Referring to Guy Ritchie’s rather trivial take on the Matter of Britain, here are the three most interesting filmed versions of the tale.

Director John Boorman was always up to no good in the film world, both to the medium’s benefit (Point Blank) and its detriment (Exorcist II), although I have to admit that Zardoz belongs in the annals of essential cinema simply as an artifact of the medium at its most casually disregarding common-sense. Take Excalibur, which occupies Boorman’s customary mode of multi-aesthetic pile-up, where the foliage of legend abounds, the effect of which is a loopy, nonsensical gamble, excessive and adjacent to hallucination. An early battle is staged as a conundrum, not quite as wonderfully unstable as the abstract battle in Orson Welles’ Chimes at Midnight but in the same cul-de-sac, especially when judged by blockbuster standards. Silhouettes poised with sinister intent, devoid of human specificity, are an early indication of Boorman’s mythic inclinations and his treatment of the material as spiritual divination. Despite Boorman never having directed in this genre before, I could show you a highlight reel and give you the rough release date and you, the hypothetical connoisseur of gonzo cinema, might well be able to narrow it down to Boorman in a heartbeat. There’s also enough vaginal imagery to perk any mid-century psychoanalyst’s ears up; It’s that kind of motion picture. It’s as though Boorman received the film fully formed through divine intervention. Continue reading →

Referring to Guy Ritchie’s rather trivial take on the Matter of Britain, here are the three most interesting filmed versions of the tale.

A million and one of us can hone in on a panoply of specific moments, turning critique of Monty Python and the Holy Grail into appreciation of Monty Python and the Holy Grail as well, not incidentally, an exercise in masturbatory self-congratulation. After all, the titular creators were sketch-artists and not narrative dramatists, so it goes without saying that Monty Python and the Holy Grail is a loosely-strung together hodgepodge of semi-connected and often contradictory, incommensurable pieces. But it’s the broad swath that impresses most, the keen eye for the scatter-brained nature of myths like Arthur that always seem to be trangentially reinterpreting themselves but not moving forward, struggling to plaster up the plot-holes in an essentially fuzzy and incomplete tale striving for the hazy appearance of sense. (The same, incidentally, is true of religion, which would be the Python’s next target). As a critique of the nature of sanding down the oddities and curiosities of a badly taped-together myth in order to approximate a precise narrative, Holy Grail actually makes a nice double-feature with the previous year’s Lancelot du Lac, the only other cinematic adaptation of the tale openly attuned to the fact that myths and legends only pretend to flow easily to hide the aporias and accidents that construct their very fabrics. Continue reading →

Referring to Guy Ritchie’s rather trivial take on the Matter of Britain, here are the three most interesting filmed versions of the tale.

 Shorn of obvious spectacle, and indeed stripped of affect or emotion, leaving a wiry, skeletal husk of human action divested of emotional concern on the part of the participants, Lancelot du Lac is much more than an honest” version of a much-told tale. Rather, Robert Bresson’s film is a rejoinder to decades of cinematic portals to the past and to the hubristic cinematic compulsion to re-equate us with a world – to think film can be our guide to a past world – that predates us not only physically but mentally by centuries. In Lancelot du Lac, the Matter of Britain is a gaseous state, hot air to be specific, a nationalist myth preaching dictums of achievement, predestination, and divine right filtered through masculine action.  Bresson has no compunction about dipping all those dreams in a joyless and uncompromising acid that shears away decades of cinematic myth-making and requests that we think of his own film more as a pantomime from the present rather than a literal glimpse of the past Continue reading →