Salon.com > Robin Hood

“Robin Hood’s” smoldering adult romance

Fri, 14 May 2010 00:20:00 +0000

Ridley Scott's "Robin Hood," which opened the Cannes Film Festival with a relatively low-wattage premiere on Wednesday night, has pretty much all the problems you'd expect from a big-budget Hollywood revision of material that's been told and retold on screen 248 times. (That's not an official count.) It's a solid half an hour too long and is constructed around an endless series of incoherent action scenes in which sweaty, hairy men wearing Dark Ages costumes and layers of drainage-ditch mud hack each other apart. It's got all the stylistic tics of Scott's late-career films: Murky, misty, oddly lit group shots that move from the ground to shoulder level and then track from right to left; back-and-forth reversals of camera position that violate the traditional language of cinema for no particular reason.

It's got a screenplay from Hollywood hackmeister Brian Helgeland that suffers from a near-terminal case of prequel-itis and is loaded with on-the-nose emotional beats and blasts of present-tense American ideology. Turns out Robin Hood wasn't just some dude in Sherwood Forest who stole from the rich and gave to the poor. He also brokered the deal between England's King John and the landed aristocracy that produced the Magna Carta, the foundational document for civil liberty in the English-speaking world! He was also George Washington's great-great-great-great-grandfather, and sent the Gettysburg Address to Lincoln via a time-travel mind-meld!

Cannes this film festival be saved?

Wed, 12 May 2010 18:12:00 +0000

PARIS -- It's already become a cliché to complain that the 63rd edition of the Cannes Film Festival lacks glitz and glamour. Hell, the 80-year-old lady who lives next door to you has probably been complaining about it. (She's younger than at least two of the directors in this festival.) I especially appreciated spending a long layover in Charles de Gaulle Airport reading old pro Joan Dupont's take in the International Herald Tribune. (Presumably it also appeared in the New York Times.) A veteran of many decades at this festival, Dupont basically says the whole thing's been going downhill since at least 1980 -- and that even then, old-timers claimed the fun had all been ruined.

Still, there's something different about this year. When I read the other day that Cannes was adding "Route Irish," the new film from 2006 Palme d'Or winner Ken Loach, as a last-minute competition entry, I was momentarily confused: But they've already got a Ken Loach film.

Cannes opens with Crowe’s beefy “Robin Hood”

Wed, 12 May 2010 12:54:00 +0000

The Cannes Film Festival gets off to a strapping start on Wednesday with Russell Crowe's "Robin Hood," though the lineup is leaner than usual, with fewer household names among the actors and directors at the world's most prestigious cinema showcase.

Key names are among the 19 films competing for the Palme d'Or, the festival's coveted top prize, including new movies by "Amores Perros" director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Cannes best film laureates Ken Loach and Abbas Kiarostami, as well as Japan's Takeshi Kitano.

Ahead of the premiere of "Robin Hood," fans were staking out a spot near the festival headquarters in hope of catching a glimpse of Crowe and co-star Cate Blanchett as they walk the newly laid red carpet later Wednesday.

The media blitz around Ridley Scott's adaptation comes at a convenient time for the action-packed film, which will go head-to-head with the reigning blockbuster "Iron Man 2" when it opens in parts of Europe and the U.S. this week.

Like "Robin Hood," many of the other big-name movies in this, the 63rd edition of the prestigious festival are to be shown out of competition.

How Robin Hood became a socialist

Tue, 11 May 2010 21:01:00 +0000

Ridley Scott's "Robin Hood," starring Russell Crowe as a common archer turned proto-revolutionary and national warrior, will bring no merriness to the month of May. Given Crowe's surly persona, the film affords no capering in the greenwood in the manner of Douglas Fairbanks, no cocky Saxon tricksterism in the vein of Errol Flynn, and mercifully no SoCal modernity in the style of Kevin Costner. In their desire to break with the traditional aura of the English outlaw, Scott, Crowe and writer Brian Helgeland have created a moody war movie redolent of their 2000 Oscar success "Gladiator," that offers a lesson in medieval realpolitik.

The majority of "Robin Hood" movies are much softer than Scott's because violent realism wasn't an existing style at the time they were made. The likes of "Prince of Thieves" (1948), "The Men of Sherwood Forest" (1954), and "Sword of Sherwood Forest" (1960) were hidebound by the merry England clichés that were the rule of thumb in Hollywood and British cinema until Richard Lester's beautifully spare and rugged "Robin and Marian" (1976), with Sean Connery, subverted the storybook visual style.

Test your cinema-snob IQ!

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 18:32:00 +0000

Good morning and good evening, class. We've got a pop quiz for you today, on the topic of Auteurs and Artistes of the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. If you're a filmmaker, a film critic or a film-industry professional of any kind, you might want to recuse yourself -- except no, on second thought, don't. You are, after all, a human being even if you work in the movie biz, and here at Film Salon we truly value your input!

OK, here goes. What follows is a list of directors whose new films will be screened in the official selection of this year's Cannes Film Festival (which was recently announced).

Here's how it works: Give yourself one point if you've heard of the director, two points if you can correctly name a film he or she has directed (I had to dig deep to find a woman for this list, let us note in passing) and three points if you've actually seen one of his or her films. In fact, let's add a bonus category: Five points if you've watched more than one of the director's films all the way through, projected on a big screen. (Just for fun, give yourself an extra point if you know who the oldest and youngest filmmakers on the list are. If you're already that kind of person, it'll be easy-peasey.)

Our man in tights

Wed, 23 Jul 2003 08:00:00 +0000

Robin Hood and King Arthur, the two great parallel myths of British folklore, got their literary start about the same time. Arthur's legend attracted the high-art crowd, while Robin's story first came together in the form of 12th and 13th century ballads and folk plays. Whether the two men existed or not, their images are still very much with us. But of the two, Arthur, the founder of the state, looks to the past and is forever fixed in time, while Robin Hood, the outlaw and eternal "trickster," is still evolving, having long ago transcended his national and historical origins. In the words of Stephen Knight, author of "Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography," Robin has always been "what the teller and the audiences needed him to be at the time of the telling."

Men in tights (and why we love them)

Tue, 08 Jul 2003 20:00:00 +0000

"He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad."

The first line from Rafael Sabatini's novel "Scaramouche" is as good a definition of the spirit of swashbucklers as we're ever likely to get. Encompassing irony, sophistication, judgment that is both detached and passionate and, most important of all, the capacity for enjoyment, Sabatini's line, a transcendent piece of purple prose, could be the code of ethics for every great swashbuckling hero.

In novels, those heroes were the creation of Alexandre Dumas, Robert Louis Stevenson and the entertaining imitators who followed -- Sabatini, Baroness Orczy and H. Rider Haggard. On-screen, the swashbuckler was embodied by Douglas Fairbanks and then Errol Flynn. And at one time or another, Stewart Granger, Burt Lancaster, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Peter O'Toole (parodying Errol Flynn in "My Favorite Year"), Mandy Patinkin (parodying the genre itself in "The Princess Bride") and Antonio Banderas have all done themselves honor.

Hurting young men put pen to rage

Mon, 04 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Last week I read excerpts of Eric Harris' diary in Salon. The week before I read the essays and poems and letters of young men doing time in my local juvenile hall. This week, next week, the week after, I will read more of these young men's writing and will, as always, be struck by how complex they are and how their words can tell us everything and nothing about how they feel and who they are.

I am confident, at least as confident as anyone can be, that the 20 or so young men who give me their writing for a juvenile hall newsletter are not capable of terrible, terrible violence. Eric Harris is still a complete mystery to me. But his writing is familiar and haunting.

Every Friday night, I spend a couple of hours teaching, coaching, cheerleading, bribing -- essentially doing whatever it takes to inspire young men in detention to write something for the newsletter, which circulates to other juvenile halls in the area. We -- I and the other workshop leaders -- assure the writers: Spelling doesn't count. Poetry doesn't have to have "thou" or "'tis" to be real poetry. Use your own voice. Write your hopes, your dreams, your fears, your memories, your hates, your truths. Write what's on your mind.

Letters to the Editor

Fri, 13 Aug 1999 16:00:00 +0000

House debates vaccine safety
BY ARTHUR ALLEN

(08/06/99)

Dan Burton deserves some support for standing up against
mass vaccination. As a father of a happy, healthy and intelligent 4-month-old boy, I'm
not risking his health with certain shots. ADD, ADHD, SIDS, shaken baby
syndrome, autism, asthma, epilepsy and other conditions have
been blamed on vaccines. There really are not enough thorough long-term safety studies to be sure --
that would cut into the manufacturer's profit margin.

The only thing I want is a choice. In my state of Texas, my child will
not be allowed to attend public school (unless we join some crackpot
religion that the state deems "established" that forbids us to vaccinate our children) A philosophical reason just ain't good enough. A parent shouldn't have to be forced by the state to make
his child a retard in order to give her an education.

Blue Robin

Mon, 07 Jun 1999 16:00:00 +0000

A blue-gray miasma hangs over England in the 1991 film version of "Robin Hood." The director, John Irvin, sustains this visual pall through almost the entire film. At times the only color seems to come from the flames of campfires or, in one stray shot that echoes Maxfield Parrish, the glow of the moon on a starry night. Irvin and his cinematographer, Jason Lehel, don't use the film's bare branches and mud and overcast skies to provide a wallow in medieval muck; the look of their movie is a visualization of the shadow hanging over the land under the rule of the Norman Prince John while England's Saxon King, Richard, is off fighting the Crusades.

The best known film versions of "Robin Hood" -- the hugely entertaining 1925 silent starring Douglas Fairbanks and the deluxe storybook version of 1939 starring Errol Flynn -- have reveled in visual sumptuousness and rousing high spirits. (The Fairbanks movie features enormous sets that serve no purpose except to provide Doug with places to leap and climb, and the Flynn movie is shot in the lushest Technicolor.) This "Robin Hood" resembles "Excalibur," John Boorman's retelling of the Arthurian legend. Irvin, a solid, craftsmanlike director who rarely gets his due, can't match Boorman's visual sheen or obsessiveness. But like "Excalibur," this is an adult version of a familiar legend dedicated to capturing the feel of its period.