Off a beer, where's your magic sword? My honor was to carry Excalibur. That is why I'm looking. Are there's real enough and man enough to ride as we do in pursuit of glory? Now, this murder is no wizard. He's a worthless drill bit. I should have known better than Pastor Frenchman. The robot is feeding off the magic of Excalibur. But your priests deny the power of Avalon. I dream to some. A nightmare to others. Hello and welcome to Hollywood Avalon with your hosts Mary Jones. And Dennis Link. And we are recording this on what might be a broken laptop because some of the keys are not working after I spilled a celtzer on it on Christmas Eve. You put some rice on it. You know what? This is the kitty litter on your ice cream end of a year. Look, it has been a year. Look, nobody's happy this year. Everybody's unhappy. Right? Everything sucks. You know, it's been a hard year for both of us in different ways. And look, we have it easy. We have easy lives compared to a lot of people. Right. But, you know, we've also been miserable. So I decided that I was going to give us a little bit of a treat. What's that? Well, I decided that for this month's episode, we were going to watch Excalibur. Yay. Finally. Yes. I know. Look, there are certain films. To be honest, I feel like we just started Hollywood Avalon. It's been two years. It's been two years, Dennis. This is episode 20. This feels so early to me. It's episode 20. This is not early. If anything, we've been edging this whole time. You know, I've held off on doing, like, some of the big movies, which is this, and "Money Python and the Holy Grail." So when's the last time you saw this? Oh, my God. It's been a long time. Yeah. I don't think we've ever watched it together. We've never watched it together. We've both seen it. Yeah. No. So it's got to be at least 20 years since I've seen it. Nonetheless, I remember a lot about this film. It's a striking film. It's, you know, John Borman made it because he couldn't make "Lord of the Rings." So it's just... A crazy cast. Oh, my God. Everybody you'd want. It really is an incredible cast, so... Except for... What? I feel like that... Oh, what's his name? Big booming voice. Oh, Brian Blessin? Yeah. He should have been in there somewhere. Come on. Yeah, I mean, Brian Blessin would have been fun in here somewhere. But otherwise, yes, you have such a stacked cast. I mean, yes, Nigel Terry plays King Arthur. And Nicole Williamson plays Merlin, and they're great. And of course, you know, you have Helen Mirren as Morgana. So it's amazing. So Nicole, Nicole... Nicole Williamson. Is he in anything else? He was more of a stage actor, I think. Yeah. 'Cause, like, of everyone, he completely dominates. Oh, it's amazing in this. He is both fully what you want Merlin to be. He's also funny in weird ways. Yeah. He is a perfect Merlin, possibly the best Merlin everyone's screen. And, but the thing about... And when we say Merlin, we mean, you know, also Obi-Wan Kenobi, also, you know, Gandalf... Gandalf, yeah. Like, he originates that, and he tops them all, I think. He really does. The doctor. Yes. No, they are all variations of Merlin. And he really is, like, maybe the best incarnation of Merlin I've ever seen in a film. Yeah. No offense to Staley Tucci in "Transformers the First Night." Yes, no offense. No offense. No offense. I actually kind of do, like, Staley Tucci in that role. He's fun. But, I mean, that's not a... Look, that's not a good movie at all. But, there are things in it that I'm like, "That's not so bad." No. And compared to other stuff we've watched, I mean, at least it's interesting. At least it's interesting to pull apart. Yeah. Yeah. But so this... It's not boring, like, "First Night." Oh God, I hate "First Night." We're King Arthur, the 2006 film that I absolutely love. Let's play better than both of those. Oh my God. We're talking about Excalibur, John Borman's incredible epic. This came out in 1981. What year did Conan the Barbarian come out? I think the same year. What year? But, yeah. Well, that's the thing. They both kind of set the template for certain sorcery in the '80s. Yeah. Now, that was already in the air, obviously. Look, a lot of stuff goes back to Tolkien publishing "Lord of the Rings," right? Mm-hmm. I mean, that is kind of the moment that a lot of culture takes on. On that fantasy element. It's not that that stuff didn't exist before Tolkien. Obviously in Tolkien, it's just like, "I'm just working with stuff that was already around." I mean, you have like William Morris translating Norse sagas in the late Victorian era. You have... You have Conan the Barbarian. You have Conan the Barbarian by E. Howard, whatever Richard E., I don't remember his name, but play as... So you have Conan the Barbarian books. You have Lord Dunseney's fairy tales and stuff, not fairy stories, not fairy tales, whatever. The play is... So you have like kind of early fantasy in the Victorian into the early... You have Sir Walter Scott writing Ivanhoe and that's like reusing medieval stuff. So you have stuff, right? And King Arthur and those stories, that all is a big part of that, especially with the Victorians in England and whatnot in the United States. These things cycle in and out. And in the middle of the 20th century, you've got Tolkien impartially, this is just the thing he likes, but also partially he is dealing with his own issues, having gone through the First World War and being upset about the Second World War and he writes "Lord of the Rings." And "Lord of the Rings" really just ignites everybody's brains. I mean, it really just kind of sets something off where people are just like, "Oh my God, this is like a fantasy world, but at the same time it's evoking things that people kind of remember." You know, people wanted to do a film version of "Lord of the Rings," including "The Beatles," we've brought up in another episode, you know, they wanted to be, you know, parts of the fellowship or in John Lennon's case, he wants to be Gollum, which, yeah, that fits. And that was with John Borman. That was maybe, maybe. Okay. I don't know. I don't know if that was actually like they were going to make it with him or not. He wanted to do it. I know they wanted to do it. I don't know if that was the same film. But so John Borman, he wanted to make "Lord of the Rings," and he couldn't get the rights. You know, I don't know how Rankin Bass was able to get away with it. So what did Borman do? He turns around and says, "Well, if I can't do that, I'm going to make, you know, my King Arthur epic." And there have been other King Arthur epics, as we already know, and we've already gone through like Knights of the Round Table and Camelot and, you know, it was just something that was part of the same zeitgeist as people's interest in "Lord of the Rings," right? But what Borman does, he takes all of that stuff, right? And all of the interest in fantasy. And then he marries that with his own readings of those sorts of weird takes on the Holy Grail story by Jesse Weston with "From Richard of Romance" and what he knows about... What is "From Richard of Romance"? God damn it, we've discussed this. I know. I've forgotten. Okay. So you know the Golden Bow, right? The Golden Bow by J.G. Frazier is sort of a landmark early book on anthropology that yes, it gets a lot of stuff kind of wrong and it's Victorian, it's speculative, but it comes up with these ideas of how you can find religious meanings in old rituals or old texts and it's like, you know, about pagan stuff, about, you know, dying gods who are then, you know, they're killed and then raised from the dead and it's about regenerating the land and it's about, you know, fertility of the soil and all that type of stuff. And it was incredibly popular in the Victorian period, the late Victorian into the early modern and a lot of it has to do with, as a backlash against industrialization and what people saw as like the displaying of the land and, you know, which is a theme that you can go all the way back to the first industrial revolution and William Blake's poem "Jerusalem" all the way up through T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land", right? So the Golden Bow lands right smack in the middle of that and it's incredibly influential in how people would read, say, classical texts, medieval texts, whatnot. Jesse Weston, she was an early anthropologist and she picked it up and applied it to the Holy Grail story, right? And that's where you get this idea of like the Fisher King as this, you know, maimed god, percival, you know, revitalizing him and it's like connected to the land and all that type of stuff. And of course then T.S. Eliot runs with that as his, you know, kind of meditation on World War I and the post-World War world that he was looking at in the 1920s. Okay, John Borman does the same thing, so he's reading those books and he applies it to Thomas Mallory's 15th century early novel, late romance, whatever you want to call it, the Mort Darther. And he melds what is part of the zeitgeist of the reading of the Groud text and Arthurian stories from, you know, looking at stuff like Jesse Weston's book, From Virtual to Romance. And he marries that to the Mort Darther. And then basically like there's an overlay of, you know, that kind of 60s counterculture, the growth of like English folk rock, which is very different from American folk rock because it's like repurposing old ballads and folkar and, you know, the Wicker Man. And like that kind of, you know, there are these weird old stories that we're pulling off from, you know, gothic texts and things like that. And so Borman is like kind of smashing that all together and putting it in plate armor. And, you know, and making his version very shiny plate armor, very shiny plate armor. But it's perfect. Look, this is this is so what I want a, you know, representation of Arthurian romance to look like, you know, it's very much like contemporary paintings of knights. And things like that you'd see, like the Pre-Raphaelites do, yeah, where they're not trying to make it look like the 500s, you know, like they're not trying to like capture it. And it's the same way with like Northern Renaissance trying to, you know, painting paintings of Jesus and, you know, they're just painting people from like the 1500s. Yeah. And like, you know, dressed up as like, you know, the bourgeoisie or whatever. Yeah. No, that's absolutely right. And you know, he is, instead of say, putting King Arthur in a business suit, he is putting him firmly in the late Middle Ages with, you know, plate armor, because that's when the books were being written, right? That's when you had the more darther being written. And it's the drawings that if you did get books on that stuff, that's what you would say. Yeah, absolutely. And so, you know, we're not going into this looking for a historical epic about the fifth century in Britain or the sixth century, we're not looking for what if, you know, Arthur was actually a Roman general, like, no, no, no, that's not what this is. This is fantasy. This is kind of like a perfect late 20th century take on King Arthur, you know, everything else comes from this feels like this is what movies from like 1990 on have been fighting against. Yeah, I think so, you know, once the 90s hit and it's got to be like, well, this has to, no, no, we have to make this more historical, we have to make this more gritty, we have to make this whatever, you know, everything has been striving against this. Honestly, yeah, like, I am curious as to what the Guy Ritchie version of this is, because I mean, honestly, I don't even dislike Guy Ritchie films necessarily, I kind of liked that for Sherlock, you know, I might actually like his King Arthur movie. But yeah, everything does feel like it's struggling against this in different ways. You know, who I'd love to see make a King Arthur movie with like a big bunch and stuff. David Eggers. Oh my God. I might explode. No, here's the thing, David Eggers, I'm sure loves this movie. Yeah. Because even though this is not historical, Eggers films are all like striving with, you know, a certain level of historical accuracy and so far as he is trying to get into the mindset of the people set in the times that he's making, he at the same time, he embraces what their minds would think was happening. So that when you watch the Northman, when he dies, he goes to Valhalla and you see that on screen and it is not treated as a fantasy, it is treated as this is what happens to him. It's the same thing in the witch. When she goes and accepts, you know, Black Peter's offer, she becomes a witch. Oh my God. So, you know, we went and watched David Lowery's The Green Knight and I have a lot of problems with The Green Knight. It's a great looking film. Dev Patel is fantastic in it. I have a lot of issues with the ending of that film. I think Eggers would completely understand how to make an Arthurian film if he wanted to. Yeah. And I think he would probably, like, would he embrace plate armor? I don't know. Would it look exactly the same? Maybe not, but I think he would at least get the spirit right. Yeah. This movie is bonkers, right? From what I remember, like I said, it's been at least 20 years since I've seen it, it's a bonkers film. It is operatic. It literally uses opera or classical music. That's the thing. You have to, like, embrace this film as a whole bunch of stuff stuck together in a very 20th century way. And at the same time, it's authentic for what it is. Does that make sense? Yeah. I fully think Mormon intends everything that you're seeing on screen to hit you the way that it hits you. Yeah. You know, there's no irony in that sense. There's no sneering at the ideas being presented in a way that I feel like if you make a film now, there's always, it's always couched in layers of irony about, yeah, we're all really enjoying this. But, oh my God, weren't people really dumb for thinking this back then? And that's where Eggers gets things right. I think Mormon sincerely is putting everything on screen that he wants to put on screen. Even when those things are not things that you want to see, like how Arthur is conceived. Like, you know, I think we both remember how that goes. We'll talk about it later. Um, you know, but he puts that out there for his own reasons, right? And some of that is again, coming out of the 60s. I mean, like, frankly, I think it's perfectly in line with what he made in Zardoz, right? Uh, I don't know. Like, I don't kind of going on about this, but I really do think this is, it's a monumental film. I think it's a very important film. It kind of sets a lot of how people try to make fantasy after this, right? And also, like, I don't know, I mean, what do you, do you think this had an influence on, say, Peter Jackson? I do. Yeah, I feel like, like Lord of the Rings and this are kind of the only really ambitious fantasy films. Yes. Like, I feel like everything else they try to like, well, let's do it and bite size thing. Like, both those, like, both Lord of the Rings and this really try to be epic. Yeah, they try to be epic, but they take tons of, I mean, like, you know, the Lord of the Rings books, like, they shouldn't be filmable and they somehow made it. And like, the thing about this King Arthur movie, it throws so much in. Yeah. Like, other movies, like, maybe like, you know, to put three stories or something like this tries to take it all in. Yeah. Yeah. Normally you make a film about King Arthur and yes, you just focus on Guinevere and Lancelot or you just, you know, like in Nights at the Roundtable or Mortrid or you focus on Mortrid in Camelot, right? Yeah. Or, well, I mean, Camelot is sort of its own beast, but think about, again, like the Green Knight or versions of Circoing and Green Knight, where they're just taking this one romance. That's one year. Yeah, exactly. You know, so many attempts at Arthurian stories are just taking little bite sizes. This tries to take in the entire story. It's the whole lifetime of Arthur. It is. From Conception to Death. Yeah. This is such an ambitious film. I realized that, to some extent, I created this, you know, little side podcast in part to talk about this movie. Basically, this is like Mighty Python and the Holy Grail. God, Merry Christmas, everybody, or Happy Holidays, Happy New Year. This is sort of a treat for us. So we recently watched Caligula. Oh, yeah. Yeah. If you go back and go and listen to our episode on Caligula. But, like, I feel like there's probably going to be parallels between that and this. Yes. You know, like, it's just in its craziness and its hell and mirrorness. Yeah, that's true. You know what, I think that these are, they're both films that are maximalist. Yeah. Okay. The acting is, in some ways, very over the top, certainly the sets are very, the violence is over the top. Yes. They're not the similar films. They're close in time period, which they're made. I don't think they have any overlapping actors other than Helen Mirren, not that I can remember. Right. But they're not this similar. But I feel like there was a general sense at the end of the '70s of, like, trying to do the blockbuster but high-minded film. They wanted to make a blockbuster for adults. Yeah. Like, they wanted to take Star Wars, right? But like, okay, we're not doing Star Wars, which is for children. We're doing it for grown-ups. Now, I know you're laughing because, ha, ha, King Arthur for grown-ups. And I'm like, look, man, that was, like, that was, like, true for, like, several hundred years, many hundreds of years until the '20th century. And then all of a sudden, anything that wasn't, like, my dad in the war became for children. And, you know, and look, yeah, I know, you can't just, like, I don't know. Don't even get me started on, like, my problems with, you know, like, there's a lot of good things about post-war culture that I really agree with. But there's a certain sneering at anything that isn't suburban realism that I find really limiting in our ways of dealing with things. And it sneers at anything. I mean, it's kind of why I kind of roll my eyes when people do take Lord of the Rings lightly. You know? But that's a whole other, you know, we can talk about that later. Yeah. Because, of course, a lot of these things are not about being heroic and it's not about, you know, anyway, tangent, sorry. Are there dogs in this? I don't remember. It must be a dog. I mean, Arthur had a dog, but I don't remember if there's dogs in this. Is there a love triangle? There might be. I mean, come on! Is there a death? Man! Yeah, there's a... Are you asking? Come on, man. This is Excalibur. The only thing I don't know is if there's a dog. I know. I really don't remember. I don't remember. I don't know. There were birds that freaked me out when I was a kid. You should be freaked out. I saw this in prison. I watched it a lot. Everybody loved this movie. Yeah. Like it was just, you know, bonkers, crazy fun. Oh, we should talk about that when we come back, like, what it was. Because I saw this in college, which is like, almost 20 years after it came out. You know, this isn't like, you know, 13-year-olds discovering it on prism in the early 80s. Is that how sex works? No! No, it is not! I mean, sometimes, but that's a bad thing. So I'm seeing this the same time I'm seeing heavy metal as well. God, the 80s were amazing! I know. Like, that rules. I'm sorry. You know, things have been kind of boring in the last 10 years. What I think about what the early 80s looked like, look, was it healthy? Did it, like, help get wrong? Where are you going to elect it? Probably. And everything bad happens since. Sure. But let me tell you something, man. When you're living as a kid and you see, like, Excalibur, heavy metal, you know, Conan the Barbarian. Yeah. God, that rules. It is. That's pretty awesome. It's pretty awesome. And I'm kind of envious. Because I didn't have that. Like, when I was a kid. Maybe there'll be something like that in our next four years. Oh, yeah. But those kids are all going to turn into fascists. It's going to be really depressing. I'm just saying that maybe entertainment will turn out something like that. I don't know. It's going to be bad. It's going to be real bad. Should we watch something that's real good? Yeah.
