t is Friday, and as the week and the month come to an end, let's take stock of our lives, shall we?

Oh hell no. We're here for snark, you to read it, me to write it, and let's be happy with that. Today's blog is not especially heavy with snark, but it does feature a DVD Review (King Arthur, 2004), and a bit of talk about Malaya's and my experiences with dance class on Wednesday night. And maybe some news, if I trip over anything surfing between now and a few hours from now when I get around to finishing up and posting this blog.

First, to the dance.

As I said previously, it's National Dance Week in the Bay Area, and dozens of local dance studios (who knew there were so many?) are opening up their doors to new students by offering free classes. Malaya and I have long harbored an interest in learning some ballroom dances, and this seemed a perfect opportunity to check out some classes. And it would be, if most of the places weren't offering weird, hippy-style, "roll around on the floor with a yoga ball" type classes.

We couldn't see anything we wanted to do on Tuesday or Thursday night, but Wednesday night we found a Samba class that wasn't too far away. So we went, got there for the 7 o'clock class, and had a damn good time. Samba, it turns out, is very Kali-esque, with lots of flowing movements gliding footsteps, and Malaya and me had no trouble picking it up and staying on the beat. If we'd been able to dance with each other the whole time we would probably have had something, but the format of the class was to add new steps constantly, dance them with a partner for a minute or two, and then rotate to a new partner. So we got to stand side by side in the Samba class for about 3 minutes, as we learned the most basic steps and moves, and then we started rotating and never saw each other again.

Well, that's not true, we could see each other, but only across the huge ballroom, and with maybe 70 or 80 people in it, the class would have had to go a lot longer than an hour for me (the leads moved, the follows stayed put) to get back around to Malaya. The demographics weren't a surprise either; we were among the youngest people there, and women outnumbered men maybe 60/40. There were a surprising number of 50-60 y/o Asian women there solo, but since we were in the Lake Merritt area, where lots of Chinese and other Asian groups live, there you are.  Why their husbands weren't there with them I couldn't say, but there were at least half a dozen old men sitting around the outside of the room being wallflowers, so maybe they were willing to be dragged to a dance class, but refused to join in? Sad, really, like junior high boys afraid to step out onto the floor where the girls are, though they so desperately want to.

I had fun with the samba; and we would happily have stayed in the ballroom and danced it some more, since open dance night started at 8 and went until 11, except that the instructor told us they had another class starting upstairs right after the samba class ended. So up we went, for some swing.

The swing was fun too, but harder for me to learn. It's jitterbuggy, like you see people doing in 50s movies and on Happy Days; very quick steps and fast direction changes and spins and such, and while I got into it after a while, the rhythm is nothing like what we do in Kali, so I didn't have any direct tie in from my recent martial arts training. I suppose having coordination and an eye for movement from Kali helped, since I was able to pick it up quickly and remember which foot went where and such, but mostly the swing and the hustle, both of which we learned for 45 minutes each, relied on an ability to get the beat/rhythm, and keep it going as you moved around and spun and were spun by your partner.

It's all beats, 3 count, 4 count, whatever, and if you have any sort of rhythm at all you can get with the music and keep moving. I frequently lost the steps or forgot the next move, but in a room full of people you can watch the others and see what they're doing, and you've always got a partner to help you remember too. That wasn't of such use this time since so many of the women were brand new for the free class too, but at worse I had to march in place for a few seconds when I went the wrong way and had to wait a moment to jump back into the dance on the beat.

As I said, it was a lot of fun and a good cardio workout too; most everyone was sweating freely during the two swing classes, even with windows open and fans blowing. Better yet, they have classes every Wednesday evening with very reasonable prices, and since that's one of the very few nights that neither Malaya or I have Kali class, we're going to try and get back there regularly over the summer.

We've got no real reason to learn to dance in these styles; we're going to two weddings this year and can use them at either or both, but we already have enough rhythm to fake it during any slow dance, and it's not like they'll throw us out of the receptions if we can't keep proper time. We just wanna learn, and since we had such fun doing it this week, why not continue?

Thinking about it afterwards and wondering why I'd enjoyed it despite my constant screw ups, I realized that I felt no pressure and no insecurity, but also that I was very optimistic about it. With the dance classes the glass was always half full for me, and anything more than falling over my own feet was a success. I enjoy Kali more than dancing, since it seems more important and not just something to play around with, but I seldom have as much fun in a given class as I did at the dance class. The reason, I think is that in Kali my metaphorical glass is always half empty. No matter how well I did, relative to others or to how long I've been doing Kali or to my own expectations, I always feel like I could/should have done better. Afterwards I always think of moves I forgot in the heat of sparring, realize things I could have done faster or more smoothly, etc.  I don't beat myself up (well, not that badly, at least) but I really want to improve and perform well at Kali, and I drive myself to do that with self-criticism.

The question is; would I keep my happy-go-lucky attitude towards dance if I kept doing it? Or would I soon come to expect more from myself every time, and be unhappy if I missed a step, or didn't keep good form as I Samba'ed, or didn't match my timing to my partner's, etc?

I dunno, but given how I am about most everything, I'm pretty sure I'll get more self critical about my dancing as I take more classes. There is, of course, a fine line between pushing yourself to improve and beating yourself up over things, and I will try to stay on the correct side of it. I doubt I'll ever take any kind of dancing as seriously as I do Kali though. After all, it's just having fun and moving with music, and even if I'm just okay at something, I'm still dancing better than I did before, and well enough that 95% of the observers would never know the difference.

That same reasoning could be applied to Kali and most every other activity in life that I put importance on though, and since I almost never apply it in those instances, it's entirely possible I won't apply it to dancing for long either. And with that cheery bit of reassurance, I'll cut to the review and wish you a happy weekend.

Directed by Antoine Fuqua, this heavily-fictionalized historical action flick was released last summer, when it promptly bombed (in the US at least; it was actually profitable if you go with the worldwide numbers and factor in DVD sales). As discussed in blogs at the time (and archived on the King Arthur review page, scroll down past the review), I didn't think this one would succeed, largely because there were half a dozen other similar movies released before it, and people are just sick of the genre, LotR excepted. Since King Arthur we've seen Alexander bomb, and I'm sure Kingdom of Heaven will join it later this year.  I further predict no more historical fantasy battle dramas for at least five years, until someone rejuvenates the genre. Peter Jackson with The Hobbit, with any luck.

As for King Arthur, I never did see it in the theaters, but when Blockbuster had a recent 3/$25 DVD sale, Malaya and me picked up the unrated director's cut, along with The Ladykillers, and Alien.  I'd long since seen and reviewed the second two, and since we finally watched King Arthur last night, several weeks after buying it, I might as well review it too.

Fuqua's version of the tale is very stripped down. Arthur is an officer in the Roman Army in England in 400AD. He and his six knights are just about to complete their 15 year conscriptions and will then be allowed to go free and return to their home, when the Bishop gives them one last task. Rome is pulling back from England and abandoning Hadrian's Wall in the face of a Saxon invasion from the north. Arthur and his men must rescue a Roman family from a small settlement three days north of the wall; only then will they be given papers allowing them free passage through the Roman Empire. Thrown into the mix are the Woads, blue-painted locals who want their lands to be free of foreign invaders, both Roman and Saxon. The leader of the Woads is Merlin, a man with no special powers of any kind, in this film. He's just an old Woad who wears brown hide clothing and a lot of blue face paint.

The rest of the familiar romantic and mythic elements are just as pared down as Merlin is. Arthur has a round table, but it's more like a hoop table, with open space in the middle and the knights sit spaced well around it. Dinner conversation would be as hard as passing the salt, with ten feet between the men. Guinevere is a captive Woad who heals up in about one day after Arthur rescues her from near-death, and then apparently falls in love with Arthur, though they hardly speak at all. She trades nothing with Lancelot but a few meaningful glances. The rest of the Knights had no names that I ever caught, and a sum total of two personality traits; one guy has a dozen bastard children, and another has a hawk that never serves any purpose whatsoever. There are no castles, no maidens, no quests, no Holy Grails, and nothing else you've ever heard from Arthurian Legend.

I didn't automatically dislike the simplified version of the story, and I find the traditional soap opera version pretty melodramatic, but there's a fine line between reducing the plot elements of a familiar tale, and telling a boring story that happens to have a few characters with similar names to those of legend.  This movie would never have been made if it hadn't had a King Arthur tie in, but the plot reduces the tie in to coincidental names, and there's a reason the Arthurian Legends have survived into the modern era, and it's not because their names are so catchy. People like the love triangle, the betrayal, the redemption, the magic, the struggle for power, and so on, and throwing all that overboard could have been a good idea, if they'd had something as good or better to replace it with.

They did not. 

There wasn't anything grossly awful about the film, and I never felt like I wanted to stop watching it, or wanted to fast forward, but we definitely kept watching it simply to see how it ended, rather than because we were enjoying it. The action scenes aren't exciting, the plot isn't compelling, the romance isn't involving or believable, and it's basically just two hours of people in costumes wandering around the English countryside, fighting. The movie wasn't awful, but it was long and relatively boring, since we never cared about any of the characters, believed their motivations, or cared about the larger plot itself. To the scores:

King Arthur, Unrated Director's Cut (2004)
Script/Story: 3
Acting/Casting: 6
Action: 6
Humor: NA
Horror: NA
Eye Candy: 5
Fun Factor: 5
Replayability: 2
Overall: 4.5

Quite a string of mediocre scores there, isn't it? I didn't expect much from the story or the acting, but I hoped that the film would at least have good battle sequences and be pretty to look at. After all, it's hard to go wrong with 120 minutes of nature scenes and people in antique costumes. Hard, but not impossible, as this film proves.

I should also note that we did not watch the original theatrical version. We watched the unrated director's cut, which restored a lot of the violence and gore that was removed to get the initial PG-13 rating. This DVD version would pretty clearly earn an R-rating, though it was still far from a hard R; there was a lot more violence and blood in Gladiator, for instance.

For some more info about the movie edits, here's a quote from my blog entry from last summer, shortly after the film was released to such disappointing returns. In this entry (Its on the review page; scroll down.) I quote from an Entertainment Weekly magazine feature about the film, and the cuts Fuqua had to make for the ratings board.

Among the first scenes he shot were for the opening battle sequence, in which Arthur decapitates a few Picts and Lancelot's swordsmanship leaves him bathed in blood.

.....

Guinevere's body count was reduced. The brutal torture and killing of one knights was trimmed. And Arthur's vengeful dispatch of the Saxon leader -- a furious sequence that originally culminated with Arthur slamming a sword hard and deep into his enemy's chest -- was softened. Looking back, Fuqua feels that the film's pulled punches are too noticeable and fears that they will distract audiences. "If [PG-13] was what they wanted to do from day one," he says, " I would have designed it differently."

I have not seen the original version, and from reading the above quote, it sounds like virtually everything mentioned here is back in the director's cut DVD. Lancelot certainly started off with blood splatters on him and Arthur did some decapitating. None of it was especially gory or exciting or realistic, but it was in there. Unfortunately those extra scenes didn't help, since they weren't done well enough to be aren't so gory and fun that they're enjoyable of themselves, and since we never care about the good guys or the bad guys very much there's no emotional impact gained by having them die in more gruesome fashion.

To discuss the scores in a bit more detail:

Script/Story: 3
This is really where the movie failed, since while the mediocre acting and action and eye candy weren't good, they wouldn't have mattered if we'd been involved in the plot. Instead we felt like we were watching a mediocre documentary about ancient history, and since the good guys weren't very involving or interesting, and the bad guys just seemed to be doing a job without much lust or enjoyment for it, no one on screen was having any fun either. The script needed a lot more work to turn these blank characters into ones we could root for or against, and the very flat direction didn't help much either.

Maybe three minutes into the movie Malaya and me were both laughing out loud at some of the inept dialogue and characterization, and that's never a good sign.

Acting/Casting: 6
This is actually the highest score I'm giving, since I'm blaming the script for the problems. None of the actors were special or great in any way, but no one was so bad on the screen that they sore thumbed their way into my attention. They weren't awful, just universally flat and lifeless; even Clive Owen, who tried very hard to do the inspirational king thing, with not much in the way of results.

Action: 6
There was a ton of action, with three major set piece battles, each with more than 10 minutes of straight action. The finale is the longest of the three, and is a solid 20+ minutes of sword fights, deadly volleys of arrows, trebuchets launching flaming balls of death, and on and on. And on. And on. We were bored with the final battle halfway through, not since the action sucked (it was mediocre) but since the strategy of the opposing sides was idiotic, and since we didn't really care who lived or died.

The action should be good; there are long shots establishing the number of fighters, they dress differently-enough that you can tell the sides apart, and every hero gets enough screen time during the battles that you see them do their thing as they take apart several enemy soldiers. In fact it's surprising how much time they get per battle; during the finale mass clashes of stunt men and women are shown for half a minute, and then the scene cuts to one hero killing several enemies, then another hero, then another, and so on. When you consider that Arthur has seven knights and a fighting girlfriend, and that there is screen time given to the main bad guys as well, and that the final fight gives them all at least a minute of fight time, each, you can see why it goes long.

The battle scenes in King Arthur basically make the mistake that lots of driving movies make; no one, other than super hardcore fans of the genre, find it entertaining simply to watch hot cars, or guys in armor, or whatever your theme is. They have to be doing their thing for a reason we care about, or doing it in an incredibly-interesting way. Unless you're directing porn and can simply have a hot woman lie around naked, you've got to have a plot and a story, or 99% of viewers will get bored with it. My girlfriend and me love action, love sword fighting, and love medieval period films, and we still got bored during every action sequence in King Arthur, since we didn't care who won or lost, and none of the action sequences were filmed with any excitement or verve.

This movie also did the usual thing where every single one of the good guys was a brilliant and skilled fighter, while 99% of the bad guys acted like they'd just picked up a sword for the first time that day, after a big lunch. That's usually silly, but in King Arthur, where every one of the bad guys is a professional, life-long soldier, it's just ridiculous. Why make the bad guys die so easily and look so clumsy with their weapons? It cheapens the triumph of the heroes.

I also thought it ridiculous that in this film, as in almost all medieval movies, armor is completely useless. Good guys never wear helms or face shields if it would make them look less spiffy, huge packs of earnest savages fight with no armor at all, and yet they easily triumph over hundreds of enemy soldiers who have far better equipment. Look, I know planning a realistic action sequence is tough, but guys back in the day didn't wear all that heavy metal just to look good on camera; they wore it since it kept them alive in combat. Read a bit about Cortez's and Pizarro's butchery of the natives in South American, or similar stories from the colonization of Africa. In all cases, small parties of the invading Europeans were routinely able to kill literally thousands of natives while suffering virtually no losses of their own. Firearms and cannons were of great assistance, sure, but their armor, even the early brass and copper stuff, was a huge factor as well. Against primitive bone and stone weapons it gave the wearer virtual invulnerability, and it wasn't bad against the soft metals swords and spear points were made from in the days before alloys came into use.

(I'm sure there are lots of better examples of culture clashes and massacres based on weapon and armor superiority in the pre-gun powder days, but that area of history is not my specialty and I'm not about to go look it up just for this stupid movie review.)

The other silly thing about the action is that of the kills shown on screen, at least 95% are made by the heroes. This works in the first two action sequences since they are smaller in scale, but when the huge final showdown comes and there are hundreds or thousands of fighters on each side, and all we ever see are close up views of individual heroes killing three or four people at a time, it's silly. The last battle goes on forever with hardly any casualties shown. Arthur eventually goes one on one against the head bad guy, with hundreds of people fighting all around them. They fight for a few minutes, and then when Arthur finally wins (What, like that's a spoiler?), the camera pulls back and suddenly everyone else is dead, all the way across the immense battlefield, with just a few surviving good guys walking around inspecting the dead. 

Humor: NA
None worth mentioning. I think we laughed once, at a completely anachronistic line by Guinevere. (Ebert quotes it in his review, if you're interested.)

Horror: NA
Nope. Unless you're very easily frightened by um... blood? Really bad fake accents?

Eye Candy: 5
This is a score I expected to be much higher. After all, almost the entire movie takes place outdoors, on rolling green fields, in forests, in icy mountain passes, and so on. Yet it's never pretty, and in fact it's actually ugly quite a bit of the time. Some of it is intentional; the director and cinematographer were obviously aiming for a gritty, dark look, and beautiful sunny meadows wouldn't have given them that. It never lets up though, and scenes with clouds look gray and depressing, while even the scenes with sunlight are tinted and filtered to look washed out and ominous. It's a stylistic choice, but it's an ugly one. 

Fun Factor: 5
Bleh. I'm not a huge fan of Gladiator (though my girlfriend is) but I can still enjoy the great action and battles scenes, and have fun watching those. The fact that it's got good acting and emotionally-involving characters is another plus, of course. In contrast, I can not imagine watching any scenes from this movie over again just for the fun of it, and I'm usually good for re-watching action scenes and fight scenes from just about anything.

Replayability: 2
This might deserve a lower score. There's nothing in the film to watch over again for the fun of it, the plot isn't involving the first time, and there aren't any mysteries or surprise revelations that make you want to go back and see how they were set up and foreshadowed. The movie isn't even enjoyable to look at, so honestly, I'll be surprised if it ever makes the trip from our DVD library into our DVD player again.