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Review: A Knight's Tale
The tone is set right away when the film opens with Queen belting out "We Will Rock You" -- at a jousting match. (And the movie ends with a song by AC/DC, probably not what the Knights of the Round Table were tapping their toes to.)
The movie is dead-aimed at teens -- girls who'll sigh over Australia's Heath Ledger, playing the commoner who follows his bliss, pretends to be a knight, and tries to win the lady's heart; and boys who enjoy watching horses, lances and knights slamming into one another for the better part of two hours. The computer renderings of jousting stadiums and olde cities are nice.
It's a silly movie, but knowingly silly, and it's also entertaining and -- even, at moments -- inventive. Brian Helgeland is winking at the old Camelot myths; A Knight's Tale doesn't take itself seriously for a moment.
William, our hunky hero (introduced to American audiences in the cheesy The Patriot), is shocked to discover the body of the dead knight he serves after a tournament. Seizing the moment, and looking and sounding exactly like a Disney prince rather than the poor street kid he allegedly is (his poor thatcher Dad is frequently invoked as hokey inspiring spirit). He dons his armor, practices for a few weeks with his buddies, starts piling up tournament champsionships, falls in love with Lady Jocelyn (Shannyn Sossamon), encounters some royalty, and runs afoul of the evil Count Adhemar (Rufus Sewell). The problem is that only nobility have the right to have their heads knocked off in tournaments, and unmasking will lead to the stocks or worse.
Jocelyn is a poor choice for William for several reasons. First off, she's noble and he isn't, a relationship issue. Second, she's a twit, demanding at one point that he permit himself to get clobbered by other jousters to prove his love for her. Third, Count Adhemar (yes, his armor is black and he is nasty to his horse) is also in love with her, and deeply suspicious of William's lineage. William and his buddies, played by Mark Addy and Alan Tudyk (with a winning turn by Paul Bettany as Geoffrey Chaucer, here portrayed as a writer, poet and gambling addict), understand that if they are found out, William will go straight to the stocks at the center of computer-animated Tudor London.
Revealing any more of the story would be unnecessary spoilage, though frankly, nobody will be on the edge of his seat with suspense about the outcome. Still, the movie is good-hearted, and since the good stuff doesn't roll out until next week, it's good for a few laughs. The teen movie has been a distinct and popular subgenre for several years now, but A Knight's Tale is genuinely groundbreaking: it would hardly have seemed possible to fuse that genre with this oft-told yarn, turning Geoffrey Chaucer into a player in a teen buddy yarn. But Hollywood has risen to the occasion.
Actually, Heath Ledger's first big American breakthrough was "10 Things I Hate About You." However, he had been making films and TV series for some time prior.
duh. Turn in your nerd credentials. You have violated commandment #1. Don't bash others expression of geekness even if you don't like it.
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Funny? I suppose, but if you'd like a slightly harsher review, here you go.
Kevin Fox
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Kevin Fox
A criticism of a movie review from one who has a movie quote as a .sig
.sig, but you don't see Slashdot delivering a joke story of the day, now, do you?
There are plenty of people on here with amusing quotes in their
What's your damage, Heather?
Every time Katz does a movie review somebody bitches about how this is offtopic. Of course it is. Is it going away? No. Shut the fuck up.
Oh, good point! Forgot about that. We're powerless. Thanks. I'll be sure to let those anti-Communist protesters in, so they can stop wasting their time too. No sense in bothering with voicing one's opinion. Appreciate that insight!
What's your damage, Heather?
Could someone please stop Jon Katz from reviewing movies here?
You may want to take a closer look at your preferences page. Last time I checked, you can turn off stories based on the category they fall under, or by author. With just a few clicks, you'll never see a story by Katz on the front page again. Personally, I like seeing the occasional story from him, if just for the entertainment value in some of the comments following it!
It's only software!
However, I've not yet seen the film, so I can't make a complete judgement on it. My assessment of the film, however, is that it will be another bomb. Might be entertaining, in it's own special way. *shrug*
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CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I was surprised by a few things in this movie. Firstly, except for "We Will Rock You" at the start, the modern songs didn't detract from the movie like I thought they would. They worked quite well. Secondly, the characters actually seemed interesting: the Count wasn't pure evil, just a jerk; and the woman he wanted (Jocelyn) wasn't a perfect fairy princess. The plot seemed to be driven by the characters for the first half of the movie.
<SPOILERS>
Then, halfway through, everything freezes up, and the interesting characters vanish and are replaced by one-dimensional robots whose only purpose is to get the plot to its inevitable conclusion. Everyone seems to forget that Jocelyn was a spoiled brat. The Count became the epitome of evil. All the supporting characters became identical weepy-eyed sycophants whose only purpose was to spout supposedly inspiring tripe at the appropriate moment. (Note to writers: you can't create drama just by having everyone cry.) And just when our hero is in the stocks, with no hope of escape, we have the textbook deus ex machina moment when the prince of Wales comes and releases him.
</SPOILERS>
I thought the first half of this movie was very entertaining, and the second half was as dull and inevitable as watching bathwater flowing down the drain.
I guess that's pretty harsh, but I was all the more disappointed because the first half seemed so good.
Overall, I think the movie is worth seeing. It's quite entertaining if you don't think too hard.
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Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
You forgot to mention the surreal David Bowie dance scene. This movie was the bomb, yo.
I liked this movie, but here we disagree.
The hero and the token babe have, if memory serves me correctly, three short public conversations, one short public argument, and sex, in that order. That's a bit rushed for me.
Maybe not graphic sex, and if "We Will Rock You" wasn't out of context, than a little boinking surely wasn't, but it flunked the responsibility test flat.
Still a hilarious, fun movie, though, and I'll recommend it to any of my friends.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
I saw a Knight's Tale last night. I thought it was pretty funny and I'm not a teen; I'm in those 30 something years. The music was well matched to the theme, and the acting was well done for the movie's ambiance. Accuracy, I have no idea, but what they portrayed in the movie was just right.
I didn't find myself once distracted by the tempting glow of the neon exit sign.
I just wished William had fallen for the right girl, the blacksmith, ferrier, armoursmith or what ever they called her. She was far more interesting than the royal twit.
If you haven't seen it yet, stick around to the very end of the credits for a taste of really immature humor that will leave you with a chuckle.
P.S. I find the Katz bashing on this review as bad as the bashers claim Katz to be. Other than the teen comments, Katz got this one pretty close to the mark.
There's not "own special way" about it--the movie sucks. But it's like The Blues Brothers in the way it sucks--the movie is so bad, it's good. It's actually a bit witty, and never, ever takes itself seriously. When we saw it on friday night, my girlfriend asked, "Do we want to leave now, or should we wait a few minutes?" during the opening Queen scene. By the end of the movie, we and the other couple we saw it with, agreed that it was actually a decent flick. (Of course, it helped that we kept the theater going with MST3K-like commentary... :)
YMMV
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
Whenever I see rms I think "root mean squared" from my days doing statistics in psychology. What do other folks think when they see RMS (or rms)? Oh, I mean, what do people think besides Richard M. Stallman? This isn't a question out of disrespect. It is question that digs into how people think, and categorize and use TLAs.
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Rich
This movie had a pop culture twist just like the modern "Romeo and Juliet" (although I hated that movie). This movie wasn't supposed to be true to the time. Also, the movie theatre that I work at has had a good showing of ALL ages.
You screwed up some points in the movie:
"Jocelyn is a poor choice for William for several reasons. First off, she's noble and he isn't, a relationship issue."
She doesn't know that he isn't noble (until later).
"...Count Adhemar (yes, his armor is black and he is nasty to his horse) is also in love with her.."
He wasn't in love with her - he refered to her as a trophy, he obviously didn't care about her.
"...she's a twit, demanding at one point that he permit himself to get clobbered by other jousters to prove his love for her."
If you would have been paying attention you would have known that she was fed up with knights saying they would win the tournament for her. All it proved was how vain the knights were.
It wasn't by any means an excellent movie, but it was a good, entertaining movie.
I'm still waiting for Shrek and Pearl Harbor!
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
I just saw this movie last night and howled in laughter through much of it. Heck, I'm sure that my friends and I were getting strange looks from everyone else in theater... The different characters are extremely well done; Chaucer was too hilarious for words, particularly as we realized all of the Canterbury Tales references. People comment that William just picks up a lance and learns how to fight in a month, but they miss one thing - he's been a squire since he was nine, so I suspect he'd had a bit of practice; we know he had plenty of sword practice. Basically, this movie made fun of a lot of things - sports crowds, particularly wrestling, with the announcer style of Chaucer-as-herald and the makeup, were a particular target... I loved how when they switched to modern music in the courtly dance, the dancing still maintained a feeling of precision. I thought the Nike product placement was hilariously funny. Just for the record, I'm not a teenage girl - I'm married and in my twenties. Oh, and I saw it was several Scadians, who pointed out some of the mistakes, but mostly with amusement. Time to stop babbling. Kria
I thought the first sign of suckness was the trailer, which unfortunately makes a good argument for giving away too much of the movie in a preview. I think I'll spend my 7 bucks on renting a truly accurate historical epic, Holy Grail.
Ni!
So many people bitch out the music... when you think about it, a full orchestra isn't realistic either. Jousting took place before symphonies, sorry. Nobody bitched about Gladiator's symphonic soundtrack, did they? Well the time-distance between gladiators and symphonies is more then it is between classic rock and jousting. It makes as much sense as anything.
...First Knight. Its a decent story, but they attached Arthurian legend to it to desecrate "Morte d'Arthur".
I wasn't going to see this, and everyone has convinced me not to even look in the direction of the theater...
Hopefully, Pearl Harbor is as good as everyone is trying to make it... or I'll have to wait for Lord of the Rings...
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Preston Sturges made this very point in his 1942 film Sullivan's Travels. A director of crowd-pleasing fluff films decides that, with the Depression on, he needs to turn toward social relevance -- but a trip among the common people convinces him that what they really need is escapism.
By the way, the title of his planned grimly realistic film was O Brother, Where Art Thou?. Nice to see that good titles get recycled...
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When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
and Medieval peasants could certainly be a rowdy bunch. So it in perverse way, this may actually catch some of the energy and excitement of the tournaments even if it is otherwise sheer fantasy.
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"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Most movies that have been hits in recent times have been silly. It's proibably because to many serious things are happening around us and we haven't been able to afford to be silly in our social lives.
There's always sufficient, but not always at the right place nor for the right folks.
I took my teenage daughter to see this film Friday ONLY because the movie I had hoped to see was not going to screen for a few more hours, fully expecting to be revulsed by the usual teen formula picture.
I enjoyed this picture.
Furthermore, I think "A Knight's Tale" is one of those rare occurances where Hollywood has found just the right balance for this age group. As a parent, I resent movies that promote out of context, graphic sexual irresponsibility and senseless (or worse, fashionable) violence. This film handled both with kid gloves, and in many ways, this film reminded me of the horse opera films of the 60's which I grew up on.
The one, small flaw I found in the film was a product of the pop culture injection. While this worked well during the opening "We Will, We Will Rock You" segment because it was a clever extention/integration of the sountrack into the on-screen action, during the post-joust dinner dance sceen they revert to period music and then try to jump 400 years musically in mid dance. I felt that this came off awkwardly.
With the MPAA being what I percieve to be an immoral and oppressive force in our society today, I'm careful about how and when I give my money to Hollywood (I don't and will not own a DVD player). The makers of "A Knight's Tale" should feel good about this effort, right up to point where they release on DVD. Then they can go to hell.
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
ish.
The Wife of Bath, the Cook with the running sore, really, good ole Geoff was aiming for middle-brow yucks just as much as the Farelly brothers do.
Undoubtably, the high born of Chaucer's age were publically aghast at his lewdnes and vulgarity (while enjoying him in private,i'm sure).
So, A Knights Tale is just another middle-brow targeted tale.
TG
See, that just totally ruined for me whatever credibility this review had.
Yeah, I thought this was a review of Shrek. Curses!