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[Camelot]: I prefer my Medieval Sex Romps in Fantasy Settings.
Kagera
Imitating the worst people. Since 2004Registered User regular
Imitating the worst people. Since 2004Registered User regular
Ah yes, the story of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, an illustrious tale of heroism and football.
They have a killer O Line as well..
Wait let me try this again.
Ah yes, the story of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, an illustrious tale of heroism and hedonism.
Dude stop squeezing my Excalibur so hard...
Starz, the bringer of such high brow fare as Spartacus: Tits and Slow Motion, is going to be premiering this new series on April 1st, which I find hilarious because who knows how they're interpretation is going to end up. The dude playing Arthur looks like a ponce, his conniving and backstabbing sister is Eva 'Fuck Me Eyes' Green, and his Merlin is none other than Henry the fucking VIII. So strap in people and get ready for Magical Tits and Blood because this shit will at LEAST be better than that fucking movie with Clive Owen.
More screencaps + trailer says I!
NSFW FOR SIMULATED SEX AND PARTIAL NUDITY.
They have a killer O Line as well..
Wait let me try this again.
Ah yes, the story of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, an illustrious tale of heroism and hedonism.
Dude stop squeezing my Excalibur so hard...
Starz, the bringer of such high brow fare as Spartacus: Tits and Slow Motion, is going to be premiering this new series on April 1st, which I find hilarious because who knows how they're interpretation is going to end up. The dude playing Arthur looks like a ponce, his conniving and backstabbing sister is Eva 'Fuck Me Eyes' Green, and his Merlin is none other than Henry the fucking VIII. So strap in people and get ready for Magical Tits and Blood because this shit will at LEAST be better than that fucking movie with Clive Owen.
More screencaps + trailer says I!
NSFW FOR SIMULATED SEX AND PARTIAL NUDITY.
My neck, my back, my FUPA and my crack.
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If it doesn't impress me in a month, I'm dropping STARZ until the next season of Spartacus comes out next year.
Magic Online - Bertro
Honestly this show looks like a low-rent Game of Thrones.
It's nowhere near as slick as Spartacus. I got some Hercules: The Legendary Journies vibes from the set construction. Since the magic has been subtle so far, there's not been much I can say in the way of FX criticisms, though.
No blood splooge on the camera, though, if that's what you're asking.
Anything that brings more Eva Green nudity to the screen can't be all bad, though.
This, I will admit to.
I was thinking more the wierd (ly arousing) combination of almost classical theatrical dialogue combined with the delicate sensibilities of the urban dictionary, all wrapped up in blood soaked copies of 300.
It's definitely set out to do it's own thing then, rather than being "Medieval Sparticus".
Not that either's a bad thing, a fantasy version of the Tudors sounds like it could be interesting though perhaps I need to watch more than one episode of the Tudors (seemed good, but our free FX subscription ran out). I do suspect it's going to suffer hard for not being Game of Thrones, but then I'm often wrong and perhaps it can glide on the wake of an interest in non-comic fantasy drama.
And then more importantly establish the cliches that CSI Anhk Morpork can then deconstruct.
But I've only seen the first epsiode and I'll be relying heavily on how the show fleshes out over the next few before I can decide if I'm going to follow the show. Eva Green helps though, it definately isn't a detractor in any way.
I imagine Game of Thrones will be the best, but I go where Eva Green goes.
"Starz, the bringer of such high brow fare as Spartacus: Tits and Slow Motion," < LOL
I am also interested in seeing what Eva Green can do in a tv show. The movies only show some of her talents, so I do want to see what she can do with some range available to her.
I am curious how high the body count will get on this show....
Whoa! James Purefoy is in it. Sweet! I dig him.
Oh, and Daragh O'Malley, from the Sharpe's series. He's a good actor, too.
Not a bad cast, but the lead seems... a bit green.
LEGO Camelot!
EDIT = Oh wow, Eva's eyes are exceptionally Fuck Me.
Yeah, I just can't tell if the Arthur actor's vacant prettyboy thing is just indicative of who the character is when he's tapped by Merlin, or if it's how he's going to be through the whole show.
I mean, if he grows into a badass, then that's pretty awesome. If he continues to just be pretty and cute, then that's going to be fairly jarring.
Anyway, Eva Green weighs as much as, like, a duck.
Joseph Fiennes does the same overacting he did in Flash Forward, I don't care one bit about Arthur (just want to smack him up the head repeatedly) and even Eva Green is underwhelming.
I'd rather wait for Game of Thrones.
Lies
Sorry Starz, better luck next round.
90 day wait.
Damn f'real? I thought they had some weird sweetheart deal. I see the stuff Premiering on Starz on Netflix days before.
XBL: GamingFreak5514
PSN: GamingFreak1234
Speaking of Merlin, very interesting implications. Namely that
If nothing else, Merlin is very calculating and certainly knows the importance of appearances.
Plus, Eva Green... meow.l
Currently painting: Slowly [flickr]
If my sister was a 35 year old Helen Mirren I'd do the fuck out of her too.
And suffer the wrath of stares, gossip, Merlin's face-palming, and a future evil son that'll eventually and quite literally be the death of you? You sir, are brave.
XBL: GamingFreak5514
PSN: GamingFreak1234
Currently painting: Slowly [flickr]
Now that was a good telling of the story. Nicol Williamson really nailed Merlin. I'll probably watch the latest iteration because I've watched pretty much all of them. And there are a lot of them.
― Marcus Aurelius
Path of Exile: themightypuck
I'm not sure how me not watching Starz's show, while paying Netflix 3 months worth of subscription anyway, is going to teach Netflix a lesson about being nicer to Starz.
Either way, I guess I'll be reading this thread in 90 days.
Oh, I dont care about Netflix being nicer to Starz (or vice versa), but if Starz wants me to watch its show its going to have to be on Netflix seeing as I cant justify subscribing to Starz for one or two shows Im mildly interested in. Party Down may have been worth it, but Spartacus and this show? Eh.
Jeremy Irons as Rodrigo Borgia on the other hand is totally worth it.
Also Morgana Le Fay is Arthur's halfsister through their mother. She was never Uther's daughter. Ticks me off that they tried to change that.
Even at its worst its better than most of what's on television, and I already have the movie channels because of the blood covenant that I forged with Charter
Only one episode, though. Casting is great for everyone but Arthur. James Purefoy as Lot? Hell yeah.
But seriously, who signed off on Arthur? Maybe he'll look more the part with a beard.
"Dude. HAVE YOU SEEN DEM TITTIES?"
I mean uh...she used magic....yeah... >.>
Anyway I kinda thought it was okay. Bieber hair man looked Bieber-y till I remembered oh shit Romans used to have that hairstyle.
Eva Green was pretty damn awesome I thought. Vile and scornful and brilliant
Right now, Eva is pretty much the only thing keeping me interested. Her character has this great [strike]rack[/strike] alien-seeming intelligence, and she's set up as more of an intellectual rival rather than a martial foe.
In addition, Merlin and Ygraine are much more interesting when she's around.
Really don't care much for the Guinevere plot or their vine-covered castle.
"As your king I promise my rule will be for you the people!"
Like, I guess it's supposed to be inspiring for a bunch of medieval peasants who haven't heard of democracy before but I guess when you go from a reign that meant you could marry the woman you raped (lols no wait Ygraine saw Uther's face for half a sec and still went with it so it's all good) anything it better.
Seriously though if Ygraine starts hitting on Merlin or something I'm gonna flip a round table.
Er, have you seen the "spoilers for later in the season" thing they did at the end of the premere?
But yeah, I kept thinking "OH BAM AH! OH BAM AH! OH BAM AH!" during the speech. It was kinda hilarious.
There are, to my mind, two acceptable ways to treat the King Arthur story. On the one hand, you can take a realistic approach to it, treating him as a historical figure the way Rosemary Sutcliff does in Sword at Sunset, as described in her introduction to that work:
But of late years historicans and anthropologists have come more and more to the belief that the Matter of Britain is indeed "matter and not moonshine." That behind all the numinous mist of pagan, early Christ and medieval splendors that have gathered about it, there stands the solitary figure of one great man. No knight in shining armor, no Round Table, no many-towered Camelot; but a Romano-British war leader, to whom, when the Barbarian darkness came flooding in, the last guttering lights of civilization seemed worth fighting for.
Sword at Sunset is an attempt to recreate from fragments of known facts, from likelihoods and deductions and guesswork pure and simple, the kind of man this war leader may have been, and the story of his long struggle.
Certain features I have retained from the traditional Arthurian fabric, because they have the atmosphere of truth. I have kept the original framework, or rather two interwrought frameworks: the Sin which carries with it its own retribution; the Brotherhood broken by the love between the leader's woman and his closest friend. These have the inevitability and pitiless purity of outline that one finds in classical tragedy, and that belong to the ancient and innermost places of man. I have kept the theme, which seems to me to be implicit in the story, of the Sacred King, the Leader whose divine right, ultimately, is to die for the life of the people.
Bedwyr, Cei and Gwalchmai are the earliest of all Arthur's companions to be noted by name, and so I have retained them, giving the friend-and-lover's part to Bedwyr, who is there both at the beginning and at the end, instead of to Lancelot, who is a later French importation. Arthur's hound and his white horse I have kept also, both for their ritual significance and because the Arthur - or rather Artos - I found myself coming to know so well, was the kind of man who would have set great store by his dogs and his horses. When the Roman fort of Trimontium was excavated, the bones of a "perfectly formed dwarf girl" were found lying in a pit under those of nine horses. An unexplained find, to which, in Artos's capture of the fortress and in the incident of "The People of the Hills," I have attempted an explanation. So it goes on . . . almost every part of the story, even to the unlikely linkup between Medraut and that mysterious Saxon with a British name, Cerdic the half-legendary founder of Wessex, has some kind of basis outside the author's imagination.
So, that is one approach: Arthur as a 5th or 6th century warleader of mixed Roman and Celtic blood, fighting to defend the crumbling remains of Roman civilization in Britain after the withdrawal of the Legions, holding off the invading Saxons long enough for his name to be remembered.
The other approach, of course, is the Malory, the high medieval fantasy of giant-slaying and Grail-seeking and jousting, and also T.H. White's Sword in the Stone, that "glorious dream of the Middle Ages as they never were, but should have been." Not at all historical, this, but a magnificent work of fiction and mythology, in which Arthur is made king by destiny and magic with the aid of the wizard Merlin, and assembles a Round Table of knights who ride around saving maidens for chivalry and Christ.
Camelot is basically a hopelessly confused mess of a show that tries to incorporate elements from these two very different presentations of Arthur, and ends up just shitting all over both of them. It looked like it was going for the more realistic approach: the armor was leather and chainmail, not Gothic plate; the hill-fort of Uther and the fortified farmstead of Ector were appropriately rustic; the general level of technology seemed fairly low (ie, sheepskin hides thrown over a horse's back instead of a rigid leather saddle).
Then they ride up to a fucking medieval castle, and claim "lol it's an old Roman ruin." The Romans didn't build bloodyfucking castles. They built square walled forts, of varying degrees of size and permanence, but they didn't go in for spire turrets and fifty-foot walls and three-storey vaulted cathedral ceilings.
Really, everything about it was just sloppy and awful. Merlin spends fifteen minutes ranting about improving their defenses and protecting the king at all costs, then on coronation night, nobody thinks to check the happy peasants for weapons when they come in? Nobody thought it was a little odd that people were bringing shields and spears and swords in to a celebration? Nobody figured that it might be a good idea to, I don't know, keep a guard posted by the front gate? There's a reason why hosts required guests to leave their weapons at the door back then.
Why are the traditional legendary names used for most of the characters - Guinevere, Merlin, King Lot of Orkney, Gawain - but Lancelot is turned into fucking Leontes? Did they just think it sounded cooler, or what?
Why hasn't anyone, in hundreds of years, thought to maybe approach the Sword of the Gods (lol) from *above* it, rather than climbing up a goddamned waterfall? Seriously, get on a damned horse, ride a few miles off to the side where the slope lessens, get up on the ridge, ride along it to the river, pick up the sword.
Why was Kay appointed Marshall of England when England didn't even exist as a concept at the time? Saxons were invading and occupying the east, the Picts were pushing down south from the Wall, the west was held by only slightly Romanized Celtic tribes, and while the center of the island was still predominantly Romano-British, once Rome pulled out it pretty much dissolved into petty kingdoms.
For that matter, who's the enemy here? The Saxons and Picts haven't even been mentioned, and the only conflict going on seems to be between Arthur and his sister. Who, exactly, do the people need to be protected from? Why does "England" need a gleaming blond postmodern democratic king, exactly?
Why does Merlin wear a goddamned cable-knit sweater coat and boots with metal eyelets, when neither of those things existed in Britain until centuries after the Norman Conquest? How does Morgan manage to buy clothes from Hot Topic?
Why is Ulfius a black dude?
I'm not completely incapable of suspending my disbelief: I loved Gladiator, even though it had plenty of historical inaccuracies, and I'm cool with the idealized, non-historical fantasy of medieval presentations of Arthur. (Though I will always love Artos the Bear the most). But when Pixels and I watched Camelot, we both kept up a running commentary about how fucking ridiculous all of it was. (Pixels: "Hey Morgan, you should show the wolf your tits, then he'll help you." One minute later: "Oh, come on. Really? I was kidding.")
If we end up watching more of it, it will be purely to make fun of it.
The bandit attack on Guinevere's home was pretty inexplicable, too. Like, they're stealing everything, but they just let the residents ride away on expensive horses? They aren't going to bother to ransom the bride-to-be of the king's champion? Why didn't Arthur decide to take a stand against banditry and ride out against the tiny force of scumbags? Oh, right, he was too busy trying to figure out how to shag Guinevere and make face-time with his obviously evil half-sister.