Poll of the Day > Green Knight

(+) Yeah! (+)

just found out about this movie. I saw Chappie, but I did not see Slum dog millionaire. The trailer looks like it will be a good movie.

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Saw it last night, it wasn't for me. Can appreciate that it's well made, had good acting and cinematography but the direction was overly pretentious and seems purposefully hard to understand

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Clench281 posted...

Saw it last night, it wasn't for me. Can appreciate that it's well made, had good acting and cinematography but the direction was overly pretentious and seems purposefully hard to understand

is the dialogue in old english?

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Clench281 posted...

Saw it last night, it wasn't for me. Can appreciate that it's well made, had good acting and cinematography but the direction was overly pretentious and seems purposefully hard to understand

i just heard about it yesterday, but i don't know anything

is it hollywood bullshit, or accurate to the source material?

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Understanding the dialog wasn't a problem, it's pretty much modern English and some of it is even funny. But there's a lot of periods with no dialog at all.

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wydrah posted...

i just heard about it yesterday, but i don't know anything

is it hollywood bullshit, or accurate to the source material?

I haven't read the poem, I went in bind. Others I went with said it's a modern spin on the legend, and definitely makes some changes, but again I'm not sure to what extent

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Clench281 posted...

I haven't read the poem, I went in bind. Others I went with said it's a modern spin on the legend, and definitely makes some changes, but again I'm not sure to what extent

i'm a little fearful of a King Arthur (2004) repeat

I think there was another one that came out recently that was also very bad

i look forward to being pretention about this if i see it

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wydrah posted...

i'm a little fearful of a King Arthur (2004) repeat

King Arthur has never been treated well in hollywood :(

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Im gonna get very stoned before I watch it -Mead

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Mead posted...

Im gonna get very stoned before I watch it -Mead

Is "Green Knight" a flavor of weed lol?

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Dmess85 posted...

Is "Green Knight" a flavor of weed lol?

no I just think itll make a movie like that more entertaining

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Dmess85 posted...

Is "Green Knight" a flavor of weed lol?

Green Crack sure is though.

Dmess85 posted...

King Arthur has never been treated well in hollywood :(

I don't think the Arthurian myth follows a traditional narrative structure, unless you're following adapting specific stories, at which point I don't think most people are familiar enough to easily follow.

People know the name King Arthur more than the specifics.

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it is a boring movie

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Dmess85 posted...

Is "Green Knight" a flavor of weed lol?

Since it's not brain damaged baby talk I would lean toward no. But it does have the word "green" in it so maybe.

SomeUsername529 posted...

Since it's not brain damaged baby talk I would lean toward no.

what is this in reference to?

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Clench281 posted...

but the direction was overly pretentious and seems purposefully hard to understand

This is my problem with it. The trailer could be giving a false impression, but it makes it look like it's that sort of "faux artsy" style that people use when they're trying to convince people they're deep. Or like music video-style visuals without the music.

But I might just be biased because I loved this movie growing up:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGJMV8qj9g8
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tbh, when I saw the trailer, I recognized the legend and my interest mostly bottomed out. Considering how many times it popped up on this board, I'm surprised you only now learned about it.

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Mead posted...

what is this in reference to?

Weed names are extremely dumb.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

This is my problem with it. The trailer could be giving a false impression, but it makes it look like it's that sort of "faux artsy" style that people use when they're trying to convince people they're deep. Or like music video-style visuals without the music.

But I might just be biased because I loved this movie growing up:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGJMV8qj9g8

Gawain the greatest knight of all? What about my boy Percy?!

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Dmess85 posted...

King Arthur has never been treated well in hollywood :(

Excalibur is pretty good!

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Blighboy posted...

I don't think the Arthurian myth follows a traditional narrative structure, unless you're following adapting specific stories, at which point I don't think most people are familiar enough to easily follow.

People know the name King Arthur more than the specifics.

What do you mean by a traditional narrative structure?

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I guess I mean that Arthurian legend feels more like a "setting" than a "story", and most people aren't familiar enough with it to make it easily adaptable? Outside of the Sword in the Stone.

I only have a passing familiarity I'm not gonna pretend to be an expert, I could be way off.

But it seems most adaptations of King Arthur seems to try to adapt the King Arthur legend as a whole, when the right answer would be to do what this film did and adapt specific stories.

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Blighboy posted...

I guess I mean that Arthurian legend feels more like a "setting" than a "story", and most people aren't familiar enough with it to make it easily adaptable? Outside of the Sword in the Stone.

I only have a passing familiarity I'm not gonna pretend to be an expert, I could be way off.

But it seems most adaptations of King Arthur seems to try to adapt the King Arthur legend as a whole, when the right answer would be to do what this film did and adapt specific stories.

Arthurian legend has a narrative history dating back about a thousand years. The most influential for us is probably Le Morte d'Arthur, but The Once and Future King (The Sword and the Stone) is also influential.

Gawain and the Green Knight is part of a lengthy literary tradition of medieval romances (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wedding_of_Sir_Gawain_and_Dame_Ragnelle). The literary tradition there is rich, but probably will be bastardized or ignored by this film.

I think Arthurian legend lends itself well to Hollywood in some ways. If you read the actual source material, it is FUCKED UP. Rampant violence and a lot of sex.

I kind of agree that Hollywood tried to adapt the legends as a whole. It's impossible for one movie to do that (I would LOVE a TV series like Game of Thrones or the upcoming Lord of the Rings Amazon series. Holy shit that would be amazing) because of how many stories there are. So what Hollywood tries to do instead, often, is turn Arthur himself into an action hero. He's not, really. He's a king. He rules while his knights go out and fight for him. That's what a lot of movies get wrong imo.

Excalibur handled it well in that it depicted Arthur's rise to power, which did involve action on his part, and then focused on his governance, which is the majority of the legend.

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Clench281 posted...

the direction was overly pretentious

What in the fuck is this even supposed to mean lol

clench is a michael bay fan

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honkzilla posted...

What in the fuck is this even supposed to mean lol

The style of the movie that the director imparted

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I don't think I like any Michael Bay movies

More of a Christopher Nolan (except for Tenet) kind of guy

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honkzilla posted...

What in the fuck is this even supposed to mean lol

Generally, "style over substance", especially in a "pretending to be more sophisticated then you actually are" sort of way.



wydrah posted...

Gawain the greatest knight of all? What about my boy Percy?!

Pssht, bitch came in third place out of three when it came to Grail finding, and he wasn't even good enough to get a reference in Monty Python and the Holy Grail..

Also, he was a back-woods hillbilly and his dad got punked out by Gawain and his brothers.



wydrah posted...

Excalibur is pretty good!

Anail nathrak, uthvass bethud, dochiel dienve...
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Blighboy posted...

People know the name King Arthur more than the specifics.

they probably know it based on the flour

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wydrah posted...

So what Hollywood tries to do instead, often, is turn Arthur himself into an action hero. He's not, really. He's a king. He rules while his knights go out and fight for him.

Ehhhh...

The problem is, Arthur does kind of fight. For years. Not just as a "general" but as a warrior (because that's how combat was generally handled in that setting/era).

But most of the stories go "Here's Arthur's origin story, boom - sword, crown, table. He and his allies fought for years to unite the land, but we're going to skip over every one of those fights and timeskip forward to the point where he's uncontested king and his knights were going out and having adventures." So you're mostly skipping over the entirety of his "action hero" years.

Then you have the amorphous period of time where tons of adventures are being had, where they're mostly told as self-contained stories or anecdotes without any clear timeline - which is what happens when you're trying to assemble folklore and fairy tales after the fact and hammering them into a narrative framework (imagine if the Brothers Grimm collected all their various unrelated fairy tales, but then wrote a framing story to link them all and wrote in occasional crossovers between characters... you'd basically have something like medieval Kingdom Hearts). But because they're not really interconnected, most media either picks one or two and adapts the crap out of them, or they ignore them entirely in favor of skipping ahead to the ending.

And then the myth cycle sort of jams the whole "Oh, and then Arthur fucked his sister, Mordred's here now, Grail, oops Guinevere's cucked him, Lancelot's gone, Saxons, Battle of Badon Hill, Avalon" storyline in at the end to cap the whole thing off. So that's a ton of crazy crap happening all at once at the end.

And then you get Merlin and his related shenanigans woven into the overarching story to tie it to together.

So you've basically got a multi-part structure, but the tone of each part is very different from the others, and there's too much content in some of those parts to cram into a single movie, let alone cramming the entire story into a single movie. You wind up leaving waaay too much out.

If anyone ever did a Game of Thrones-esque TV series set in Arthurian lore, what you'd kind of need to do is maybe make the first couple episodes the really idealistic origin story, then the rest of the first season would be Arthur actively fighting for the throne, probably winning it for the season finale. Then season two skips ahead a bit, Arthur's settled in (and maybe already had or is just getting the round table), and then you have episodic (or two-part) stories where each knight gets his own stand-alone adventure, so Gawain and the Green Knight, Pellinore and the Questing Beast, etc. Jut build up how awesome each knight is, and get the audience to like them. Maybe cap off the season by having Galahad show up and sit in the Siege Perilous, because shit just got real.

Then have your third season be the Grail Quest as a season-long story, where most of the knights we learned to like in the previous season utterly fail, some die, and Camelot generally suffers for it, as the good knights are whittled away and the less than noble ones remain.

And then season four is when everything gets really bleak. Mordred shows up, the Cuckening gets outed, Lancelot kills Gawain's brothers and war breaks out, the Saxons show up, etc etc. Then the final scenes of the final episode are Arthur dying, Bedivere throwing the sword back into the lake, and Arthur getting carried off to Avalon.

And then if you get renewed for season five, you can have Arthur come back in the future and do a Camelot 3000 riff:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camelot_3000
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wydrah posted...

Gawain the greatest knight of all? What about my boy Percy?!

i thought lancelot was the one who didn't lose to anything.

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Pretty sure I learned in school that the Arthurian legend and myths actually originated from a group of nobleman traders and not knights or warriors or anything

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Mead posted...

Pretty sure I learned in school that the Arthurian legend and myths actually originated from a group of nobleman traders and not knights or warriors or anything

They originated over a fairly wide span of time and not even exclusively from the British isles (I believe Lancelot was basically french fanfic).

The historical Arthur, if he existed, is typically considered to have been a Celtic or Roman (probably mixed race at that point) warlord from around ~500 who fought a war against invading Anglo-Saxons (Germans) who later became the English ruling class.

The King Arthur "bible" was written around 1000 years later as The Death of King Arthur, compiling all the popular stories that had originated in the previous millenium.

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Blighboy posted...

They originated over a fairly wide span of time and not even exclusively from the British isles (I believe Lancelot was basically french fanfic).

The historical Arthur, if he existed, is typically considered to have been a Celtic or Roman (probably mixed race at that point) warlord from around ~500 who fought a war against invading Anglo-Saxons (German tribes) who later became the English ruling class (or part of the English ruling class, later mixed with Danish and Normans and all those other fun groups).

The King Arthur "bible" was written around 1000 years later as The Death of King Arthur, compiling all the popular stories that had originated in the previous millenium.

To add to this, a lot of the stories started as Welsh and Cornish folklore (because that's where the Romano-Britons got driven to when the Angles and the Saxons pushed into England), some of which managed to cross the channel back to Brittany via other British expatriots (hence the name), which in turn led to the growth of French infatuation with Arthur and which resulted in characters like Lancelot getting added in later.

Arthur tended to go in and out of fashion in England, and whenever there was a surge of interest the story would usually get reinterpreted into modern ideals (which is how full plate armor and chivalry found its way into stories that originated long before either of those two things existed). The Normans in particular loved the crap out of Arthur, and are probably the main reason why so much of the narrative has survived and been perpetuated all the way to the present day (and why his story is known as "The Matter of Britain" in the same way that Charlemagne and Roland and fighting the Moors are "The Matter of France".
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

Generally, "style over substance", especially in a "pretending to be more sophisticated then you actually are" sort of way.

Pssht, bitch came in third place out of three when it came to Grail finding, and he wasn't even good enough to get a reference in Monty Python and the Holy Grail..

Also, he was a back-woods hillbilly and his dad got punked out by Gawain and his brothers.

Anail nathrak, uthvass bethud, dochiel dienve...

Chretien de Troyes' Perceval, the Story of the Grail is my favorite Arthurian tale. The shit Percy does is hilarious. The grail means nothing to me! I want to see more of this rube awkwardly interact with knights and ladies.

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ParanoidObsessive posted...

If anyone ever did a Game of Thrones-esque TV series set in Arthurian lore, what you'd kind of need to do is maybe make the first couple episodes the really idealistic origin story, then the rest of the first season would be Arthur actively fighting for the throne, probably winning it for the season finale. Then season two skips ahead a bit, Arthur's settled in (and maybe already had or is just getting the round table), and then you have episodic (or two-part) stories where each knight gets his own stand-alone adventure, so Gawain and the Green Knight, Pellinore and the Questing Beast, etc. Jut build up how awesome each knight is, and get the audience to like them. Maybe cap off the season by having Galahad show up and sit in the Siege Perilous, because shit just got real.

Then have your third season be the Grail Quest as a season-long story, where most of the knights we learned to like in the previous season utterly fail, some die, and Camelot generally suffers for it, as the good knights are whittled away and the less than noble ones remain.

And then season four is when everything gets really bleak. Mordred shows up, the Cuckening gets outed, Lancelot kills Gawain's brothers and war breaks out, the Saxons show up, etc etc. Then the final scenes of the final episode are Arthur dying, Bedivere throwing the sword back into the lake, and Arthur getting carried off to Avalon.

Yeah, Arthur does get into a lot of action, but it's primarily when he's young and uniting the various kings under him. There is a lot of action there (and Arthur does some fucked up shit :o). And then sometimes toward the end in stories where he fights Mordred. But once his kingdom is united and the Round Table established, the knights take center stage. Yet many modern depictions condense the breadth of Arthurian Legend into Arthur being the focal point all the time.

I love your medieval Kingdom Hearts comment. Spot on.

Did you ever see First Knight? lmao

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Apparently when you try to say "fuck" with 13 us, you get this message and cannot post it:

An obfuscated form of the word "fuck" was found in your message text. Please do not attempt to bypass the site censor, as this word is not restricted; just post "fuck" without trying to obscure it.

wtf lol. i wanted it for emphasis

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Yeah it bypasses the censor unfortunately

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wydrah posted...

Did you ever see First Knight? lmao

Ugh. ~vomit~







Though, since you're apparently a fan of Excalibur, I'm gonna hit you with... this:

http://youtu.be/n89R6rQll0w?t=130
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w...what is this?

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Terror.
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I skipped around and saw some setups for nude scenes, but never any nudity. Only bad acting. why would you do this to me

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The only way to alleviate this pain is to share it. I have carried this burden since the 80s. Now you know it's sting.
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Shymalan twist, what if they were all just hardcore larpers?

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ParanoidObsessive posted...

imagine if the Brothers Grimm collected all their various unrelated fairy tales, but then wrote a framing story to link them all and wrote in occasional crossovers between characters... you'd basically have something like medieval Kingdom Hearts

Okay but Into the Woods was really fuckin good

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Metalsonic66 posted...

Okay but Into the Woods was really fuckin good

I watched a live production, and it was incredible. I wish I could experience it again.

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Yeah, King arthur it's crap treatment in hollywood

"A Kid in kig arthur's Court"

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Dmess85 posted...

Yeah, King arthur it's crap treatment in Hollywood

"A Kid in King arthur's Court"

Well, that's just a modified adaptation of this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Connecticut_Yankee_in_King_Arthur%27s_Court

Same as this, honestly:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Knight_(film)
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A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is *chef's kiss*

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