Robin Hood

I watched one of my favorite movies from teenage-hood last night, Robin Hood Prince of Thieves. It sucks.

I still enjoyed it because I could watch anything with castles and fighting and a well-built community in the forest, and I'd watch Morgan Freeman read the back of a cereal box for two hours, Alan Rickman too, but watching Kevin Costner act is torturous. He tries to make all of his lines dramatic by hurling out the last word in a sentence as forcefully as he can. He trips over the language horribly. He has zero charisma.

The movie itself isn't much. It has a bunch of pretentious crap, like director's obsession with the fish-eye, or bubble, or whatever you call it lens. Conflicts are hastily thrown together and overblown. It's just not interesting.

My roommate is a theater critic and I get her input on productions or tv shows sometimes (though we rarely hang anymore due to scheduling). One insight she sometimes throws out is a particular performance or show and its quality having to do with the writing as opposed to the acting. I'll stretch that concept to direction and whatever else goes into making a film - lighting, editing, etc. I can't parse those things. I can't tell what did work and what didn't. Maybe Robin Hood was a stellar piece of writing, direction and everything but just needed a more charismatic star. Or maybe the whole thing sucked from top to bottom. I don't know. But the whole thing was downright silly in the rewatching. Too bad I spent many hours on that movie in my life. I've seen it about a dozen times.

And you know what...I'll watch it again. I loved their outfits.