http://blogs.kitschmag.com/movies/2008/07/07/mongol/ Just another kitsch-ka-blogs weblog Fri, 03 Feb 2012 13:18:10 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 hourly 1 http://blogs.kitschmag.com/movies/2008/07/07/mongol/comment-page-1/#comment-1425 Robin Hood » Movie Monster Thu, 20 May 2010 05:23:07 +0000 http://blogs.kitschmag.com/movies/2008/07/07/mongol/#comment-1425 [...] Sherlock Holmes fared well when Guy Ritchie removed the detective’s deerstalker; but Robin seems naked without his tights. In the old days, he robbed from the rich and gave to the poor—the Tea Party’s worst nightmare. Coy as the allusion might be, it’s apropos to this adaptation, which muddies things up and makes the “history” denser, but keeps its ideals on a simple, commercial level. Robin soapboxes about liberty and rallies against taxation, but the taxes are levied to pay for the Crusades—a war in the Middle East. (Only socialists will be displeased with the film’s shifty politicking: The French are invading England and pilfering indiscriminately. One of the marauders, on the verge of raping a landowner, tells her, “Nobody should own 5,000 acres.” Staliniste! But the filmmakers probably aren’t worried about upsetting socialists; they don’t pay for tickets anyway, right…?) Sequences that should be rousing, if naïve, seem to have been manhandled by clammy appendages. Even the setting is too clammy. These mizzly medieval days can get so dour that I wished the Technicolor sunlight that Errol Flynn basked in would break through the heavy-handed clouds. Some of Jim Mathieson’s photography is quite appealing—the firelit oranges twinkling on the midnight blues, the beads of water dripping from an arrow, its launch slowed down for us to savor. But Scott’s images no longer look as if seen through a frosty pane of glass, as they did in The Duellists; and they lack the dynamism of Sergei Bodrov’s in Mongol. [...] [...] Sherlock Holmes fared well when Guy Ritchie removed the detective’s deerstalker; but Robin seems naked without his tights. In the old days, he robbed from the rich and gave to the poor—the Tea Party’s worst nightmare. Coy as the allusion might be, it’s apropos to this adaptation, which muddies things up and makes the “history” denser, but keeps its ideals on a simple, commercial level. Robin soapboxes about liberty and rallies against taxation, but the taxes are levied to pay for the Crusades—a war in the Middle East. (Only socialists will be displeased with the film’s shifty politicking: The French are invading England and pilfering indiscriminately. One of the marauders, on the verge of raping a landowner, tells her, “Nobody should own 5,000 acres.” Staliniste! But the filmmakers probably aren’t worried about upsetting socialists; they don’t pay for tickets anyway, right…?) Sequences that should be rousing, if naïve, seem to have been manhandled by clammy appendages. Even the setting is too clammy. These mizzly medieval days can get so dour that I wished the Technicolor sunlight that Errol Flynn basked in would break through the heavy-handed clouds. Some of Jim Mathieson’s photography is quite appealing—the firelit oranges twinkling on the midnight blues, the beads of water dripping from an arrow, its launch slowed down for us to savor. But Scott’s images no longer look as if seen through a frosty pane of glass, as they did in The Duellists; and they lack the dynamism of Sergei Bodrov’s in Mongol. [...]

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