Look Back in Anger (1989)

There's something perversely compelling but ultimately tiresome about Look Back In Anger, the classic "kitchen sink drama" about an Angry Young Man. In fact, the protagonist's name, Jimmy Porter, has become something of a shorthand for "the Angry Young Man" - or, if you're like the PPCC, "self-important misogynistic asshole".

What's amazing about Look Back in Anger is how autobiographical it purportedly is. John Osborne, the playwright, was also notoriously horrible to his loved ones - after repeatedly insulting her, he threw his teenage daughter out of the house and never spoke to her again. Like Jimmy Porter, the cruelty of his language was infamous. And what's amazing is that someone so, well, self-involved and dick-ish, could have been able to write anything remotely three-dimensional at all. It's a wonder he managed to create characters other than Jimmy Porter - especially Jimmy's long-suffering wife, Alison, and friend, Cliff.

Anyway! Jimmy Porter (Kenneth Branagh) is a working class candy shop owner somewhere in an anonymous English town. He seethes at the unfairness of it all, particularly classism and, uh, the existence of women. His hatred for these two things he takes out with relish on Alison (Emma Thompson), his passive, upper class-slumming wife. A diarrheic talker, Jimmy hates the complacency, the conformism, the hypocrisy of modern English everything. He rails and rails… and rails… and rails some more, for good measure. His (only remaining?) friend, the adorable puppy-like Cliff (Gerard Horan), tries to keep the peace between Jimmy and Alison. Eventually, Alison's childhood friend, the righteous and churchy Helena (Siobhan Redmond), comes to visit and attempts to bark back at Jimmy.

All of this building tension - a tension that goes from being pleasantly coiled to excruciatingly awful to watch - is punctuated by rare moments of sweet, almost needy, affection: when they're not screaming at each other, Jimmy and Alison cuddle and coo about being a "bear and a squirrel", Alison and Cliff cuddle and coo ("My lovely!" Cliff always exclaims), and Jimmy and Cliff wrestle and rough-house like schoolboys. It's a strange, compelling roller coaster of ups and… well, not so much downs, as when the roller coaster breaks off the tracks and goes flying away.

Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson are always reliably good in theater-driven stuff. Judi Dench directs, but it's a limited, anemic direction, still speaking theater language when it should be speaking movie.

The play itself has been lauded for bringing realism (and, we guess, nihilism and rebellion) to the English stage back in the 50s. It is certainly shockingly gritty by even today's standards - again, not so much because of the poverty or unwanted pregnancy stuff, so much as the cruelty of Jimmy and Osborne's relatively sympathetic treatment of it. It's as if Osborne is trying to tell us Jimmy is a prophet, someone who (as the "citation needed" intro of Osborne's wiki tells us) "argued for the cleansing wisdom of bad behavior and bad taste, and combined unsparing truthfulness with devastating wit." Now, we have a personal bone to pick with such a philosophy: mostly because we think compassion is the only universal wisdom, and behaving like an asshole isn't so much shaking off the shackles of a hypocritical, stifling society, as it is, well, being an asshole.

If we may go a bit Tiger Beatdown on Osborne and Jimmy for a moment, as well, we've always heard this ultra-individualistic, pessimistic philosophy proselytized by, well, angry young men. Angry, desperate egotism and self-pity of this sort, when coupled with disenfranchised young white men (as Jimmy and Osborne are), always makes us think of (1) misogyny! and (2) racism! And, indeed, you can read Look Back in Anger as a post-colonial play: Jimmy as a broken-down, post-imperial UK, with nothing else to conquer, wallowing in ennui and feelings of low self-worth. (Hey, Laurence Olivier, who was all about injecting patriotism into theater, thought Look Back in Anger was an offense to his "sense of patriotism and theatre".) In that respect, as a self-aware sympathetic satire of wounded, post-imperial British pride, Look Back in Anger is almost acceptable - but we're wary of giving Osborne too much self-reflective credit, especially since he was kinda right-wing and it smells throughout that he agrees with Jimmy. He certainly seems to think Jimmy's categorical hate of anyone upper class or female (or, worse, upper class and female!) is righteous and true. And he wasn't totally self-aware: as demonstrated in the completely ridiculous moment when another character, the father-in-law, listens to Alison describing Jimmy's various abuses and then compliments Jimmy on his "way with words" (?!). Why doesn't he just say, "Good heavens, that Jimmy fellow should become a playwright! He could revolutionize the stage with his witticisms!" Dude, he put a sockpuppet in his own play. What a troll...

Dead Again (1991)

Dead Again is a fun, weird romp through reincarnation, melodrama, and Kenneth Branagh-Emma Thompson's Greatest Hits. A fluffy murder mystery dressed up in classical Hitchcock-style aesthetics with a dash of Branagh-style theatricality, it is whimsical and not too gory and very silly. Expect much intentional and unintentional humor.

One day, detective Mike Church (Kenneth Branagh, in an American accent) agrees to help his old orphanage out with a bag lady problem they're having: a mysterious mute woman (Emma Thompson), suffering from amnesia, has wandered onto the grounds and keeps having screaming nightmares. Mike takes the lady in and tries to find out where her memory went; his friends, Pete (Wayne Knight (!)) the forensics guy and Dr. Carlisle (Robin Williams, in a very good beefed-up cameo) the former psychiatrist quack, try to help. But the biggest help comes when the dapper, take-charge hypnotist Frank (Derek Jacobi) enters the scene. After just a few sessions with Frank, the woman - now called Grace - has regained the ability to speak and is busy reliving her past life as Margaret Strauss (Emma Thompson, again), eminent pianist and wife to the dashing European composer, Roman Strauss (Kenneth Branagh, in a (sexier) German accent this time), way back in post-war LA. The same Strausses who ended up all over the 1940s newspapers after Roman was convicted of murdering Margaret with a pair of scissors. What does it all mean?! Will Mike and Grace fall in love as per their predetermination? Or will karma catch up with them, as Dr. Carlisle insists it will, and they'll just murder each other all over again?! And what is Grace's real name anyway!?!?!

It all comes together in a delightful, unexpected conclusion that we'll not spoil here. But suffice to say it includes jarring cross cuts (our favorite filmy thing ever!), blood-pumping choral music (our favorite Kenneth Branaghy thing ever!) and lots of gasps and close-ups and unexpected laughter (from us, that is).

The charm of Dead Again is that it doesn't take itself too seriously, even though everything is played straight. Everyone looks like they're having a rollicking good time swaning around the 1940s black-and-white scenes (all white tie events, mind you) or engaging in some earnest, cringe-worthy 1980s rom-com-style flirting ("I can read tea bags, you know?" Mike schmoozes; OH GOD). Robin Williams' glorified cameo is a great performance filled with hilariously vulgar dialogue; it's worth it just to see him in this cross between The Fisher King and Good Will Hunting. Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson are at their charmingest peak (this was their period, after all!), and the whole film is like a tribute fest to their past and future work: the masked ball which we'll see again in Much Ado About Nothing, the domestic horrors reminiscent of Look Back in Anger and Patrick Doyle's rousing, bombastic score straight out of the goosebump-inducing St. Crispin's Day speech from Henry V. Andy Garcia has a nice role as the tobacco-addicted journalist, while Campbell Scott's cameo made us laugh and laugh and laugh.

Our conclusion? Definitely see it. And then write Kenneth Branagh and tell him he is and always will be King Arthur.

A Month in the Country (1987)

If there is one movie that is terribly, tragically underrated and unknown, it is A Month in the Country.

It's ironic because J.L. Carr's novel of the same name, on which the 1980s movie is based, is also terribly, tragically unknown. It just missed a Booker back in 1980, and instead won the Guardian Fiction Prize - a lesser trophy and, it seems, a punishment to anonymity. The movie, in the meantime, stars everyone's favorite English actors, Colin Firth and Kenneth Branagh, as young World War I veterans struggling to cope with their traumatic experiences in the first, Elysian summer after peace is declared. It's great. Really beautiful. And there's no DVD for it!?!!


Colin Firth as Tom Birkin and Kenneth Branagh as Moon, both so young!

It's terrible, tragic and ironic, but it also makes sense - in a weird, double-agent-ironic way - that this small, understated story of remembering and loss should be on the verge of falling into the vacuum. The story is, after all, an extended meditation on nostalgia, grieving and renewal. It's about preserving yourself against the abyss; carving a space of light in a world where all seems dark. When Tom Birkin (Colin Firth) arrives in the tiny Yorkshire hamlet of Oxgodsby, he suffers from a stammer, a facial tic and terrible nightmares. He's also freshly divorced and still pining for his ex-wife, Vinnie (never shown on screen). He arrives in Oxgodsby in rainy twilight and makes his way to a gloomy church. His job for the coming summer months is to restore a decrepit, hidden 14th-century fresco from the church's ancient walls.

The pace is slow, matching the drift of motes in sunlight. Birkin meets another young vet, Moon (Kenneth Branagh), who has been paid to dig up the lost grave of a rich townie's ancestor. Moon is, like Birkin, still damaged from the war, though the quality of his suffering becomes an unexpected parallel with the mysterious artist's life. Birkin, when not drinking tea with Moon or brushing turpentine onto plaster, falls into quiet, intense love with the vicar's wife, Alice Keach (Natasha Richardson).


Love with the vicar's wife (Natasha Richardson)! The bit when she explains her apple savantness is so good.

Colin Firth recently waxed nostalgic about director Pat O'Connor's confidence in making this film: the story was allowed to breathe, actors were allowed to be silent. Indeed, the whole point of the film is the profound, emotional intensity that underscores this pleasant facade, and the uselessness of words. The trauma of World War I still lingers like a ghost in the landscape: and O'Connor does a brilliant job of never gazing directly at the war, but rather coming at it sideways. The most explicit war scene we see is the opening shot of Birkin struggling through the mud and barbed wire: the camera is zoomed tightly on him, we have little sense of context, and there's a sense of claustrophobia and horror. The haunting church hymns underscore the usual aphorism: war is hell (in the religious and literal senses). Similarly, Birkin and Moon's PTSD is a smothered suffering that we see only through the cracks of Birkin's twitch or Moon's nighttime howling.

But this story isn't about dwelling in the horribleness of World War I - rather, it's a realist, poignant look at slow healing. Oxgodsby's warm fuzziness is the perfect restorative for the broken vets, even if that healing is fragile and tentative. And the narrative is a looking back, so nostalgia is thick. The greatness of this story is the way it captures ephemeral beauty, a feeling that is vibrant and impermanent. Quite spiritual. And, like all art that does what it's supposed to, it captures and transmits an emotional quality.


We should probably mention that this film is, actually, in color.

The film is also a marvelous companion to the book - they both really enrich each other. And experiencing either is like breathing in purified rural gold. People, get thee to this film - or rather, get thee to preserving this rich work! We can't let gems like these disappear. Ahh, Angleterre. Where's good ol' William Blake when ya need him?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold;
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!

(the book!)

Wallander: The Fifth Woman (2010)

Ah, the Wallander series, where ace Swedish detective Kurt Wallander (Kenneth Branagh) relentlessly picks at the scab that is his life.

We can't help but think constantly to a description Kenneth Branagh gave of Wallander: the man's like an "open wound". And every episode features the same key scenes to show us just how psychologically wounded this teddy bear is: he sleeps only in awkward sitting positions (he broods himself to sleep, every. single. night. people!), is always awoken by the harsh siren call of his detective colleagues, who then take him to see someone who was murdered in some horrible way (in this episode: with spikes!), wherein Wallander becomes even more moody, irritable, depressed and fatalistic.


Kurt: historiam calamitatum.


Sweden is a sad place, apparently.

In this third installment of Kurt's Angst, The Fifth Woman, Wallander is busy trying to figure out who killed the birdwatcher (with spikes!) while - on the personal side of things - his father, Povel (the excellent David Warner), deteriorates even further into frailty and old age. In fact, the entire episode is about aging parents, vulnerable adult children, and the ancient wounds we leave on each other. And, in its usual style, it tells us about these scars and hesitant catharses with moody shots of a sagging, exhausted Kenneth Branagh as he drives through the desaturated Swedish landscapes. The murder mystery turns out to be just a convenient thematic parallel for Kurt's familial turmoil, and on the personal side - well - Kurt finally cries in front of someone and lets himself be hugged (thank God).

The genius of this show - the genius of Branagh's interpretation of Wallander - is, as we've mentioned before, his social awkwardness. Because while watching Wallander churn silently in his own self-loathing is compelling (to a point), watching Wallander try to mask this is much more poignant. Of course, he fails every time as his tense explosions or brittle unhappiness are obvious and, well, really out there. But he tries to cover it up - and that's just sad. Also, is it just us, or does Wallander's sympathetic friend, Nyberg (Richard McCabe), solve every mystery only moments after seeing the corpse? "Oh yes, it was Colonel Mustard with the wrench. You can tell by that piece of lint there. Ta!"


Pale and miserable.

Meanwhile: Kenneth Branagh's performance. Ah, Kenneth Branagh. There's something unique about his style of acting: a combination of naturalism with theatrical vulnerability. It worked so well in Henry V. Heck, it worked really well in that reincarnation movie with Emma Thompson which was, btw, totally fun! In Wallander, his pain is obvious - and his attempts to smother it, or hide it, or beat his way through it, are likewise obvious. It's not necessarily subtle, though it is… calming? What's the word? There's a comfortably sympathetic quality to it. An earnestness. That's it! Kenneth Branagh is terribly, terribly earnest. And that's awfully nice.

Wallander: The Man Who Smiled (2010)

Honestly, Wallander should just be called the Soft and Fuzzy Pillow (Death) Show, where that pillow is played by Kenneth Branagh as a man who made a big mistake in choosing a profession. Why on earth did Mr. Kurt Wallander, who takes every murder as a torturous baptism by fire into realizing that the world is immoral, imperfect, violent and horrible, ever become a detective, of all things?! This man should have been a doctor, or maybe a watercolor artist, or a gardener.


For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.


Be he ne'er so vile.


This day shall gentle his condition.

In The Man Who Smiled, we catch up with a shaky, clammy Wallander, living in uneasy early retirement after the traumatic events of Faceless Killers. Wallander, who was forced to discharge his firearm in self-defense in the previous episode, is clearly suffering from some nasty PTSD - and if you thought Wallander couldn't possibly get any dumpier, frumpier and unhappier, he can and he does. Now chewing through handfuls of pills and gulping them back with red wine, he spends most of his private hours wallowing in wretched misery. (He spends most of his public hours having sweaty panic attacks.) When an old friend, Sten (David Sibley), begs Wallander to come out retirement for one final case (someone killed Sten's dad!), Wallander refuses (!), which leads said friend to kill himself (!!). Wallander now has just that critical level of toxic guilt he needs to spur him back into the office.

The excellent David Warner makes a small appearance as Kurt's equally wretched father, Povel, who spits venom at his son with just enough intensity to amp up Kurt's already considerable self-pity levels. David Warner... you are so great.


But we in it shall be rememb'red.


From this day...


...until the ending of the world!

Personally, we've never seen the point of murder mysteries, especially TV shows about them. In the end, we always discover that the murderer is some random guest actor - a character about which we know nothing and care little about. The "puzzling out" of the crime feels likewise arbitrary, as every "clue" is placed there by the storyteller to give a false sense of discovery. Blah. Give Wallander a sudoku book - maybe someone DIES for every sudoku he doesn't figure out - and we'd have a better sense of tension and moral strain, as well as greater intellectual involvement. It could even be called "Sudoku Death Pillow Soft".

Yeah, yeah, we tease and tease. "But you still watch it!" you note. Well, of course we do. We gobble it up! It stars Kenneth Branagh, with special guest star Angst. It's like french fries dipped in cheese salsa for angst-loving Kenneth Branagh fans such as we!

For those of you that don't fetishize emotional suffering with the same relish we do (or pretend not to, anyway), you can tell yourself you watch Wallander for the gorgeous, desaturated shots of an emotionally draining Swedish countryside. (You'll never feel the same in IKEA again.) The direction is beguiling, as we follow Wallander on his disorienting drives down empty rural roads - a symbol for his slow, methodical circling in to who the killer is? Well, maybe it's too literal to be a symbol. Anyway, Wallander is also more than just a walking lump of huggable moping (though he is mostly that); he also, thanks to Branagh, exhibits a terribly realistic social awkwardness. This is a man who does not know how to express himself, and generally fumbles, stutters, mutters and grunts. Watching his bumbling attempts to connect with his daughter ("Uh, er, hmm, how are you? Uh, yeah..." *click*) or his complete verbal shutdown when confronted by the awful co-worker Magnus (Tom Hiddleston) is pure delight. Well done, Kenneth.

Wallander: Faceless Killers (2010)

Blue/orange, blue/orange, orange/blue, blue/orange, WHY?!?!

A well-worn tale of the world weary detective archetype, Wallander is appealing, if not very original.

A BBC remake of a popular Swedish series, the British version retains the Swedish rural setting and just replaces everyone with British actors - the protagonist being portrayed by Kenneth Branagh (ironic, as we were just lamenting how he's not working enough these days!). Branagh's a good choice for the soft-on-the-outside, soft-on-the-inside Detective Kurt Wallander, a rumplied workaholic who gets skittish when things get too personal. Jowly and awkward, he has an appealing Everyman quality. He also retains, beneath that haunted, vacant stare of the emotionally and physically exhausted, a familiar Branaghian current of drama queen. He is, as he always has been, a wounded puppy, only a trembling chin away from tears, and he inspires the compassionate in his colleagues, Anne-Britt (Sarah Smart) and Nyberg (Richard McCabe), who spend much of the episode we watched shooting tender stares in his direction. (Okay, we did too.)


We few.


We happy few.

Indeed, so endearingly, boyishly vulnerable is Branagh as Wallander, that it's hard to believe he could have such frosty relations with his father, Povel (an unexpectedly old and unexpectedly brilliant David Warner), and his daughter, Linda (Jeany Spark). We have yet to see the barbed, slightly villainous undercurrent that juxtaposed so well against that boyish charm in something like Henry V, where Branagh's performance hinted at a darker core. Wallander is as vanilla as they come; obviously wounded, emotionally inept, weary moral purity personified. But this is a series, and we watched only one episode, so maybe we just need to give it time for the complexities to emerge.


This story shall the good man teach his son. (A divine David Warner.)


"These wounds, I had, on Crispin's Day."

In episode Faceless Killers, an elderly Swedish couple have been brutally murdered on their farm. As Wallander and crew set out on a paltry set of unpromising leads, someone from within the police force leaks that the killers may have been "foreign". This immediately sparks a rash of xenophobic violence in the sleepy Swedish hamlet, enraging Wallander and spurring him to work even faster to give non-foreign faces to the faceless.

Meanwhile, Wallander's piteous personal life is rocky as ever. His daughter introduces him to her new boyfriend, Jamal (Arsher Ali), a young Syrian-Swedish doctor. Wallander's latent racism alienates all three - and leads to a healthy dose of self-loathing on Wallander's part, as well as some suspected overcompensating in fighting the town's xenophobia. Meanwhile, Wallander's father is crumbling further into Alzheimer's.


Narrowness and claustro-/xenophobia, thanks to limited focal depth.


And again.

Other reviews of the series have lauded its moody shots of the gloomy Swedish countryside, as well as Branagh's likably depressed vibe. However, this whole tale shares too many similarities with the Icelandic film Jar City, a film which treats an identical subject with more grit and less squish. Indeed, Faceless Killers' script - apart from often telling us something we have just seen for our own eyes, bad writer! - also includes a number of touchy-feely lines which, even in Branagh's excellent delivery, ring very cheesy.

Nonetheless, it's all enjoyable - if only because the countryside is gorgeous and Branagh is likably rattled all the time. There is a moody theme of caring and being cared for (and being bad at both of those things, see Wallander, Kurt), and the entire production was very sleek. The biggest surprise, though, was David Warner, who we last saw in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country as a Klingon Gorbachev. He conveyed great depth and tragedy in his few scenes. And there was a poignant parallel of his character and the old white stallion who often encounters Wallander during his lonely drives around the farms, only to bolt, wild-eyed.


Once more unto the breach, dear friends!

We look forward to more Wallander, if only for the revelation of David Warner's greatness and the comfort food of Kenneth Branagh's angst. Someone give that man a hug.

Make this movie, universe! (2): The Once and Future King

Oh, there is nothing as sharp as the pain of the unmade movie. While Hollywood pumps out rehashed drivel, we at the PPCC must sit in silent lamentation that so many classics - Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light! - must remain un-movied, languishing on bookshelves and in our lonely hearts.

Here's another great book that is just begging - BEGGING! - to be made into a film. Or maybe we're the ones doing the begging?



So part of it was made into a film, Disney's Sword in the Stone, which is all fine and well and very nice. But the best part of The Once and Future King, a four-part anachronistic fantasy based on the Arthurian legend, comes later in the story: in particular, The Ill-Made Knight and The Candle in the Wind. In other words, it's the adult portions of the book which are the most poignant, the most true, and the most glorious.

"By the way. You remember that argument we were having about aggression? Well, I have thought of a good reason for starting a war."

Merlyn froze.

"I would like to hear it."

"A good reason for starting a war is simply to have a good reason! For instance, there might be a king who had discovered a new way of life for human beings — you know, something which would be good for them. It might even be the only way from saving them from destruction. Well, if the human beings were too wicked or too stupid to accept his way, he might have to force it on them, in their own interests by the sword."

The magician clenched his fists, twisted his gown into screws, and began to shake all over.

"Very interesting," he said in a trembling voice. "Very interesting. There was just such a man when I was young — an Austrian who invented a new way of life and convinced himself that he was the chap to make it work. He tried to impose his reformation by the sword, and plunged the civilized world into misery and chaos. But the thing which this fellow had overlooked, my friend, was that he had had a predecessor in the reformation business, called Jesus Christ. Perhaps we may assume that Jesus knew as much as the Austrian did about saving people. But the odd thing is that Jesus did not turn the disciples into storm troopers, burn down the Temple at Jerusalem, and fix the blame on Pontius Pilate. On the contrary, he made it clear that the business of the philosopher was to make ideas available, and not to impose them on people."

Plot: King Arthur, with the aid of the wizard Merlin and his Knights of the Round Table, works hard to eradicate Rule by Might and promote Rule by Right in the violent, rough lands of proto-England. Meanwhile, Arthur's best knight, Sir Lancelot, a self-consciously ugly over-achiever, falls in love with Queen Guenever, who finds him sweet (well, he is!). In addition to this usual soap opera, there is the rise of Mordred, Arthur's alienated, unhappy and incest-begat son, who eventually makes war on the kingdom.

This is all textured with some overt and covert allusions to a Europe freshly out of World War II and the unveiling of Nazi concentration camps. Merlin, in particular, lives backwards and so educates Arthur on the importance of ethical rulers and establishing democracies. Arthur's all, "Yeah, right on!", except that his noble intentions - emphasizing the equality of people when it comes to justice - are often tested when things strike close to home (for example, when he discovers Guenever's totally illegal affair).

The story is, much like Lord of Light, told with a gentle air of deeply passionate humanism. Even the most tragic of situations - Lancelot and Guenever's betrayal of Arthur, Mordred's bile - are portrayed with sensitive humor. And there's a lot of time for musing about justice, family and responsibility. This is much less gory swords-and-armor spectacle, and much more J.L. Carr. We at the PPCC did a lot of laughing, crying and sighing.

If people reach perfection they vanish, you know.

The film: First of all, we need a director whose vision would match the dreamy, whimsical quality of the story - we imagine lots of shots of rolling Cotswold hills, soft breezes, modest Camelots and such.

Director

One option is Terrence Malick, who specializes in making that particular breed of thoughtful, impressionistic films closely wedded to expressive shots of nature. Very Emersonian! And a very good choice for balancing the scenes of Elysium (i.e. the quiet times in Camelot) with low-key, pensive violence (à la The Thin Red Line).

Another option would be Ettore Scola, whose grasp of intricately-layered humanity is unmatched! The heart-sticky bittersweetness of Arthur, Lancelot and Guenever would be well-served by the guy who made the funny-sad love quadrangle in C'eravamo tanto amati.

Cast

Now, from about page 1 or so, when Arthur is introduced as a meek "hero-worshipper", a kind of well-intentioned, kinda clumsy, stand-up guy, we thought Kenneth Branagh would be perfect! And indeed Branagh, apart from his Henry V pedigree, has aged into a sort of doughy likability which would suit the adult Arthur well. And who else can capture that vibe of tearful joy than Mr. We few! We happy few! himself?! Or Sir I am Welsh, you know, good countryman?!



Then there's Guenever - "She was pretty Jenny, who could think and feel." Now, we were wracking our brain for a British actress who would fit the bill - Kate Winslet, Helena Bonham Carter, Emma Thompson (the last two would certainly lend a meta air to things!) - but screw it. Hilary Swank or Laura Linney, two highly intelligent actresses who we just love, would be perfect.


OR


And finally Lancelot! Now Lancelot is tricky, as he's very specifically described to be ugly, but actors, by their definition, usually meet some socially-designated minimum of looking good. Steve Buscemi and John C. Reilly seem to have made careers of the distincteness of their features, but we're actually leaning more and more towards Michael Sheen. Blame it on The Damned United, which was so frickin' amazing. And if he can act odiously obnoxious, he can do Lancelot, in all his self-pitying, sadistic, sensitive complexity.



And the soundtrack? Well, how about hiring those history-minded Decemberists to compose some ballads!? OMG NEW ALBUM!