I always thought it was a fine movie.
I always loved the transition during the dance, from period dance music to David Bowie. Very well done. And the blacksmith was hawt!
Given that the orchestral stuff they usually put on the soundtrack is from around 400 years later it seems like quibbling to complain over another few decades. “Sure, it’s all anchronistic, but it’s not the anachronism I’m used to.”
It’s exactly my complaint and I don’t consider it quibbling. First of all, you don’t usually have characters singing along to the soundtrack. I’d feel the same way if Friar Tuck or Mordred broke out with the lyrics to the Ode to Joy. Second, the choice of pop music is so obviously tied to a contemporary time period for a modern audience, it’s inescapable. Unnoticeable anachronism is fine with me. Blatant anachronism pulls me out of the story.
Define “unnoticeable.” For some of us, getting a sword pattern wrong is enough to pull us out of a movie. For others, it would take Godzilla to do it.
Oh come on. I don’t share Acsenray’s complaint but geez, the grounds for it are self-evident no matter how much nerd-lawyering you try to do.
So what you’re saying is that the Timex watches are all right but the Pulsars are going too far?
Yeah. That’s it. No digital watches.
I thought it was (as most seem to think) a generally fun time. That said, there was one bit that really bugged me (going from memory having seen it only once many years ago ). So the final climax is the good guy (Heath Ledger) jousting against the bad guy. And it’s clear in the leadup jousts that the bad guy is a really really good jouster, basically as good as Heath if not better. So for some reason in the very final joust Heath takes off all his armor and jousts armorless. So the horses go charging towards each other, and I’m all ready for Heath to pull some crazy anachronistic over-the-top hilarious stunt in which he, I dunno, stands up on his horse and jumps over the other guy’s lance and Bruce Lee kicks him or something. You know, wacky and fun like the rest of the movie. Instead, he just kind of, you know, wins. With no explanation or justificaiton, no matter how comically strained, for the fact that despite having no armor and despite not being an obviously better jouster than the bad guy, he somehow outjousted him.
I was let down.
It was “soon after” the interview I read, which would’ve been late 2007 I suppose. It was like a month or two between reading it and his death. Well, I say “interview” but it was possibly a red carpet sound bite.
IIRC, earlier in the movie it’s explained in This Will Be Important Later terms that a jouster always lines up his lance as best he can on the ride over and looks away before getting too close: sacrificing accuracy to make damn sure armor and helmet will be ideally positioned to protect himself from the other guy’s lance.
So if you’ve got two otherwise evenly-matched jousters – one fearlessly staying on target, and the other blindly cringing away from the oncoming lance – then one guy is more likely to win, and more likely to get maimed or killed if he loses, regardless of whether he’s wearing any armor.
Sort of an aside, but would most medieval banquets/celebrations have been held during daylight hours? All they had for illumination was smokey candles and torches-so the castle halls would have been pretty dim.
Liked those medieval dances though-very complicated! Also Heath (Sir Ulrich) is shown wearing trousers-is this correct? I thoght trousers only came in later (16 Century?
Saw this movie for the first time my senior year of high school. Our English teacher actually had us watch it while we were studying the Canterbury Tales, pointing out how many references to the different stories you can see in Chaucer’s various scenes. The implication, of course, being that Chaucer went on to be famous expanding on his impressions of all these different encounters.
So I’m the only one who thinks the handmaiden was the prettiest one?
And it’s too bad they cut out the romance between her and Mark Addy’s character (Roland.) There are hints of it…little sideways glances and the like, but the full sub-plot never made it into the film.
Of course, the best romance sub-plot in the film is between Paul Bettany and Alan Tudyk’s characters. 
Both the handmaiden AND the blacksmith would have made better choices for Heath Ledger’s character! Especially the blacksmith, though.
When I was watching this movie the first time, I “thought” I could see the ending coming a mile away… William would get found out (most likely because he wouldn’t be able to fool the other highborn people when he wasn’t jousting) and disgraced in some way, and the blacksmith would pick him up and dust him off, happily ever after. Jocelyn would marry Count Ademar (they deserved each other) and live unhappily ever after.
I really didn’t care for the Jocelyn character - the scene where she asks William to prove his love for her by losing at jousting on purpose was what REALLY did it. I thought that little request was an early indicator that she was not trustworthy and would betray him in the end. Kate the blacksmith, on the other hand, showed to be a loyal friend time and again.
Imagine my surprise when the peasant and the noblewoman (who happily jumped into bed with him at the earliest opportunity!) wound up together, even though in those days noble ladies married who their fathers told them to. Even allowing for suspension of disbelief, this was a lot.
Interestingly enough, the handmaiden character didn’t make much of a splash at the time, but the actress has hada pretty major success recently, maybe we’ll be seeing more of her.
Shannyn Sossamon’s career seems to have stalled at the moment (maybe too busy having kids and naming them Audio Science and Mortimer) but she’s only in her early 30s, she could make a comeback one of these days.
I like the way she looks (and actually I think she’s gotten prettier as she’s aged) but she does have an “exotic” beauty that was not appropriate for the Jocelyn character. I believe she is part Hawaiian or Polynesian perhaps. Another contributing factor in the “too much for my suspension of disbelief”.
Overall, though… I liked the movie. Better than most.
I liked the gimmick, but I know a couple of people who were unimpressed. It was just breezy fun, with a nice juicy role for Paul Bettany to ham it up.
I agree that the handmaiden and the blacksmith were both better than the princess.
I love this movie.
One of the deleted scenes shows Chaucer (naked again) caught having a midnight rendezvous with a woman whom he introduces as his wife, Philippa. For history buffs, Philippa was the sister of Katherine Swynford, who was famously the mistress and later wife of John of Gaunt. Henry VII was a descendent of Katherine Swynford.
So Chaucer would eventually become a brother-in-law of sorts to Edward the Black Prince when his wife’s sister marries Edward’s brother. (Although John and Katherine didn’t marry until after Edward’s death.)
Looking for any kind of historical accuracy out of this particular movie is probably a very large mistake, ralph. 
That wasn’t what bothered me so much as, once William was doing badly in the tournament, Jocelyn turning around and telling him “Oh, changed my mind, actually I want you to win for me.” I mean, she did have a point when she said that men were always trying to impress her by saying they’d do things they would have been trying to do anyway. But yanking William around like that was just mean.
But didn’t one of the women in the Arthurian tales do exactly that to her lover? And for the record, I thought she was jerkish too. (maybe The knight and the cart?) I thought all the little real history gags in the movie were the best part of it. Just using the name Ulrich von Liechtenstein was a great bit. The real guy travelled across the continent challenging knights while dressed up as Venus the Goddess of Love.