A Knight's Tale

And I expected the guy to go into Monty Python’s Parrot Sketch. But first he showed us some previews.

FINAL FANTASY–This movie holds the future of computer animation in it’s realistic little hands…and it looks AWESOME!!!!! Even if little girls next to me gave it a thumbs down. They’re at the wrong age anyway. Unfortunately, they’re at almost exactly the age that they’re selling it to. But I’m going to be there and so are some friend of mine who are really into this sort of thing. And so should you be, too.

Or something.

AMERICAN PIE II–Yes, the kids are back, and they want more sex!! Funny how that works. Looks pretty funny, but I have one question: How did Jim’s parents and his girlfriend’s parents all end up in the same room while the two of them were in bed together? Unless Jim and the girl are roommates, which is highly unlikely in a non-Threesome environment, the two sets of parents would never have met like that.

But maybe it’s explained in the movie. It makes for a pretty funny scene, though. And one of the best lines from either movie, “I believe we met your daughter. I didn’t catch her name, but hopefully my son did.” Um, like, that’s all the previews I can remember for now, so here’s the main event.

And when I say main event I mean MAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIN EEEEEEVEEEEEEEEENNNNNNNNT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yes, if jousting had been wrestling (which it may have been the wrestling of it’s day…only more real) it would have looked something like this movie.

But I get ahead of myself.

William Tatcher (Heath Ledger, today’s it golden boy) is a poor peasant kid who really wants to “change his stars” and become a knight. Unfortunately, that’s very difficult in medieval England. Fortunately, Will’s employer, a jousting knight, as just died after losing his last match. But no one knows except for the servants, so Will goes in his place.

Now, this is where things get really dangerous. You see, peasants aren’t allowed to joust. Only real knights are allowed to be killed in nasty ways in this event.

His buddies, Roland (Mark Addy from The Full Monty and The Flintstones In Viva Rock Vegas) and Wat (Alan Tudyk from Wonder Boys and 28 Days…sporting a horrendous Scouse accent) are not too happy about Will’s decision to become Sir Ulrich von Lichtenstein, descendant of many, many knights. Of course the blurtings of buddy Geoffrey Chaucer (Paul Bettany from Bent and Kiss Kiss (Bang Bang)) don’t hurt his popularity at all. His introductions at matches are more Hulk Hogan than King Arthur. (He even calls Will “The Rock” a couple of times. Sad.) And his armor, made by the blacksmith they picked up along the way (Laura Fraser from Virtual Sexuality (not as dirty as it sounds) and Titus (also not as dirty as it sounds…but close)), is lighter and stronger than anyone else’s. Convenient, that.

Enter Jocelyn (beautiful newcomer Shannyn Sossamon). She is a princess who begins to fall for the little knight who could. But she’s not impressed by his winnings. In fact, when he doesn’t promise to win the tournament for her it catches her interest. It’s his persistence that pays off in that department.

But all cannot be well for Good Sir Knight. No, there has to be a bad guy. This is where Count Adhemar (Rufus Sewell from Dark City and Dangerous Beauty) comes in. He falls for Jocelyn, too, but in a much less romantic way. He just wants a woman for his mantel. And he’ll do anything to get her.

The story is pretty pedestrian. Boy has big dreams. Boy starts his work on the dreams. Boy meets girl. Boy meets arch nemesis. Girl tells boy to lose if he loves her. It happens everyday. Well, to me, anyway.

What makes this movie different is its gimmick. And what a gimmick! Imagine anything anachronistic for this time. Now stick it in the movie and make it work. From the first beats of Queen’s “We Will Rock You” to the Pretty Woman style dress and hat that Jocelyn wears to the first strains of Thin Lizzy’s “The Boys Are Back In Town” all the way to the guys singing words to the tune of “Stars And Stripes Forever” everything actually works to the movie’s advantage. Check out the amazing melding of David Bowie’s “Golden Years” with a more traditional medieval piece of music. Well, almost everything. There is a joke with the Nike swooshes that’s a little hard to take, but product placements must be made somewhere, I guess.

It did, however, have a few too many parallels to a little movie set in medieval times starring Heath’s Patriot co-star. There’s the woman of high persuasion falling for the rogue. She’s supposed to marry someone else who actually has her persuasion. Now, you may say that these are just coincidental plot points that ALL movies have. But I give you more examples that are a little harder to write off. Jocelyn’s maid had the same accent as Princess Isabelle’s maid. AND she started to fall for the fat friend of the hero. There was also a cry in the final jousting scene that was WAY too reminiscent of William Wallace’s (another parallel…their names) cry of “FREEEEEDDOOOOOOMMMMMM!!!!!” at the end of the better movie.

And just to show that this movie is an equal opportunity rip-off artist, there’s a scene in a jail that is way too much like the jail scene near the end of Gladiator and a Deus ex Machina that apes the one in Robin Hood-Prince Of Thieves.

But the cast doesn’t disappoint. Heath is a pretty good actor for a pretty boy. He did, however, seem to have learned a lot from his older Aussie co-star from that last flick. He had a few Gibson-esque mannerisms in this one that I never saw before. At one point I actually expected Will to say, “Aye. Fight and you may die. Run, and you’ll live. At least a while.”

And the Chaucer character was great! Bettany did a great job as a man whose only joy in life was to be the center of attention and explore human nature in his writings…which we never actually see him write. I don’t know enough about Chaucer’s work to know if there were very many in-jokes about it, but I imagine that there probably were. And wasn’t it appropriate that he looked quite a bit like Sting? (Only we real Sting-freaks will catch that one. Although hasn’t he lost some of his talent lately? Oh well. One can’t write good songs forever, I guess.)

The sidekicks were funny (if Wat was a bit too much like a cross between John Stewart and Michael Rapaport) and Jocelyn was beautiful and almost ethereal. Pretty good embodiment of an independent princess.

But I guess Rufus Sewell was the real standout, as always. He’s a great actor who doesn’t always get great roles. This one was pretty good, though. He was evil, yet almost charming in his own weird way. But he was almost too evil. And then he didn’t even really get his comeuppance. He never actually gets shown for the truly evil man that he really is. We know it (and the little girls next to me screeched when they saw what he had in store for Will…HE CAN’T HURT HEATH!!!!! He’s all chocolatey with a hard caramel center!!) and Will and his buddies know it, but the jousting audience never really finds out. Shame. I would have liked to have seen him in the stocks. At least they didn’t commit the Twister sin and kill him. That was just dumb.

So Brian Helgeland (co-writer of L.A. Confidential, Conspiracy Theory, and The Postman (whoops) and writer/director of Payback–I wonder how Heath got this role) has brought us a stylized version of the medieval times. No, it’s not very realistic, but we couldn’t sell tickets if Heath had shit all over him and his teeth were falling out. Well, maybe we could, but to the wrong kind of people. It’s nothing if not entertaining. Lots of action, comedy and romance. It’s only real crime is that it’s just silly. And I don’t use that word often. In fact I hate that word, but it’s the only way to describe the movie. Silly. But in a good way. I can think of worse ways to spend two hours.

And it’s got a great soundtrack, too.