I was right to misgive: Robin Hood is utterly appalling. Although, to be fair, the barrier was set high by dashing Erroll Flynn's technicolour myth, where the fantasy of men in tights was sealed for eternity:
The new film tries to invent a whole series of new myths, including the existence of Medieval landing craft which engage in Second World War-style beach landings... I'm sorry, I can't go on with describing this travesty.
Robin Hood is also not helped at all by Russell Crowe's lumpen, dodgy-accented performance:
He's still pretending to be the romantic hero, something he hasn't been able to pull off since his role as a cute gay-boy in Australian film The Sum of Us (1994) (which, incidentally, preserved for posterity some lovely views of the taut twenty-odd year old Crowe's bottom. Strangely, he never seems to talk about that film):
That's rather sweet, isn't it? Let's have another shot from that film (in which he sits around a lot in very, very tight shorts with his legs splayed):
Ok, that's enough movie prehistory: back to the matters at hand.
There are a couple of (slightly) redeeming features in the new Robin Hood -- and I am referring, of course, to the buttocks of Oscar Isaac:
The film comes oh-so-close to giving us a full-frontal of the lovely Oscar, but, of course, it is far too prissy to deliver (arrow bolts through the throat, well, that's all manly and shit. But a cock? Nah...):
Oscar was one of the few good things in appalling movie Agora, so he seems to be carving out a specialist career as the one saving grace of any bad film. I can't find any decent new shots of him in Agora, so here's a parting glance at him playing Joseph in some awful-looking retelling of the Bible story:
This weekend's movie viewing has also included (finally) Nowhere Boy, artist Sam Taylor-Wood's movie of the early life of top Beatle John Lennon:
Starring her hot teenage lover Aaron Johnson (recently praised by me for his role in Kick Ass), I hated Nowhere Boy.
Whereas Steve McQueen, the other recent visual-artist-turned-film-maker, pulled off an extraordinary tour de force in his utterly gripping first film Hunger, here Sam Taylor-Wood has produced a tv special of a movie, all lumpen, shouty melodrama and clunky characters.
Aaron plays a charmless John Lennon, one whose teenage angst seems strangely at odds with the heavyweight middle class wealth of his upbringing. Kristin Scott Thomas is rather good (of course) as his stiff-upper-lipped Aunt Mimi, here proving conclusively that smoking is very, very glamorous:
Anne-Marie Duff wasn't bad, either, as his natural mother:
But Taylor-Wood seems unable to make these talents sing, perhaps at least partly because she doesn't give us a single shot of hot beefcake Aaron without his shirt on (here he is, looking lovely, in Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging):
Perhaps she wanted to keep him for herself? A feeling with which I can completely empathise, actually.
PS: Lady V completely disagreed and thought Nowhere Boy was rather good. Whereas neither L. nor A. thought Robin Hood was any good at all.
2 comments:
So why none of those lovely sounding shots of Crowe or Mr. Isaac?
Robin Hood is too recent a film to have any screen grabs floating around (unless you know different...?), and The Sum of Us is far too old a film -- the material on the web is, frankly, piss-poor.
And all the DVD player programs in my crappy Macbook stopped working two or three major crashes ago, so I can no longer make screen grabs myself. Bummer.
Still, you have all the information necessary to make your own -- do let me have copies and I promise to post them here!
Post a Comment