THE GREEN KNIGHT (2020)

I love this trailer.

— Alan

This is the Green Knight, as in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight?

Either that or Medieval Times is rolling out a new six part backstory for its knights like we’ve never seen before. Which would be kind of amazing & unlikely but we’ve seen stranger things these past few years.

Yup.

— Alan

The trailer made me think it was a Ben Wheatley movie. Kind of disappointed it isn’t.

OK, here’s the movie’s competition, The Green Knight starts at about minute 6.

I don’t think “grim dark” has ever really fit the Arthur mythos, or at least the knights go on quests part of it.

I dunno; it’s always possible the Bretonnians simply scored enough chivalry points to summon him long enough to film a movie?

Without the magic “A24” this doesn’t look particularly interesting.

I’ve read a really nice verse translation of the poem, which I can not now find to recommend. The original is in a dialect of Middle English from the north of England that was probably not mutually intelligible with Chaucer’s, although roughly contemporaneous.

It’s a sexy story, pretty much in the way that Boorman’s Excalibur captured. But not too much goes on in it; it seems a pretty thin reed on which to hang a feature film.

No Sean Connery, no sale.

Is the Green Knight the one that challenged everyone and constantly regenerated so you couldn’t beat him? Kind of a bad guy?

Simon Armitage’s?
https://www.simonarmitage.com/sir-gawain-and-the-green-knight/

Tolkien’s is probably the most famous, though.

No, the one I read was older. I’m thinking Marie Borroff’s, since it probably was from a Norton edition. But the Armitage one looks very good.

I’ve glanced at Tolkien’s but found it lacking.

If it’s the same story as the 80s one with Sean Connery, then yes. That was a pretty good movie, as far as armored fighting went. I still prefer Hearts and Armour, a weird French? movie that really let the armor do what it’s supposed to do. Plus you had the Kurosawa-esque panoply of bad guys with distinct styles. The dubbing was brutal, though.

I remember Sword of the Valiant being on HBO as a kid. More recently I got to work with its director Stephen Weeks, who (among other things) writes mystery novels now. He lives in Prague now and is an interesting character to say the least.

I’m a fan of the “Gawain Poet” - definitely one of the great poets of the middle ages. This looks like it’s adding a bunch of extraneous stuff that isn’t in the original material, though, so skeptical as always when some modern-day filmmaker thinks they can “improve” one of the classic of literature for modern audiences.

J.R.R. Tolkien approves.

I think he has one of the more avalible translations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

So this released yesterday? Theatre only?

It seems to be getting really strong critic reviews, but really poor audience/user reviews on rotten tomatoes and metacritic.