Gawain and Winifred are the only two characters of medieval legend that got named (and Winifred wasn’t an Arthurian figure, instead a minor 7th century welsh saint)
Haven’t figured out why Essel is named, yet, I’m sure there’s a reason for that.
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Watch Your Highness instead
I would actually recommend it in theaters over streaming, I also watched it streaming and that was a big mistake because the dark scenes got completely crushed in SD, from what I understand it looks great in an actual theater
The movie was clearly made with no respect for streaming
ps: its way better than shit like midsommar, it has an actual visual identity and some sense of spectacle
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The Green Knight isn’t comparable to either of those, imo
The Green Knight is actually good, for one 8)
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Sir Gawain + The Green Knight is:
Arthur’s Most Perfect Knight Gawain journeys to his inevitable death, meeting every trial perfectly (he’s the Prefect Knight!) until the very last. When he fails the final trial, it’s nbd! He gets a gentle lecture and goes home and everyone says “good story bro” though he may be personally sorta tore up about it.
The Green Knight inverts this. Its Gawain (Not Even A Knight) passes through a series of trials where he fails to live up to the explicitly cited (and poem-sourced) Knightly Virtues, but (finally) he (prepared by his previous failures) removes the belt, passing the fifth and final trial.
His vision lays out a life of relative comfort and prestige that still, finally, ends in annihilation. He spends the film fighting/fleeing the inevitability of death even as he ostensibly draws nearer it (as personified by the overwhelming hostility of “nature”), something that the poem’s Gawain only shrinks from in the final test. I like this Gawain, who takes a very long stumble into “all is vanity,” a lot more than poem Gawain, who models perfect virtue before the gentlest trippings-up.
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my favorite part was the giants
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Yeah when I sorted my shit out, it looked great. It wasn’t just that my picture was a little dim like you get in a theater from time to time. My dopey self was watching a near totally black screen for an hour. Definitely wouldn’t have been an issue even at a shitty theater.
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This made me watch /a version/ of The Green Knight. It was great to watch a movie like I watched Tenet. I got up and used the bathroom without stopping it. I kept it going no matter what.
Y’all are making me feel like it is an intellectual movie and that I didn’t have the proper book-learnin’ to what for get it. As is the way too long montage end dream really soured a lot of it for me. I’m left trying to figure out what the hell was going on.
Only to find out oh if you’d read the source material you’d get it. Which well that makes me more angry.
It was cool and moody and neat to see live action pull from the long history of Animation and Videogames.
I wish I had watched it in a theater. I am reminded “oh I like movies I should watch more movies I just have around here with my 2.5 hours a night.”
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The Mulan live action movie sucked but Freddie Wong’s little brother had a small role in it, so I could be like “hey I know that guy” good for him I guess
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To my credit, I watched Gilliam’s Jabberwocky at last last night, and a bunch of his castle interior backgrounds were total shadow (but with the actors actually lit).
By the way, that’s a movie totally doomed by the inevitable comparison to Holy Grail, but there’s a scant couple decent gags (the cliche bright lights, big city sequence when he first gets to the town is adorable) and the titular creature at the end is beautiful.
Now to bring stuff full circle. Despite Jabberwocky being a bit of a slog, the costuming felt like an old Flemish painting come to life, which I really dig. The Green Knight was definitely coming from a very contemporary fantasy art direction with its production design, but it was well done. Maybe those crowns were a bit cheesy, but they’re not anywhere near the muscle armor from Excalibur (no disrespect). Maybe that camera obscura was a bit much, but fantasy’s gotta fantasy.
Really I’m just treading water here until Shrug drops some science…
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Love that the literal canon reason the giants are naked is because no one can make clothes big enough to fit them with early medieval production technologies
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the crests on knight’s helmets in jabberwocky are a delight
Not a single bit of costuming in the green knight was realistic or ‘historically accurate’ (as if such could be possible in a medieval fantasy film set in an ersatz arthurian era) but it did have great personality, with so much of the costuming doing the heavy symbolic lifting (the dorky crowns are one of my favorite touches becauses it pulls at the thread of christian hubris vs pre-christian morality that’s pretty central to the movie’s plot)
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Ok, that halo motif on the crowns wasn’t working for me because I took it as a awkwardly plundered bit of medieval painting reference, but when you put it like that it totally makes sense! You’re winning me over!
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watched best of the best and instantly recognized this place phillip rhee stops at for two seconds as the “rock store” on mulholland hwy which you of course probably know as the one stop convenience store/lydecker veterinary office location from twin peaks
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Started watching the new Eva, glad that preview was there because went “I should rewatch 2.22 and 3.33 first.”
Mari seems a bit less out of place seeing these films as a sequence but she is in 2.22 so little you question why she was there. I am shocked how well it works just going from one film to the next despite years and years between releases. It even makes the films make more sense.
They are certainly cool to look at. I’ve loved how the Apostles/Angels look and act truly alien in a way that only Animation can achieve.
I finish 2.22 and got 40 minutes into 3.33. To counter my above praise, I remember the first time around I hated how it was a non-mystery and it jerks Shinji (and by extension the audience, around). I still hate it. You get a parade of characters you love, but they are different, but no time to examine or acknowledge that because they all hate Shinji, but still love him I guess. Because if we killed shinji the film would be over. And if we sat down and explained what was happening the film would be even shorter than it’s barely feature length run time.
Also hard to figure out how much you are supposed to be bringing the baggage of Eva into 2.22 and 3.33 . Friends are saying 4 leans into this, but it is ambivalent here. Where I think like FF7make is all FF7 baggage and RE2make has this perfect balance between RE2 baggage and new audience.
Prettyyyy excited for 2.5 hours of the end of Evangelion. And plenty of Fan Service!
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I watched all the rebuilds through this week myself and I was very, very pleasantly surprised by them. It really is remarkable that they all feel so coherant when watched together, even the fourth one does despite parts of it’s plot feeling like they could have only been written years into development.
While I dug all of them to a greater or lesser degree, and moreso than rudie because 3 is just a great film to vibe with and feel the mood, 3.0+1.0 really stood out as the interesting one. It’s annoying how it’s nearly impossible to understand it without having seen the entire series, EoE, and the other three rebuilds, which is both a big strength and huge failing.
Really extensive spoilers for the series but especially 3.0+1.0:
Summary
Turning the series central freudian metaphor on it’s head at the end that makes Gendo of the rebuild series a stand in for Anno really works. It lets Anno just discuss his own depression, and how Evangelion and all the misery stems from his own depression. It’s almost too frank, too on the nose, and yet one upping the ending of EoE by literally have fiction and reality merge works well in the context of the movie.
There’s a thousand little things that are really neat about this movie. How it’s apologetic that it feels like it can’t figure out how to give Ayanami a happy ending, or let her exist outside of her mechanical role in the story. How Asuka can’t connect with humanity because of how depersonalized she’s been rendered by merchandising. How Kawaru sadly admits that even thought this movie is supposed to break the cycle, he knows there will still be more Evangelion someday, and he’ll be back.
Mari is a controversial character because her literal perpose is to break through the fourth wall of the film and get shinji out of this perpetual unchanging state he’s been trapped in for decades because Evangelion is a brand, and brands don’t change. She’s also a stand in for Anno. That being said…she doesn’t actually fix Shinji, she supports him enough that he can finally have a talk with Gendo as Anno and talk about what it means to accept living with depression, and accept the love of others who care about you. And all of this is contextualized throughout by direct refrences to all the things that Evangelion drew from: Space Battleship Yamato, Gundam, Ultraman, Godzilla, even Childhoods end gets more directly referenced in the way the newest incarnation of the ‘Impact’ works this time.
There’s so much stuff I could criticize. How it can’t quite escape the fanservice. How extremely blunt it is because it wants you to both completely understand the intentions of the original series, and how Rebuild differs. How it occasionally gets lost in spectacle to the extent it loses some dramatic tension. How no matter how much it wants to be about how turning Asuka and Ayanami into dolls to collect a thousand copies of, that there will still be those dolls forever because of the capitalistic society we have. The movie just stops bothering to animate stuff at times, just showing still with voice overs.
That said…all of this is equally true of the original series. Hilariously, the things that bring this movie down a little are the same stumbling blocks Evangelion always had…so maybe in some ways it needs these contradictions to still be evangelion, as it’s ending just says “It’s time to move on with my life now that I’ve completed Evangelion”.
And at the end of all of this, I’m really looking forward to Shin Ultraman and Shin Kamen Rider. Anno does all of his best work outside of Evangelion in my book, and this movie was so much stronger because it really really felt like it was less a chance to make more money, and more a chance for him to really say something he wanted to say.
Good movie, I’m sure a lot of folks aren’t going to like it but…in a weird way it’s the exact ending for Evangelion I’ve hoped for since I was a depressed teen watching torrented End of Evangelion in a basement. I nearly cried because of how seen by it I felt at times.
Flawed, but worthwhile. I’m glad it exists.
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do we know when shin ultraman is coming yet
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