One Good Movie and One Bad Movie - And You'd Probably Guess Wrong

Eddie and I saw two movies this week-end. One much better than we expected and one much worse. Oh, so much worse.  You know the more you think about the movie the more you hate it - and you nated pretty much at the theater? That was...

Paris Can Wait

This is the first non-documentary made by Eleanor Coppola. And I don't want to trash an 81 year old woman's first movie, but just because you got Coppola in your name, doesn't make you an R-teist.

It is a throwback to those old romances where "No" means "Maybe" and a man leaving you at a gas station for an hour is forgiven because he was getting roses for you. Diane Lane did a game job of an American Wife of a movie producer (Eleanor Coppola anyone?!?) who puts up with a too-busy spouse who directs and trouble shoots his films. When swifeyhe can't fly the hour to Paris (ear problems, that the husband doesn't even notice), her husband's french business partner begs her to let him drive her to Paris.

Diane Lane, Eleanor Coppola and the charming french scoundrel...

The seven hour trip dissolves into multiple days, lots of food, flirting and the Frenchman ignoring her very basic requests to take her to Paris so he can stop by old girlfriends, old haunts and sleep in cute old hotels. It is romantic kidnapping and if the theme music was changed would be a great stalking movie.

Then there was the movie that was suppose to be bad, but I liked it.

Arthur; Legend of the Sword

Granted it is dumb and huge and loud and silly - but when you hire Guy Richie to do a King Athur movie, what did you expect?  We all saw his Sherlock Holmes.

King Arthur - the only man in England with Hair Gel and Bleach.

Here he decides to pretty much throw out all details of the story, the back story and history. Instead we are given an humpy King Arthur (Charlie Huhnan who doffs he shirt quite often early, and way too little later on). Artie's shirt is always white and, except for immediately post battle, clean. This contrasts with everyone else in the show.

We have Jude Law in a massively over the top of the top performance as his evil wizard uncle. Don't give Jude Law his head, because he will steal your movie from under you!


We also have giant snakes, mages (good-girl witches), lots on sad pathetic Londiniumites and lots of voluptuous prostitutes with hearts of gold and the big boobies to match.

Holy Battle Mastodons Batman!

AND giant fighting Mastodons! What could go wrong. Sit down, turn your brain off and enjoy the ride.

Oh wait, I forgot the best. One of the knights of the Round Table (spoiler alert) is the Asian Kung Fu master that taught our young King to fight - which, married to the magic sword - makes him all but unbeatable.

The addition of training Kung Fu gives us naked Charlie AND Asian representation