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Excalibur (HD DVD)
Warner Bros. // R // October 31, 2006 // Region 0
List Price: $28.99 [Buy now and save at Amazon]
Well, I'll say this for John Boorman: at least his movies give me something to write about. This is the man who filmed Ned Beatty squealing before getting cornholed in a Georgia swamp. Boorman had Sean Connery wear a red diaper in a film about a giant floating stone head that spits guns from its mouth while chanting about the seed-shooting evils of the penis. His incomprehensible Exorcist sequel is one of the most notorious cinematic disasters of the past thirty years. Soak that in and picture the same filmmaker taking on Arthurian legend, and for better or worse, you have 1981's Excalibur.
Might not be a bad idea to brush up on Arthurian lore before sitting down with Excalibur. I've yet to read Malory's Morte d'Arthur, but I'm a sufficiently dutiful student of pop culture to know the key points. Good thing 'cause the storytelling in Excalibur teeters on incoherence. A detailed plot summary would be seventeen pages long, but it goes something like this: Uther Pendragon decides he wants to screw the Duchess of Cornwall, so risking his kingdom, he convinces his sorceror pal Merlin to transform him into the Duke and rape his goodly wife. Uther's glamour is transparent to young Morgana, who quickly gains a brother from this affair only to see him snatched by Merlin as payment for the mystical one night stand. This child, Arthur, is the only one who can remove the mighty sword Excalibur from the stone and become ruler of the land, and in his teenage years, he does just that. After besting the brave knight Lancelot in combat even though he shouldn't have, Arthur establishes the Knights of the Round Table and weds the lovely Guenevere. Arthur is assured that Lancelot and Guenevere are having an affair, claims that are at first unfounded but don't stay that way. Arthur's shock at the discovery enables Morgana to trap Merlin in a translucently rocky tomb and to dupe her distraught half-brother into a couple of minutes of unbridled passion, just long enough to set up the squirting out of Mordred nine months later. Arthur is weakened by this sin and needs the Holy Grail to restore himself and his lands, so he dispatches his knights to find it. So, yeah: Mordred, the Grail, gruesomely bloody climactic fight...you get the idea. Boorman attempts to cover everything, and the way he plows through it all is mildly confusing even if you already know the basic story.
The back of the case touts the appearances of Gabriel Byrne, Patrick Stewart, and Liam Neeson at this early stage in their careers, but despite that minor footnote on their filmographies, the acting in Excalibur is pretty uniformly awful. Something like 40% of the short, choppy dialogue in the movie is shouted, and the ham-fisted scenery chewing is less restrained than a high school production of A Streetcar Named Desire. Merlin's "...and Donald Sutherland as the clumsy waiter" campy delivery and slapstick seems like he wandered in from the set of a completely different movie. Excalibur is borderline-surreal at first, but especially once it settles into a more serious tone with the Lancelot affair, my interest quickly waned, and I struggled with the uneven pacing until the Python-esque limb-lopping and goofy optical effects near the climax. Boorman may have had many faults as a filmmaker, but he's always benefitted from a strong visual eye, and the production values and cinematography are suitably dreamlike.
Excalibur is a film that's attracted a devoted following over the past twenty-five years, and I'm sure I'll soon be inundated with hate mail reminding me of that. Whatever appeal it holds completely escapes me; I was fascinated by its trippier, campy, more bizarre moments, but otherwise, I found Excalibur to be fairly tedious.
Video: Excalibur is a soft, grainy movie, so if you're a card-carrying member of the Soft Grainy Movie Defamation League, don't bother reading any further. Excalibur's 1.85:1 presentation can be kind of schizophrenic, but many scenes look wonderful, exhibiting a great deal of detail. It's not without its flaws, though. Fine detail fades away in the murky, darker sequences, and although grain is visible throughout much of the film, there are moments where it's really excessive. The framing seems excessively tight even on a display with minimal overscan; crank that up to the usual 5-7% of most TVs and Excalibur would be awfully tough to watch. I also spotted a slight jitter in a fair number of shots, and color saturation isn't always consistent even within the same scene. Excalibur would be one of the last HD DVDs I'd grab if I were trying to show off my home theater rig, but considering its style of photography, this disc looks alright. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to hear that this master is seven or eight years old, though, and I don't think some of these flaws would be present if Warner were to give it another pass in the telecine bay today.
Audio: Excalibur's Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 remix is horrifically dated: shrill, distorted, and muddled. The mix coaxes some meaty thuds from the subwoofer, and it does an alright job spreading discrete stereo effects across the front channels, but many of these attempts sound forced and labored. I noticed several spots where the dialogue wasn't quite in sync with the video, and a good bit of the delivery appears to have been awkwardly looped in post. Excalibur scrapes the muck off the bottom of the barrel, arguably the sonically weakest HD DVD to date. This disc also includes monaural dubs in French and Spanish alongside the usual selection of subtitles.
Supplements: Same as the bargain bin DVD: a trailer and an audio commentary by John Boorman. It's a very leisurely discussion, and although Boorman is quiet for a good bit of the film, the director has such a wonderful voice that I found myself engaged regardless. I enjoyed hearing about how Boorman cleverly sidestepped the shoestring budget with mock-crane shots and in-camera effects that traditionally would've been accomplished optically, and some of his comments about the cast, such as the squabbling between enemies on-screen and off Helen Mirren and Nicol Williamson, are also of interest. There is a fair amount of narration, though, and I wasn't quite as interested in where particular scenes were shot as Boorman appears to be.
I'm too lazy to search Google to see what Excalibur's original poster art looked like, but I can't imagine it being any worse than the cover of this title. Looks like something a ninth grader with a cracked copy of Paint Shop Pro banged out in half an hour.
Conclusion: So in one week, the same studio issues V for Vendetta and Excalibur. What's the next throw-a-dartboard-at-our-back-catalog pairing? Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and The Neverending Story 2? Oh well. I realize that a great many people consider Excalibur to be a favorite, but I found little to appreciate about the movie itself or its lackluster release on HD DVD. Skip It.
Might not be a bad idea to brush up on Arthurian lore before sitting down with Excalibur. I've yet to read Malory's Morte d'Arthur, but I'm a sufficiently dutiful student of pop culture to know the key points. Good thing 'cause the storytelling in Excalibur teeters on incoherence. A detailed plot summary would be seventeen pages long, but it goes something like this: Uther Pendragon decides he wants to screw the Duchess of Cornwall, so risking his kingdom, he convinces his sorceror pal Merlin to transform him into the Duke and rape his goodly wife. Uther's glamour is transparent to young Morgana, who quickly gains a brother from this affair only to see him snatched by Merlin as payment for the mystical one night stand. This child, Arthur, is the only one who can remove the mighty sword Excalibur from the stone and become ruler of the land, and in his teenage years, he does just that. After besting the brave knight Lancelot in combat even though he shouldn't have, Arthur establishes the Knights of the Round Table and weds the lovely Guenevere. Arthur is assured that Lancelot and Guenevere are having an affair, claims that are at first unfounded but don't stay that way. Arthur's shock at the discovery enables Morgana to trap Merlin in a translucently rocky tomb and to dupe her distraught half-brother into a couple of minutes of unbridled passion, just long enough to set up the squirting out of Mordred nine months later. Arthur is weakened by this sin and needs the Holy Grail to restore himself and his lands, so he dispatches his knights to find it. So, yeah: Mordred, the Grail, gruesomely bloody climactic fight...you get the idea. Boorman attempts to cover everything, and the way he plows through it all is mildly confusing even if you already know the basic story.
The back of the case touts the appearances of Gabriel Byrne, Patrick Stewart, and Liam Neeson at this early stage in their careers, but despite that minor footnote on their filmographies, the acting in Excalibur is pretty uniformly awful. Something like 40% of the short, choppy dialogue in the movie is shouted, and the ham-fisted scenery chewing is less restrained than a high school production of A Streetcar Named Desire. Merlin's "...and Donald Sutherland as the clumsy waiter" campy delivery and slapstick seems like he wandered in from the set of a completely different movie. Excalibur is borderline-surreal at first, but especially once it settles into a more serious tone with the Lancelot affair, my interest quickly waned, and I struggled with the uneven pacing until the Python-esque limb-lopping and goofy optical effects near the climax. Boorman may have had many faults as a filmmaker, but he's always benefitted from a strong visual eye, and the production values and cinematography are suitably dreamlike.
Excalibur is a film that's attracted a devoted following over the past twenty-five years, and I'm sure I'll soon be inundated with hate mail reminding me of that. Whatever appeal it holds completely escapes me; I was fascinated by its trippier, campy, more bizarre moments, but otherwise, I found Excalibur to be fairly tedious.
Video: Excalibur is a soft, grainy movie, so if you're a card-carrying member of the Soft Grainy Movie Defamation League, don't bother reading any further. Excalibur's 1.85:1 presentation can be kind of schizophrenic, but many scenes look wonderful, exhibiting a great deal of detail. It's not without its flaws, though. Fine detail fades away in the murky, darker sequences, and although grain is visible throughout much of the film, there are moments where it's really excessive. The framing seems excessively tight even on a display with minimal overscan; crank that up to the usual 5-7% of most TVs and Excalibur would be awfully tough to watch. I also spotted a slight jitter in a fair number of shots, and color saturation isn't always consistent even within the same scene. Excalibur would be one of the last HD DVDs I'd grab if I were trying to show off my home theater rig, but considering its style of photography, this disc looks alright. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to hear that this master is seven or eight years old, though, and I don't think some of these flaws would be present if Warner were to give it another pass in the telecine bay today.
Audio: Excalibur's Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 remix is horrifically dated: shrill, distorted, and muddled. The mix coaxes some meaty thuds from the subwoofer, and it does an alright job spreading discrete stereo effects across the front channels, but many of these attempts sound forced and labored. I noticed several spots where the dialogue wasn't quite in sync with the video, and a good bit of the delivery appears to have been awkwardly looped in post. Excalibur scrapes the muck off the bottom of the barrel, arguably the sonically weakest HD DVD to date. This disc also includes monaural dubs in French and Spanish alongside the usual selection of subtitles.
Supplements: Same as the bargain bin DVD: a trailer and an audio commentary by John Boorman. It's a very leisurely discussion, and although Boorman is quiet for a good bit of the film, the director has such a wonderful voice that I found myself engaged regardless. I enjoyed hearing about how Boorman cleverly sidestepped the shoestring budget with mock-crane shots and in-camera effects that traditionally would've been accomplished optically, and some of his comments about the cast, such as the squabbling between enemies on-screen and off Helen Mirren and Nicol Williamson, are also of interest. There is a fair amount of narration, though, and I wasn't quite as interested in where particular scenes were shot as Boorman appears to be.
I'm too lazy to search Google to see what Excalibur's original poster art looked like, but I can't imagine it being any worse than the cover of this title. Looks like something a ninth grader with a cracked copy of Paint Shop Pro banged out in half an hour.
Conclusion: So in one week, the same studio issues V for Vendetta and Excalibur. What's the next throw-a-dartboard-at-our-back-catalog pairing? Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and The Neverending Story 2? Oh well. I realize that a great many people consider Excalibur to be a favorite, but I found little to appreciate about the movie itself or its lackluster release on HD DVD. Skip It.
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