I know we’re pretty deep in the movie season because I saw three movies this past week. On Tuesday Char and I saw Anchorman, on Friday night we saw I Robot (at the Cineplex Odeon Eglinton Town Center…more on that in a moment), and on Saturday afternoon I biked up to Yonge and Eglinton and saw a matinee of King Arthur.Anchorman, funny, full of that Will Farrell pseudo ad-libbed comedy that he does, I loved all of the little bits of what life was like in the 70’s…chucking garbage everywhere, smoking in the newsroom, just little slices of how innocent everything was.
I Robot was perfect summer escapism, it had very little to do with the book (other than the three laws). We saw it at the Eglinton Town Center though, which wasn’t such a good idea. Our usual theatre is “The Beach”, and people just seem to be better behaved there. Every time we’ve been to the ETC, we’ve had to tell someone to shut up. This time there were about ten people together, over three rows. The one guy kept on taking phone calls during the movie. We tried to move, except the theatre was packed.
King Arthur was decent enough, but the movie didn’t seem like an Arthurian legend, it took too much from Lord of the Rings, and not enough from the rich depths of the legend of King Arthur. What really bugged me about it though was the fact that it should have been called “Arthur and his men”, not “King Arthur”. Arthur isn’t a king in the movie, just a soldier in the Roman army. It was a decent medieval movie, but Excalibur doesn’t need to worry about losing it’s place as greatest Arthur movie of all time (as cheesy as it was).
Finally…this summer’s been pretty filled with Comic Book movies, Hellboy, Spider-Man 2 have already come out, while Blade and Catwoman are still to come. Next summer will have Batman, and now word comes out that Green Lantern will come out in the next couple of years with Jack Black playing the ring-slinger.
Ugh, what are they doing? A story that could become a huge franchise (a man without fear being granted the ultimate weapon by a dying alien) will instead be “zany comedy version a la ‘The Mask.'”. If you want comedy, go with Plastic Man (which really SHOULD be a movie)…not Green Lantern.