grimy men with swords

Nope, it's not my local SCA experience (although it all felt curiously familiar); it was a stolen evening with starmadeshadow last night, watching Kingdom of Heaven. I tell myself that it's work, dammit, work! - some of my students are writing essays on it next week, and it's actually an interesting version of the ongoing tussle in romance between ideals of knighthood and the reality on the ground. (In this essay they have to compare medieval romance to a modern romance text of some sort, and I'm getting everything from Shrek and Star Wars to "La Belle Dame Sans Merci". Which is good, as it suggests they are capable of creativity and lateral thought).

Things I Liked About Kingdom of Heaven (and, warning, if you haven't seen it, there are minor spoilers here):

• Orlando Bloom - hot or not, the boy is basically likeable.
  
• The swordfighting, for which I have a low, reprehensible passion similar to that which I have for spaceships and superheroes.
  
• The landscapes, costumes and armour, which felt reasonably authentic to me, possibly excepting the "gone-native" style of the single female character.
  
• The millyuns of siege engines. (I also like siege engines).
  
• The complete absence of the central battle between Saladin and Guy de Lusignan - all you get is post-battlefield scenes with circling birds. I wouldn't have credited Ridley Scott with that degree of self-restraint, and it's very effective.
  
• The leper king.
  
• A pleasing tendency to see Christians as both flawed/fanatical and genuinely dedicated/moral. I liked the world-weary grimness of the Liam Neeson and Jeremy Irons characters. It rang true.

Things That Bothered Me About Kingdom of Heaven:

• Cheesy predictable plot with expected and rather unrealistic upbeat ending.
  
• None of its battle scenes were as cool as Lord of the Rings. No monsters.
  
• I had the uncomfortable feeling that Orli was trying to be Aragorn a lot of the time, which is sad, because of course Viggo would have done a much better job in the role, even if it would have brought the level of LotR flashbacks up to nearly unbearable.
  
• Precisely two women, one of them dead.
  
• Over-compensation in the political correctness department - almost all the truly bad guys were Christians. The film is apparently annoying fundamentalist Christians while rather pleasing Moslems, and I have a sneaking suspicion that historically the dishonours in the Crusades, at least in terms of religious fantaticism, were about equal. Of course, you could argue that the Christians had absolutely no bloody right whatsoever to be there, certainly not because "God wills it", in which case the film is probably an approximately fair depiction.

Anyway. A rather pleasant way to avoid work for a couple of hours. I felt it was justified because I worked like a demon all afternoon yesterday, in between being fed lunch by Stace and Maia. On re-reading, I realised that, had I been marking my film chapter as a student essay, I would have been writing repeatedly down the margins, "Interesting point, but you're straying off topic," so I spent about five hours inserting the word "metafiction" at random intervals to bring all the mad feminism back to issues of narrative. Will finish that today, and then it's just the conclusion chapter to do this weekend. In between mad socialising (Neil's birthday party tonight! Stace's tomorrow! Extra singing practice on Sunday! somewhere in all this, I have to plan the menu for the feast next weekend...)

But it rained all night. All night. Heavily. Drumming on the roof, and trickles and rivulets of joyously wet water bounding all over the garden. I am a happy thing. With its nose firmly to the grindstone, but nonetheless a happy thing.