A long march, a long march, and twenty years behind

[sovay]

Look, I don't know Neil Marshall from a poke in the eye with a pilum, but all things being equal, I'd rather see The Eagle of the Ninth. No offense, but General Virilus? Does he have a very great friend in Rome named Biggus Dickus?

(Oh, movies. How is it you can beautifully realize Middle-Earth and still fuck up the Romans on a regular basis?)

Comments

[teenybuffalo.livejournal.com]

Only a couple, but they're rock-solid excellent. You've probably seen them already, now I think of it. Ben-Hur was one of those movies that I'd had hyped to me for years before I ever watched it, but which still outdid all my inflated expectations. The only sequence you ever hear about is the chariot race; instead, I got this weird but lovely epic about a guy whose life is ruined by one of his boyhood friends and who finally claws his way back to the happy world he remembers, only to find that it's no longer there and he's still screwed. All through this, Jesus is walking around in the background and performing the Jedi Mind Trick on bad guys. Also, I just like Charlton Heston here. He's kind of an ancient version of George Bailey from It's A Wonderful Life.

Spartacus is also good, more for the secondary characters than the heroes. The part that I remember best is how they managed to talk about Romans' sex lives without going the "lol they were pedophiles" route, and that's hard to do.

And it's not as cool as the first two, but I liked Gladiator a lot. The gladiatorial games are just about perfect in every respect. It has a Giggling Villain of Utter Evil who is also fairly well-written and clearly-motivated, which doesn't happen often.

[sovay]

It has a Giggling Villain of Utter Evil who is also fairly well-written and clearly-motivated, which doesn't happen often.

You might enjoy The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964), which was essentially remade as Gladiator. It suffers from starring Stephen Boyd, who despite his good work as Messala opposite Charlton Heston here cannot act his way out of a paper bag, but makes up a lot of ground in Alec Guinness, James Mason, Sophia Loren, and Christopher Plummer, who is great fun to watch as Commodus. I cannot recommend all three hours of the movie equally, but the funeral of Marcus Aurelius is genuinely something from another world.

[teenybuffalo.livejournal.com]

I can see I'll have to watch it and compare the two. Good heavens, what a marvelous lineup of actors!