More Stone than Sword

Best that they can do?

The best thing I can say about King Arthur is that I can’t decide whether it’s bad or just mediocre. What I do know is that I found it dull and unmemorable, with the exception of one pretty cool (literally) battle scene, the sheer magnetism of Clive Owen and Keira Knightley and one great one-liner from Miss Knightley (which I believe was in the trailer, but altered to meet MPAA regulations).

The marketers at Disney should be ashamed of themselves for putting Knightley front and center in all the posters. She doesn’t appear (like a breath of fresh air) until halfway through the movie, and even then her role isn’t nearly as prominent as they’d have you believe. However, Owen and Knightley are definitely movie stars (he just needs to find the right project to prove it to the uninitiated – he’ll at least win over the art house circuit in Closer this December). She is absolutely stunning, even when covered in mud or looking like a smurf.(I can say that because I’m only four years older than her, but it was a tad disturbing to watch a man 20 years her senior caressing her thigh).

One last note: There was a surprising amount of applause at the end of the movie (maybe they were just clapping because we got to finally go home), which got me to thinking: a few years ago, it was a very rare occasion to hear an ovation at a movie – now it seems to happen after every other movie I see. Have our collective standards been lowered? Have we gained an appreciation for the art form that is cinema? Is it just an L.A. thing – where there’s a good chance somebody who worked on the movie is sitting in the audience? And how many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop?