Nothing Like the Sun

I pulled about 100 less-than-vital volumes from my overflowing bookshelves, today, and with sleepwhenimdead's help carted them to the local used bookstore.  As the owner sorted through my cast-offs, she actually tried to convince us to buy the place.  (Why not? It would only cost us 1,000 times what she paid me for my books ...)

I love history and have a sort of love-hate relationship with historical melodramas.  The genre tends to appeal to my fascinations with origins, with change, and with the real-but-exotic.  Of course, the bare facts are rarely sufficient in themselves to achieve a dramatic effect without at least some imaginative intervention, and onscreen historical fictions are generally more faithful to Hollywood story conventions than to history as such.  And, yes, most of the audience is there to be entertained, not to participate in a conversation about how things used to be or how they got to be the way they are.  But, being me, I often find myself watching a movie like The Kingdom of Heaven with one eye on the film's success as simple storytelling, or spectacle, and another on how much it really tells you about a real place and time.  It makes for a certain amount of cognitive dissonance.

Contrary to expectation, however, I found that The Kingdom of Heaven derived some of its most effective dramatic moments from history, and was at its weakest when the writers indulged their own cliché-ridden imaginations:  ( A lot of spoilers interspersed with things we know about the actual Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem ... )

"With this document, I intend to set the record straight before the slanderers who are determined to defame Zorro have their say. Our enemies are many, as is often the case with those who defend the weak, rescue damsels in distress, and humiliate the powerful. Naturally, every idealist attracts enemies, but we prefer to count our friends, who are much greater in number..."

It took me all of 4 hours from hearing (on NPR, today) about Isabel Allende's Zorro to buying a copy. Isabel Allende! The hardest part was deciding whether I was up to reading it en español or not ...

Blame it on drglam:

Instigated by drglam :

* Reply to this message telling me which of these 20 artists you have also seen.
* Take the ones from my list that you have seen, and post them in your own LJ.
* Add more until you have 20 (recent, favorites, or just go for diversity ...).

Director Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur rode into theaters last week as a gritty, Gladiator-like reboot of Arthurian legend. Rather than the supernatural tales of T.H. White or the medieval chivalric romance of Thomas Malory, this would be an older story, of barbarians at the gates, of a Romanized Celtic culture’s last stand against invading hordes of Germanic Angles and Saxons.

In fact, Fuqua’s King Arthur assembles a collection of facts and suppositions about three hundred years British and European history into a new myth, King-Arthur-shaped collage that confuses pagans with Christians, Romans with Italians, popes with emperors, and a second-century Roman cavalry commander with a fifth-century Romanized British warrior.

If King Arthur predictably fails as a history lesson about Dark Ages Britain, Fuqua's film does perhaps breathe new life into a much older version of Arthurian myth, one that's at least rooted in that little-understood era and its all-but-forgotten Romano-Celtic society.