Mists of Avalon
Sep. 19th, 2004 05:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rmI am watching the Mists of Avalon miniseries, and it is, as Kat promised, bad.
The casting is mostly apalling. Most of the faces are too modern, most of the acting is mediocre, and few of the actors seem physically able to inhabit their roles and that's before they get on a horse and have a sword in their hand.
The changes made from the book mostly seem unnecessary, and in the interest of sanitizing things that can't really be sanitzed, and that's annoying as well. The entire king-making thing was especially awful, visually displeasing and neither frightening or arousing (and it probably should have been at least one).
That said, the matter of Arthur's heir and the infamous threesome issue, while also utter crap in this thing (let me count the ways), still made me look up from the work I've been doing while watching and held my focus forcefully. I've often said, what a strong, precise literary memory that is for me and the various things it made me understand about writing and people and sacrifice and complexity, but to see that infamous discussion on screen, even in this tripe, moved me more than I would have thought -- not out of any great anything in this awful project, but just because that's been laid so deep under my skin for so long, and if nothing else, it got the sense that no one breathed once during that whole conversation down perfectly.
Other things that suck: okay, people... having some chickens around doesn't make your project all Middle Ages authentic. The people are still too damn clean, and straw on the ground and chickens do not make up for manicures, blindingly white teeth, and men who have no scars on their flesh.
Also -- cheesy blue light surrounding Excalibur? Was that really necessary? Man.
This is sucktacular, and not even terribly fun for all that.
The casting is mostly apalling. Most of the faces are too modern, most of the acting is mediocre, and few of the actors seem physically able to inhabit their roles and that's before they get on a horse and have a sword in their hand.
The changes made from the book mostly seem unnecessary, and in the interest of sanitizing things that can't really be sanitzed, and that's annoying as well. The entire king-making thing was especially awful, visually displeasing and neither frightening or arousing (and it probably should have been at least one).
That said, the matter of Arthur's heir and the infamous threesome issue, while also utter crap in this thing (let me count the ways), still made me look up from the work I've been doing while watching and held my focus forcefully. I've often said, what a strong, precise literary memory that is for me and the various things it made me understand about writing and people and sacrifice and complexity, but to see that infamous discussion on screen, even in this tripe, moved me more than I would have thought -- not out of any great anything in this awful project, but just because that's been laid so deep under my skin for so long, and if nothing else, it got the sense that no one breathed once during that whole conversation down perfectly.
Other things that suck: okay, people... having some chickens around doesn't make your project all Middle Ages authentic. The people are still too damn clean, and straw on the ground and chickens do not make up for manicures, blindingly white teeth, and men who have no scars on their flesh.
Also -- cheesy blue light surrounding Excalibur? Was that really necessary? Man.
This is sucktacular, and not even terribly fun for all that.
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Re: Is it really feminist at all?
Date: 2004-09-20 04:38 am (UTC)Historically, records really don't support the sort of religious antagonism Bradley and the SCA like to depict. We DO know that the Roman Church incorporated a lot of pagan elements into its ritual in an effort to convert the people of Britain. Doing so would have made Christianity more appealing, and we can see evidence of its effectiveness all over Europe.
And we know that the Roman Church brought literacy and iron age technology to a culture that was at that time only recently moving toward the bronze age, and even that only in the easy-to-live-in areas of the island. The mountains and moors were still stone age, and it was not uncommon for early Britons in these less forgiving regions to live in (no doubt very well furnished) caves.
Early British Pagans had a lot of good reasons to convert, and a lot of them did so willingly. This process was not a conquest attempt by the Roman Church. They were trying to help people.
It's not as though the stone- and early bronze-age Celts of Britain had resources that the Roman Church wanted. And the Church were snobby enough that they wouldn't have explicitly desired the membership of a people they considered barbarians. They were trying to save souls according to their own understanding of what that meant. It was a generous instinct.
The Roman military was another story. They came much earlier, and they really were looking for conquest. Caesar wanted to run the whole world, to its extreme corners, and that meant Britain. The army brought a lot of benefits too, but their motivations were not generous.
Thing is, in the 50s AD, when the Roman military came to Britain to take over, the Romans were not Christian. They were still Pagan themselves, and the Pagan authorities in Rome were busily throwing Christians to the lions. To the extent that a hostile rivalry existed between the Christians and the Pagans, it was in Rome, and the Pagans were the aggressors. Different Pagans of course.
Real religious misbehavior by the Roman Church will come later. But, the inquisition is primarily concerned not with reluctant Pagans, but with Christians who spread heretical doctrine. The later, a corrupt inquisition uses its influence for political purposes, executing politically strong rivals even in the absence of heresy. But by then, these rivals were also largely Christian.