No Movie Night with the kids this week, alas— The Pip had a tryout for travel baseball on Friday night (they had about twice as many kids as spots on the first team, so we don’t know if he’ll make it, but he came out of the tryout happy and cheerful, so that’s good), and then was invited to a basketball game at the University of Albany with a couple of his friends (Albany won on a pair of late free throws) Saturday night. SteelyKid was all wrapped up in watching some livestreamed Minecraft competition, so declined a movie.
That left me and Kate to choose a movie we wanted to see, so we rented The Green Knight from Amazon Prime. This is a very stylish screen adaptation of the famous medieval poem “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” and got a fair amount of buzz back in the summer. I usually try to get a shot of the title card for these posts, but there wasn’t a clean one in this, and anyway, I think this shot captures the essence of the film:
Some time back, SteelyKid started asking to have the captions on during Movie Nights, so that’s now the default on all our streaming services, and I’ve kind of gotten to like it. It provides the occasional moment of unintentional hilarity when they attempt to describe the music cues, though, and this film was a rich source of that. They ran through a whole thesaurus of terms to describe the soundtrack: “eerie music,” “unsettling music,” “pensive chorale music,” “woman singing in medieval language,” “ominous percussion music.” Eerie is a good catch-all for the whole thing.
The basic premise of the story is well-known at this point: On Christmas day, a mysterious knight shows up at King Arthur’s court and offers a game. He will let one of Arthur’s knights strike a blow against him, if the knight will agree to come to his Green Chapel the following year, and receive an equivalent blow in return. Arthur’s nephew Gawain agrees, and cuts the Green Knight’s head clean off; the knight picks his head back up, and rides off laughing. A year later, Gawain sets off to face his fate, and has Adventures.
As you can probably guess from the description of the music, this is a very… atmospheric movie. Dev Patel as the initially callow Gawain moves through a series of basically empty landscapes, all of them beautifully shot and vaguely ominous. What interactions he has with people are also highly stylized, with all the dialogue being very stiff and formal. It’s not going to be to all tastes— I can’t imagine either of the kids sitting through it— but it’s pretty good at capturing the feel of medieval poetry (I haven’t read Gawain in full, but I read a bunch of other stuff from that era for a college course). The only thing it’s missing for the full medieval lit experience is a lengthy digression about something almost completely unrelated to the actual plot.
The movie ends very abruptly, and much more ambiguously than the original poem, but it worked pretty well. It’s not exactly something that will become a much-rewatched Christmas classic, but I’m glad we checked it out.
The other media consumption this week in Chateau Steelypips has mostly been continuing to watch long-running series (Wheel of Time and Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood) while riding the stationary bike in the basement; I’ll hold off on talking more about those until I finish something, though. Here are the traditional buttons:
And if you just want to talk about The Green Knight, the comments will be open.
Offtopic for The Green Knight, but on travel baseball: when my older son started playing "travel" baseball, in a program with paid coaches, it was such a relief to me not to be roped into any sort of coaching duty. (I have been the team's scorekeeper, though. I put travel in quotes because the farthest we've had to travel is about 40 miles; lots of "travel" teams around here.) He's had 8 seasons with the same cohort in the same organization, and of the original 12 players, only 4 have played for all those seasons. That is, there's a lot of churn, players do move from team to team, there will be opportunities in the future if this one doesn't work out.