Yet another film I saw this week. This one is inredibly misunderstood and it saddens me to see people who I’m sure would really enjoy it turning their noses up based on the trailers.

This isn’t your typical King Arther tale. This is a Dark Ages King Arthur, a Roman soldier faced with fighting back an invading Saxon army while the might of Rome is leaving the people of Britain to fend for themselves. Arthur, who is actually half-British, can’t find it in his heart to leave the common folk to be slaughtered by the Saxons (who are killing and burning everything as they advance) so he stays to fight.

The knights are there against their will. Merlin is the leader of the Woads (the native people that have been driven north of Hadrian’s Wall by the romans) and there’s not a spot of magic or mention of a Holy Grail throughout the film.

It might be easier to ignore the title and just see it from the point of view of a Dark Ages period piece. Its a damned fine film and its a shame that its being overlooked by so many.

Finally got to see Spiderman 2 today. No big surprises…I loved it just as much as everyone else did. I hope there’s an extended or director’s cut version, and I’d love to see a ‘making of’ featurette too.

Toby Maguire is such an unlikely candidate to play Spiderman, and he pulls it off so damned well. Its amazing how authentic he can look as a nerd AND as Spiderman. The special effects were freaking AMAZING. I think I snagged one effect in the entire movie that ‘jarred’ by not looking like it fit in perfectly. Kirsten Dunst is still pulling off the ‘incredibly hot yet very wholesome’ thing, and the actress who played Aunt May looks like she stepped out of the pages of the comic book.

Some really funny scenes, some great cameos, lots of incredible action, some real tear-jerker moments…the movie just hadseverything you could ask for. It gets my vote for Movie of the Year so far!

I watched Armitage: Dual Matrix the other day. It was pretty good if you’re an anime fan. It wasn’t good enough that I’d recomend it universally, as I would say Spirited Away or Grave of the Fireflies or even Princess Mononoke. But for anime fans, a decent movie.

Fairly typical plot. You have your earthers and your martians. The earthers hate robots and want to suppress robot rights, the martians like robots and need them to help the colony survive. Some evil dude sets up a massacre so that it looks like the robots killed a bunch of people. Armitage is a robot, a “type 3” and she has to fight the conspiracy while avoiding capture. Someone wants to take her apart to see what makes her tick since she’s done something no robot has ever done.

Lots of action, a decent if predictable plot. Good voice work on the English Dub. All in all, as I said, a decent movie for anime buffs.

Carm and I watched Amadeus the other night. I’ve seen it before, way back when it came out. But it was like seeing it for the first time watching it with Carmina. Her knowledge of Mozart’s music, and specifically his operas, made a lot of things more clear to me. For instance near the end of the movie there’s a wild opera going on and she pointed out to me that it was a parody of all of his operas…a kind of tribute to him. He appreciated it, but his wife didn’t. I never picked up that it was a parody so that was all lost on me.

One of the things I really appreciated was how they used modern speech in the movie. It made it very accessible, without really being too jarring. It was almost like a translation. You know the characters wouldn’t have used that particular phrase, but they would’ve said something with a similar meaning.

The costumes and of course the soundtrack were amazing. It took me a long while to place Elizabeth Berridge, who played Constanze Mozart; she played the ugly, awkward lady cop on The John Larroquette Show! She was gorgeous in Amadeus!

One other important fact I took away from watching the movie with Carm is that it isn’t true. Certain facts were true; Mozart was terrible with money, he was married to Constanze and they were very much in love, and Salieri was the Court Composer at the time. But there’s no historical evidence of any of the scheming or the malice that Salieri had for Mozart in the film.

It was a great movie in 1984, and its a great movie today. If you haven’t seen it, you should. It really benefits from a home theater system, though. The soundtrack is so….massive.