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A Knight's Tale
***
Cinema
Releases - August 31, 2001
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate PG. 132
minutes. Written and directed by Brian Helgeland. Starring Heath Ledger,
Rufus Sewell, Shannyn Sossamon, Paul Bettany, Laura Fraser, Mark
Addy.
"A Knight's Tale" is a medieval
action picture with a soundtrack featuring such artists as Queen, Bachman
Turner Overdrive and Thin Lizzy. As horsemen prepare to joust, the crowd
claps a drumbeat and sings "We Will Rock You". When the heroes ride from
place to place, "The Boys Are Back in Town" blares through the speakers.
During a celebratory feast in a royal castle, the guests invent modern
dancing.
If the film had revelled in these anachronisms,
desperately straining to point out their irony, it would have been a lame
failure. Witness the tackiness of "Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat"
and you get my drift. But the rock music on the soundtrack is just in there
without explanation, simply because the filmmakers thought it would be cool.
These kinds of movies are going to have historical inaccuracies anyway, so
what difference does it make if they're obvious or not? The general texture
of "A Knight's Tale" is no less convincing than a movie like "Gladiator",
and the clearest factual errors are so clear that they're fun.
The movie stars Heath Ledger as William Thatcher,
a commoner with uncommon gifts who decides that he wants to take part in
jousting tournaments. The problem is that only men of noble birth are allowed
to compete in such events, so he adopts a fake identity and gets a young
Geoffrey Chaucer (Paul Bettany) to draw up some documents proving his family
history. Also accompanying our hero are a pair of old friends, Roland (Mark
Addy) and Wat (Alan Tudyk), who help William train for his fights, and a
feisty female blacksmith played by Laura Fraser, who must have thanked God
for this project, after starring in "Kevin & Perry Go Large" and "Virtual
Sexuality".
The entertainment press has been affectedly attempting
to paint Ledger as the newest teen pin-up, but he's not just hype; he's a
solid enough presence to anchor this movie, and actors like Addy, Bettany,
Fraser and Tudyk have the right comic presence to surround him entertainingly.
The movie itself is directed by Brian Helgeland with high energy; 15th Century
pictures can be stuffy and dull even when they're trying to be exciting,
but here the classic rock music and the expensively produced action scenes
make things move ahead with power and force. "A Knight's Tale" is about as
loose as you could imagine an adaptation of Chaucer to be, and as much fun,
too.
COPYRIGHT©
2001 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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