxley is actually longer than the distance between Sir Antonius Block  in 'The Seventh Seal' to King Osric. I just thought I'd mention that.

I also forgot to mention, he also played another donor figure in Dr. Liet Kynes in David Lynch's 'Dune' staring opposite Kyle McLachlan's Paul Atreides. He also plays Frederik in 'Hannah and Her Sisters' by Woody Allen with the classic Line: "They always ask about the Holocaust 'how could it have happened?' when the real question should be asking is 'why doesn't it happen more often?'"

I mean, really, Max Von Sydow is the gift that keeps giving if you're a Hollywood movie hero. He's so typecast but I never feel bad about seeing Max Von Sydow on screen. I realised during his scenes that I am in fact a besotted fan. It's a little embarrassing, but it was interesting to me.

The French As Bad Guys

Movie French  in these medieval England movies are always so damn sinister. They have goatees and brood and plot to take England. In reality most of the Hundred Years' War was fought on French soil. But the anglophone world keeps making these movies where the French are on the receiving end of much cinema-humiliation. Having seen 'Henry V' and the various Joans of Arc, I sort of wonder why the Anglo Saxons are so paranoid about the French. Even in the Normandy landing, it was the Anglophones landing on French beaches.

The French - bless their frog-eating souls - can't be simultaneously the most sinister forces in medieval Europe as well as cheese-eating surrender monkeys. There are any number of these movies where the medieval French get a good beating. Why the heck did they have to beat up on the French in a movie about Robin Hood? Why couldn't the bad guy be the Sheriff of Nottingham and be done with it?

I can only put it down to the the perverseness of the English.

Doing the Robin Hood Thing

Still, you have to love a Robin Hood movie. There's something fundamentally suspenseful with letting fly an arrow and waiting for the moment it pierces the target that makes good cinema. The Kevin Costner 'Prince of Thieves' Robin Hood was also awful, awful kitsch but it did have the essential beauty of letting loose with an arrow. Who remembers arrow-cam, where the shot travels with the arrow, straight into the target?

Considering it is Robin Hood, I was a bit surprised at how seldom Crowe's Robin Hood let loose with an arrow. Instead, this film sees him on Horseback, hacking away like he did in the first battle sequence in 'Gladiator'. It's as if both Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe missed the point of the character, in pursuit of some bogus realism that doesn't matter. Robin Hood is an archer, damn it, not a centurion!

Also suspect was how the whole film is couched as the beginning of the Robin Hood legend when in fact it sells the legend downstream for a bunch of political claptrap. The Robin Hood thing is best summarised by this parody here. If Rusty's not willing to wear the green tights, is he even doing the right movie, I ask you.

The Australian Thing

That being said, and with all that was tossed out with the bathwater, it was curious to see two Australians on screen playing Robin and Marion. It kind of felt like a bastard menage-a-trois lovechild between 'Gladiator', 'Braveheart' and 'Elizabeth: The Golden Age'.

It would have been enough to make Errol Flynn proud. And we know how much there was of Errol Flynn's pride.

More seriously, the weirdness of the performances of Messers Crowe and Blanchett are such that you wonder what exactly they thought the narrative mode of the film might be. The lovingly method-acted gruff gutteral grunts of Russell Crowe clashing awkwardly with the highly mannered mimesis, minted in the halls of NIDA performed by Cate Blanchett simply looked positively weird.

Through out was the ol' Aussie love of realism come hell or high water, so much so that Russell Crowe walked out on an interivewer who insinuated his accent might have been less than authentic. Lighten up Russell, you're playing the medieval equivalent of a comic book character for fuck's sake.

As for Ms. Blanchett, this was the first time I thought her acting was so mannered I couldn't see the character at all. I just saw the doyen of Australian actresses doing *something*, but I had no shot at getting the character.

Misplaced Realism

Did you ever meet a guy who wanted to compare Superman and Mighty Mouse and then would insist Mighty Mouse was a cartoon and therefore no contest for Superman? This film has that sense of appeal to realism about it. Authenticity and an eye for detail is nice but misplaced realism is as bad as playing a major key tune with an insistent minor key bass line.

Yet, you can just hear the director demanding more and more period authenticity for things 1215 AD. A mug here, a table there. All the while I kept thinking if any of this was making the story of Robin Hood richer, or not as the case may be. It's one thing to make a history picture and going for authenticity. One really wonders if such a posture was necessary in doing a Robin Hood movie. It's troubling in the same way the successive 'Batman' movies seem to take on more and more moral-philosophical quandaries. Do we really need these trappings of pseudo-seriousness in order for us to enjoy our fiction these days?

On Ridley Scott

All of this brings me to Ridley Scott. I don't think this man fulfilled his early promise. I don't think he's really made an excellent film since 'Alien' and 'Blade Runner', and this film is probably on the bad side of his score sheet.

I don't know what to say because I keep watching his films in the hope I'll see something as profound as 'Blade Runner' but I'm also sick of being disappointed. I get more joy watching Woody Allen sliding down the other side of the hill than Ridley Scott in his decline phase. Woody Allen to his credit still had 'Match Point' and 'Curse of the Jade Scorpion' in the last 10 years. If it's 'Gladiator', 'Kingdom of Heaven' and 'Robin Hood' for Ridley Scott, it's actually a little sad. Maybe my expectations are too high.

Still, there are days that I think his brother Tony is making more interesting films in the last few years. Ridley Scott's big films in the last decade and a bit have been more bombast than spectacle and his technical excellence only betrays the degree to which his films are ponderous affairs. The problem with 'Robin Hood' is that it's better than any old crud, but it's not good enough to rival his best work. it just sits in a zone of arbitrary action for the sake of arbitrary action.

Another point to be made is that he's beginning to repeat himself a lot, and it is more than just his signature stylings that pop out. There are mini-sequences in the climactic battle scenes that are reminscent of shots from both 'Gladiator' and 'Kingdom of Heaven'. There are the repeated motifs of absent father figures and brothers in conflict, which incidentally are also in 'Blade Runner'. Maybe these are deep-seated themes that stem from his childhood or are infra-psychic structures that come out in his narratives. I would be interested to see if he can break free of his own tastes a little more, but this is an unfair ask to an artist who has made some true classics of cinema.