Prince of Sleeves
3/3/07 22:47![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
madrobinsOh my God.
Just saw the first twenty minutes or so of the new Robin Hood on the BBC. That was all I could bear. I was willing to be enchanted. Then I got to the bit where Robin and Much (his emancipated serf) drop by a weaver's place on the way back to Locksley. The weaver's daughter is so heavily made up she looked like a Maybelline ad. It was all downhill from there. Every time the scene changes, the name of the new venue shoots across the bottom of the screen, accompanied by the sound of an arrow. The peasants are properly ill-treated, Guy of Gisborne is suitably black browed and sneery; it's all rather sunlit and glossy without there being an ounce of mystery or legend about it. The fight choreography was all choppy and self-conscious, and (as the Spouse said) I didn't believe a damned word that came out of anyone's mouth. Made me nostalgic for the 1980s Robin of Sherwood with Michael Praed (and later Jason Connery) as Robin, which had, for all its woo-woo silliness, a great sense of mystery and the deepness of the forest, a sense of magic and legend and moonlight.
I suppose that every generation or so gets its own Robin Hood. This one didn't look any stupider than the Kevin Costner RH, but it didn't have Alan Rickman to cheer things up.
Just saw the first twenty minutes or so of the new Robin Hood on the BBC. That was all I could bear. I was willing to be enchanted. Then I got to the bit where Robin and Much (his emancipated serf) drop by a weaver's place on the way back to Locksley. The weaver's daughter is so heavily made up she looked like a Maybelline ad. It was all downhill from there. Every time the scene changes, the name of the new venue shoots across the bottom of the screen, accompanied by the sound of an arrow. The peasants are properly ill-treated, Guy of Gisborne is suitably black browed and sneery; it's all rather sunlit and glossy without there being an ounce of mystery or legend about it. The fight choreography was all choppy and self-conscious, and (as the Spouse said) I didn't believe a damned word that came out of anyone's mouth. Made me nostalgic for the 1980s Robin of Sherwood with Michael Praed (and later Jason Connery) as Robin, which had, for all its woo-woo silliness, a great sense of mystery and the deepness of the forest, a sense of magic and legend and moonlight.
I suppose that every generation or so gets its own Robin Hood. This one didn't look any stupider than the Kevin Costner RH, but it didn't have Alan Rickman to cheer things up.