Wednesday, May 11, 2005
Kingdom of Heaven Movie - Reflections, Fun and Serious - Update May 13
This is good review writing! I really liked it. Tim Apello, from the Seattle Weekly, via rottentomatoes.. (Contains a little swearing, but it's so perfectly used to qualify certain lame movie aspects, that it's excused.)
I didn't understand how Bloom got the role either. It's this wishy-washy phenomenom we're having in the movies with actors like the lame Di Caprio and others.
I must say when I was watching the part of the movie that Bloom starts blabbering why he is refusing Eva Green, I didn't even make sense of what he said, it was so out of touch with reality of the story and the characters. I was like, "What did you just say? I didn't catch the beginning of your insane refusal monologue, given how much attention I was paying to the movie at this exact moment, and now I am even more lost than before. What reason could there be for you to say No that is not absurdly ridiculous?"
And Sibbyla wanting to go from Queen to peasant wife? Right. You used to have all the silk and gold and servants and banquets in the world, but now go tend the pigs from dawn to dusk, in the cold and mud, look 50 after 2 years of this, and die of childbirth by 30. All for Bloom, the elf... Now that would work in real life...
I liked the message of the movie, though. It's not a historical movie, it's just a "nice message" movie, like a "hint, hint" movie for our times. I´ll write my comments on the movie later.
Update May 13, 2005:
Jack commented on my blog:
"She looked unhealthily slender; needlessly to say, that is almost certainly historically inaccurate (from what I've read, medievals preferred their women plump)."
Ah yes, but box office profits today come from thin women :-)
I had never seen this actress before, and in KofH I didn't notice she was that thin, since you almost always just see her face (bare), all those veils and jewelry. Or maybe it's because that's where my attention was focused. I found her costumes very beautiful. I got tired of the close up shots on her eyes though. Ok, we've seen she has green eyes, some other shot please... It almost looked like a CoverGirl commercial, over and over again...
I did wonder as one more historical innacuracy thing in the movie about her riding around on a horse, even with a small troupe of guards. It doesn't seem like queens would be allowed to ride around like that, so independently, not important queens anyways. But then there were medieval women who broke all the rules, even in Europe, because they had the power to do it.
Queen Alessandra hopes to break lots of rules if anything goes right in the future. Philistines, Cabbageheads, and other Miscreants are not fit to set the rules in the world, that is what Queen Alessandra believes ;-)
.
A period battle epic should be as simple as it is big. It should never flex its brow in thought, only its bloody bulging biceps, to strike a blow for instinctive cinema. Braveheart and Gladiator spring to mind, precisely because they have no mind. Couldn't be sillier. In Braveheart, historical veracity goes right out the window, along with that poor guy director Mel Gibson executes for being gay. Ridley Scott's Oscar-winning Gladiator may be packed with more authenticish decor, but it's not about history, it's about Russell Crowe's iconic coolness, which is even more galvanically jolting than Gibson's.
Calamitously, Scott's Kingdom of Heaven (which opens Friday, May 6, at the Metro and other theaters) tries to be all about history—the lull between the Second and Third Crusades, circa 1184, when Baldwin the Christian leper king of Jerusalem maintained a dicey peace with the Arab conqueror Saladin. Kingdom earnestly preaches on behalf of peace and cross-cultural understanding. (Can't we all just get along?) This is perverse and self-sabotaging, robbing the calls to combat of all their conviction. Instead of a clear collision of good guy and bad, we get a horrendously confusing mosh pit of quarreling factions, with good guys on the Muslim and Christian teams who maneuver to thwart the (Western) warmongers in their midst. A war film about pacifists is like a sex film about George W. Bush's Chastity Pledge for Teens.
Our hero is no man's man à la Crowe but a fucking elf: Orlando Bloom, [too funny :-)]
who's pumped up a few pitiably stringy muscles since Lord of the Rings but still looks like someone Hilary Swank would KO with one punch in Million Dollar Baby. Kingdom's opening is pointedly like the poetical opening of Gladiator, which also needed to get its hero from snowflake-graced northern Europe to the blood-soaked sands down south.
[...]
and finds himself in the leper king's court, a place sumptuous with Ridley Scott set design and way too many characters. Some are admittedly cool: Edward Norton's bloodshot eyes look great behind Baldwin's silver leper's mask; Jeremy Irons sports a cute dueling scar as Baldwin's second banana; [second banana :-)]
[...]
And you couldn't have a less commanding commander than Orlando Bloom.
I didn't understand how Bloom got the role either. It's this wishy-washy phenomenom we're having in the movies with actors like the lame Di Caprio and others.
If you think Bloom's star quality is a black hole, you should see his love interest, Eva Green of Bertolucci's soporific The Dreamers. She plays the reluctant wife of a Bad Guy Crusader, and wants to marry Balian instead—who virtuously refuses. George W. Bush's Chastity Pledge for Teens is sexier than Kingdom's love story and less stupid. Bloom represents an all-time testosterone low in the history of the Hollywood love god.
I must say when I was watching the part of the movie that Bloom starts blabbering why he is refusing Eva Green, I didn't even make sense of what he said, it was so out of touch with reality of the story and the characters. I was like, "What did you just say? I didn't catch the beginning of your insane refusal monologue, given how much attention I was paying to the movie at this exact moment, and now I am even more lost than before. What reason could there be for you to say No that is not absurdly ridiculous?"
And Sibbyla wanting to go from Queen to peasant wife? Right. You used to have all the silk and gold and servants and banquets in the world, but now go tend the pigs from dawn to dusk, in the cold and mud, look 50 after 2 years of this, and die of childbirth by 30. All for Bloom, the elf... Now that would work in real life...
I liked the message of the movie, though. It's not a historical movie, it's just a "nice message" movie, like a "hint, hint" movie for our times. I´ll write my comments on the movie later.
Update May 13, 2005:
Jack commented on my blog:
"She looked unhealthily slender; needlessly to say, that is almost certainly historically inaccurate (from what I've read, medievals preferred their women plump)."
Ah yes, but box office profits today come from thin women :-)
I had never seen this actress before, and in KofH I didn't notice she was that thin, since you almost always just see her face (bare), all those veils and jewelry. Or maybe it's because that's where my attention was focused. I found her costumes very beautiful. I got tired of the close up shots on her eyes though. Ok, we've seen she has green eyes, some other shot please... It almost looked like a CoverGirl commercial, over and over again...
I did wonder as one more historical innacuracy thing in the movie about her riding around on a horse, even with a small troupe of guards. It doesn't seem like queens would be allowed to ride around like that, so independently, not important queens anyways. But then there were medieval women who broke all the rules, even in Europe, because they had the power to do it.
Queen Alessandra hopes to break lots of rules if anything goes right in the future. Philistines, Cabbageheads, and other Miscreants are not fit to set the rules in the world, that is what Queen Alessandra believes ;-)
.
