The reivews in this article are drawn from the Listathon project.  Contributors at Playtime picked 20 films they loved to share with other Playtimers, and everyone who contributed a list agreed to watch the amassed films in a rather haphazard manner that can only be described with augury or advanced quantum mechanics.  You can either watch as PTers rip apart each others’ favorite films or join in with the fun in the Listathon thread. This roundtable proceeded between Matt Schneider, Alex M., D.J. Bigalke, and Tracy McCusker.

Tracy
I recommended Excalibur (Boorman 1981) on my Listathon thread as one film that may not necessarily be my favorite, but that I love nonetheless.  The reason I recommended Excalibur should be pretty apparent to anyone who knows me: I’m a huge fan of Arthurian literature.  To me, Boorman’s film represents the best Arthurian film to-date in terms of representing the diverse and disjointed nature of Arthurian legend, while capturing the individual struggles by the knights to strive towards the ideals of Camelot and, ultimately, falling short.

Alex
Wow, I think that Excalibur may be one of the strangest movies that I’ve ever seen.  So much so that I couldn’t help but admire its audaciousness even though it was completely riddled with flaws and ultimately, failed to connect on the emotional level it really needed to.

Matt
This afternoon Ellen and I watched [the film].  I liked that it was weird, but I’m not sure I liked it overall.  Parts of it worked.  Parts of it dragged.  The scene were Percival throws the sword back into the lake had a bit of emotional oomph to it for some reason, although I couldn’t really figure out why.  Very little of the film engaged me emotionally, although I will admit that things picked up once the soapy melodrama of Lancelot-Guinevere-Arthur came into play in Camelot.  It’s the kind of movie that screams “cult classic,” although I’m not aware of a particular cult following.

DJ
It seemed as though you were required to have some familiarity with Arthurian legend to begin with, as the movie is rather disjointed and jumps around frequently (thank Chaos for Monty Python). From what I’ve seen, I’d classify it as “delightfully 80s”. Not so much for the look or the style of the film, but more for the overall feel of it. I’m still trying to figure out what the green glow is all about.

Matt
It was still very interesting from a distance.  I guess the biggest thing to me was that it put on no pretense of treating its characters like characters; it had the air almost of an academic essay by a geek who’s just really into Arthurian legend.  So the clanging of swords and the trappings of the mysticism are all powerfully deployed, but mostly it just seems to be John Boorman insisting that the tales of Arthur and his knights are memorable — because he’s made a big, epic movie about them!

Tracy
I found out about Excalibur a few years ago in a medieval Arthurian lit class. My professor, despite her attachment to the subject, ridiculed it mercilessly for its overly-stereotyped portrayal of knighthood.  It was by the prompting of Bobby and Dan Swensen that I finally watched it.  I enjoyed it immensely.  The “stereotyped” behavior that my professor specifically referred to was the constant parade of knights in shining armor (literally).  The pageantry of plate mail can be a bit much, but I found the allegorical meaning attached to the outward “shine” of the knights of Camelot to be manipulated in an interesting way; as the knights head further from Camelot — from the ideal of the city’s founding — the duller and dingier they become.  This attention to visual allegory was what attracted me most to this film (not necessarily my overt attachment to detail), as most other Arthurian films don’t even attempt to engage that level of the legends.

Matt
I’m being slightly more sarcastic than I think is warranted.  The trailer that was included on the disc seemed to be a slightly more thrilling condensation of the film than the film itself.  Which I guess testifies to Boorman’s ability to evoke really strong moments and images, or maybe that’s just the strength of the source material.

DJ
The characterization of Merlin was my favorite part. He had the perfect blend of goofy and respectful, even though it did once or twice dip into the realm of absurdity.

Matt
I also really enjoyed the interpretation of Merlin.

DJ
I also just found out that the director had to direct his daughter in the movies first sex scene. Ewwwww.

Alex
Yet so much of the oeuvre was right.  So much of it felt right.  The clunking crashing hand to hand combat, the desolate wasteland landscapes, Williamson’s batty Merlin, Mirren’s sexual but vicious Morgana and Terry’s stoical Arthur.  I loved that the production managed to feel gritty and grimy, but also magical and fantastical.  I loved the audacity of the Wagner soundtrack (As much as it felt a emotional cheat at times) and I loved the fact that as a movie it was content to throw the viewer in the deep end with precious little explanation.

DJ
I must say that the ‘reborn’ Arthur riding through the apple blossoms to O Fortuna created a fairly striking image. Beyond that, all I can say is that the movie has me wanting to give T.H. White’s The Once and Future King a third attempt. The imagery also reminded me a lot of the game Shadow of the Colossus. Since I think the game is absolutely gorgeous, I must also think the movie looks that way, even though I didn’t really realize it at the time (in my defense I was washing dishes).  I can’t help but think that I would enjoy the movie more if I had seen it during my childhood and grew up with it.

Matt
One of the things that leapt out at me was how episodic the film was.  From what very, very little I’ve read about Arthurian stories, that’s perfectly in keeping with the way the legends were written/handed down — though part of a grander narrative, the individual stories were connected more like thematically related oral histories than a novel or continuous narrative.  Correct me if I’m wrong in his apprehension, Tracy.

Tracy
You’re certainly not wrong about the disjointed part.  But you are a bit wrong to think of the knights’ tales as an oral history or tradition. Arthur was very much a literary invention.  His creation as a mythological king of Britain was only possible through the dissemination of written texts, and his pan-European popularity was made possible by the circulation of manuscripts.  As far as my studies have shown, only one author (Marie de France) has ever mentioned an oral tradition surrounding Arthur in the introduction to her Breton lais, but with the exception of “Lanval”, they only barely touch the Arthurian court to flavor their setting and their popularization was very much due to the media form they were recorded in. But that points up a problem of working within the Arthurian tradition: much of the individual romances about Lancelot, or Perceval, or Gawain that make up the entire body of art only touch on the “main” story of Arthur and Camelot.  Any kind of nod to this tradition, as Excalibur did, would make for disjointed viewing.

Matt
I kind of liked that the film attempted to relate the story in this way, but it did make for rather disjointed viewing, and I don’t think that Boorman exercised enough control over the pace and recurring visual motifs to string it all together into a satisfying whole — although, as Tycho noted, some scenes, like Arthur’s last ride, were magnificent.

Alex
The big problem with filming Malory — above and beyond the technical issues of condensing 1,000 pages of fine literature into a 2 hour movie — is that most people view the legends of King Arthur through more modern, accessible filters, like T.H. White and Disney.  Whilst everyone knows the names and some of the stories, these filters are really all wrong.  Boorman’s movie is a head-on challenge to that, determining not to be sucked down the easy road of portraying Arthur and his knights as Modern romantic heroes.  They go back to basics, mining the source material and trying to capture some of the attitudes behind it.   In my opinion he manages to do this effectively… probably a little too effectively.  Malory’s writing is able to present a sprawling epic and whilst it’s still emotionally removed from our modern sensibilities, the writing is so powerful that the classic moments resonate.  I bawled my eyes out when I first read The Death of Arthur.  A two hours greatest-hits package doesn’t really give us the opportunity to connect with Arthur or his knights on any level and because the editing and narrative strategies of the film are so muddled.  Every time something significant happened, I could only tell because we were treated to another moment of Wagner soundtrack.

Matt
The film also cultivated a distinct feeling that I’d appreciate it more if I was familiar with the various early iterations of the story.  Like I was supposed to be impressed with Boorman’s interpretation of the story, much like viewers are supposed to relish the differences in Shakespeare adaptations, which highlight or interpret scenes and the thematic core a little bit differently each time.  Unfortunately, I’m not well-read on Arthur or any connected legends. I’ve gleaned bits here and there because I enjoy fantasy stories, but the film really seemed to hammer heavily on certain things that made me go, “Uhhh, okay… Why should I care about this?”  So I think it is a film whose appeal would be measurably heightened by the viewer’s pre-existing familiarity with Arthurian legend.

Tracy
Despite my recommendation of this film to you, I think it absolutely helps to know the Arthurian legend before you watch this film.  Excalibur does interesting things with the tropes of Arthur, the round table, and the Grail legend that most films unconsciously ignore (or choose not to fit in short run times), and you can’t fully appreciate these manipulations of the canon without having been exposed to Arthur beyond Monty Python. While I’d argue that Boorman’s film isn’t simply an adaptation of Malory’s Mort D’Arthur (which itself is a blockbuster integration of several hundred years of Arthurian legend), that would perhaps be the best place to dip one’s toe in to the canon.  Aside from the fact the Mort D’Arthur simply a powerful and moving work in its own right.

Alex
This kind of movie won’t be made now, it’d be deemed to expensive and lacking a viewership.  Witness the lamentable King Arthur we had just recently.  It was a bloody mess of a movie, but it felt like a really honest mess.  A mess that was trying to convey something and might have done so with a better editor and a little better scripting and acting here and there.  An interesting pick Tracy…  I’m not sure I could recommend the movie, personally, to any but the Arthur obsessed– but to those, I could recommend it pretty well.

Edited by Tracy McCusker.