First Night is pretty girl friendly (with Gere and Connery being their charming selves and Julia Ormond once again being the source of conflict between two “brothers”), but I hardly consider it Arthurian as it doesn’t have Merlin and Arthur isn’t fighting Mordred and Morgan Le Fey.
**Merlin ** is also not bad and the material is pretty light. And it’s long.
Excalibur is cool and all but it might be a bit guy-centric and heavy for girls.
I haven’t seen **The Last Legion ** but it seems very similar to Bruckheimers King Arthur in that it’s a kind of a “historical basis for the Arthurian legend” film.
Your daughter might be a bit old for Disney’s animated The Sword in the Stone.
Really what they need is a new, big budget historically accurate King Arthur fantasy movie that is true to the actual legend with all your favorite characters - Arthur, Lancelot, Guenivere, Merlin, Excalibur, the Grail, Mordred, Morgan le Fey, the Lady of the Lake and so on.
You should definitely go with Excalibur. Most Arthurian movies since then have approached the stories with post-modern irony or as a metaphor. Excalibur just took them as they were and used them as the basis of a well-made and entertaining movie.
I always thought I loved Excalibur…eventually I realized that I really just loved Siergfried’s Funeral, so I bought a Wagner CD instead of watching the movie every time it came on. But the film is good on its own merits – I think it really captures the eerie feeling of Malory. On the other hand, it really pissed me off that they told the Grail story but somehow removed all religious elements (substituting Arthur for Christ, for example).
First Knight is one of the few movies that causes me to launch into a pit-worthy rant.
Heh, I rather liked First Knight, although it could have used any names for the main characters, and it would have worked just as well (King Aragorn, Queen Arwen, and the First Knight, Sir Pippen)
I highly concur with both these recommendations and I don’t think a fifteen year old will have any problems with any of it. (C’mon people ,she’s fifteen, not nine; she can legally get married in some states) I saw Excaliber in the theatres when I was your daughter’s age and I’m a squeamish sort and it didn’t bother me. That’s also about the same age I read Arthur Rex (I went through the same phase) and it’s the best Arthurian adaptation out there. Yes, it’s a bit earthy and bawdy but that just adds to the atmosphere. Oddly enough, it’s out of print as are a number of Thomas Berger titles (I wonder what the story there is) but used copies are easy to find.
Ha! You beat me to it. Wonderful realization of the Arthurian story as it could have really been. Not only that, but Sutcliff wrote a lot of young adult books set in pre-Roman, Roman occupation, and post-Roman Britain that are also wonderful reading (for adults too). In many of those books there’s a recurring theme (a ring inherited from a Roman legionary which passes down to his British descendants through the following centuries) that plays a small role in Sword at Sunset.
If your daughter is a little prudish, her brain might explode at a couple scenes in the book.
[spoiler]1. Arthur and Morgaine have sex as part of a ceremony recognizing Arthur as the new king of the land (hunting of the stag). They’re drugged when it happens, and it’s made out that it’s all very mystical and primal. Then they sleep and dawn comes, and they have sex again, only this time it’s for them. BIG BAD INCEST.
Gwenhwyfar isn’t knocked up yet years after marrying Arthur, so his solution for this is to have a threesome with Lancelet. Drunken, of course, but then Lancelet gets all angsty because he doesn’t know who he found hotter – Arthur or Gwenhwyfar.
Meleagrant kidnapes and rapes Gwenhwyfar, and there’s a fairly graphic description. It contains the words “big meaty phallus.” Then on the next page, Lancelet comes along and cleaves Meleagrant’s head in twain with his sword right in front of her ("[his] head suddenly exploded with a spray of blood and brains"). Then on the next page, Lancelet and Gwenhwyfar have some fairly sweaty sex. It’s a very rapid sucession of events, and this actually disturbed me more than the threesome and incest when I read it at fifteen.
The healthiest sex in this entire book is between Morgaine and Kevin, and it’s fairly unconventional sex as far as expected American values for sexual relations go.[/spoiler]
Although familiar, I’m not really up on all the many adaptations of the Arthurian legend in movies and literature. However, from my limited exposure to King Arthur, it’s always seemed to me a rather tragic tale. The elements for tragedy are certainly there: rape, incest, adultery, jealousy, treachery, revenge, and filicide. At the bloody end of the tale, you have Arthur near death and his seemingly ideal kingdom in ruins due to his and the other central characters’ personal weaknesses. I’ve often wondered why Shakespeare didn’t try to tackle this story as the subject for one of his tragedies (perhaps Arthurian stories were too familiar or out of fashion with Elizabethan audiences). In any case, I was wondering if there are any versions of the Arthurian legend that heavily emphasize its tragic elements.
There is an episode of Babylon 5 called “A Late Deliver from Avalon” which features a man coming to the station in chainmail and a sword claiming to be King Arthur returned to his people. The episode only takes bits and pieces from the legends, but it’s kind of neat to see how they run with it (one human character humors “Arthur” because he sees no reason not to, another thinks the man insane or delusional and needs to be watched over, and G’Kar, witnessing the man beat up a gang of thugs to retrieve something they stole from a homeless woman, decides he’d make for an excellent drinking partner.
“And they made a satisfying THUMP when they hit the ground!” Passes out
Yea gods…the crimes First Knight commits against movie-making. Or at least its director, who has a fetish for the color blue and uses a scriptwriter who can’t get away from guns, err, mini-crossbows.
It’s only semi-related, but you have my undying thanks for posting Howard Pyle’s name. I have been looking for the book ‘Men of Iron’ for months, but I couldn’t remember the author, or the title of the book until I saw the name ‘Pyle’ in this thread.
I read it in gradeschool, and I have wanted a copy of my own forever, but apparently they have it at Project Gutenberg now.
A book I recommend, by the way. It might not be exactly ‘Arthurian’ but I enjoyed it.
I recently tried to watch the recent King Arthur movie (with Clive Owen); but after half an hour there was just too much stupid, and I had to stop.
There’s a French movie of Perceval le Gallois, based on Chretien de Troyes. Slow-moving, and not that much story, really, but A+ for art direction; everything looks like a 13th century illumination come to life.
The recent movie Tristan and Isolde was actually not too bad.
