There's some swearing on the webpage, but it's not prominently displayed.
It was awesome to see so much of it. Two more weeks!! Is anyone planning to see it in the IMAX? I've thought of it, but I wonder if it would be annoying to try to watch it that way...
Posts: 6415 | Registered: Jul 2000
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Very, very nice. They've got the Roman, they've got Ras Al Guhl. They've got Liam Neesom as a mentor to young warrior in training.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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Is that all Liam does these days? How many movies has his role been to train a Knight? (Jedi etc.)
Posts: 796 | Registered: Mar 2005
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Rob Roy has one of my favorite sword fight scenes.
Liam makes a great knight. There's a sense of quiet nobility about him. I think he played Sir Gawain in Excalibur.
Posts: 4116 | Registered: Apr 2002
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Referee, explaining the rules of the duel: Quarter... Rob Roy: Will not be asked for... Skeezy villain: ...nor given.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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Rob Roy has one of the best heroes in any movie I've seen, and two of the worst villains in any movie I've ever seen!
*mutter* I'm sure I would've remembered the lethal fop's name, Dagonee, if you hadn't shown him as 'Skeezy villain' Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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I really enjoyed Rob Roy. I think Ebert actually usmmed up my feelings about it pretty well:
quote:Strange. I thought I had seen enough sword fights in movies to last a lifetime, but I was wrong. The sword fight in "Rob Roy" reinvents the exercise, and the movie itself brings hot red blood to the costume genre. This is a splendid, rousing historical adventure, an example of what can happen when the best direction, acting, writing and technical credits are brought to bear on what might look like shopworn material.
...
What's best about the movie is its vivid picture of the time and place (Scotland, circa 1713), and the kinds of personalities produced by a world where the simple people still believed in romantic chivalry, while the aristocracy embraced decadence and courted intrigue. Rob Roy is a hero not simply because he is tall, good and strong, but because he will sacrifice his life rather than compromise his word. And the film's villains are magnificent because they are so smart, cunning and smarmy: Not content with merely being despicable, they work at it.
...
The sword fighting sequence, staged by William Hobbs, is the best of its sort ever done. In most movie sword fights, the participants leap about effortlessly, their blades shimmering and clashing. Here we get the sense of the deadly stakes, and the great physical effort involved.
Cunningham chooses a rapier, Rob Roy a broadsword (their weapons reflect their personalities), and the fight is punctuated by passages of dead silence, except for heavy breathing. They become very tired.
They are both wounded. The pauses grow longer, until the duel seems like a chess match in which thought counts for more than action. It is one of the great action sequences in movie history, and "Rob Roy" is a fabulous entertainment.
The villainous fop is "Archibald Cunningham" BTW. Great movie.
Edit to add: He liked this sword sequence so much that he *still* brings it up 10 years later. From his review of Episode 3:
quote:The duelists are so well-matched that saber fights go on forever before anyone is wounded, and I am still not sure how the sabers seem able to shield their bearers from attack. When it comes to great movie sword fights, Liam Neeson and Tim Roth took home the gold medal in "Rob Roy" (1995), and the lightsaber battles in "Episode III" are more like isometrics.
Hmm. I suppose I should say something about Batman too since this is a Batman thread -- I'm reeaaaaaalllly looking forward to the movie. Yah. That covers it.
Posts: 1323 | Registered: Aug 2001
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Wow, what a fantastic derail guys! I never would have predicted that it would get to Rob Roy. That's the beauty of it, we can go anywhere we want!
posted
I recorded this on DVR when it first came out, and considered making a thread about it, but I decided that I've pestered this forum with my Batman enthusiasm for long enough now. I'm glad to see you're all, for the most part, as excited about this movie as I am.
What did you guys think of the voice?
Posts: 2258 | Registered: Aug 2003
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"A seven foot tall man who's been smoking since childhood..."
That voice?
It was slightly contrived and "I must sound manly and gravelly now," but I like that it makes him harder to recognize so I can actually bring myself to believe that his girlfriend wouldn't recognize her boyfriend in a bat suit. *coughSupermancough*
Posts: 6415 | Registered: Jul 2000
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It is contrived...because it's the voice he always thinks in, but up until he dons the cape and cowl, it's not a voice he speaks in.
There was an animated series released and run a few years back called Batman Beyond. The setting is Gotham City, decades into the future. Bruce Wayne is an old man who finally gave up his alter ego when he was forced to use a gun (to threaten, not to kill) a criminal, rather than his physical prowess. Another young man with a father murdered by the man running the company that bears Wayne's name manages to discover Bruce Wayne's abandoned secret identity, and eventually assumes it.
Anyway, in one episode, someone attempts to drive Bruce Wayne mad by having him locked up and using miniature microphones to speak to him, to make Wayne think he's hearing voices that aren't there. He fails because he's calling Bruce Wayne "Bruce", and it doesn't work. Bruce never for a second believes that the voices are really coming from inside his head, and we find out that it's because, "That's not the name I call myself."
Gotta remember, Batman is nuts.
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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Only since the mid-80s when the writers tried to make him super-ultra-hardcore.
Until we get to the Batman we see in the comics currently, with countless partners he's alienated, a team he ends up fighting against instead of with more often than not, and an amount of paranoid planning that makes him look more like a freak than even the bat-suit does.
Feh.
Always angry, nuts, paranoid, too-smart man-child Batman REALLY has gotten old.
I'm hoping this film will be (and the trailers indicate it will) feature "Driven, dark, but still pure at heart" Batman. Haven't seen HIM for a while.
Posts: 6689 | Registered: Jan 2005
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posted
I think he can be super ultra hardcore, and still be pure at heart, Puffy Treat. The 'not killing' thing he sticks to seems that way to me.
In general, though, I think it's more realistic (heh) for him to alienate people, and to be paranoid. The comics just don't dwell on things like his massive, constantly working charity with the Wayne Foundation, that sort of thing.
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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The story seems to have been taken from Frank Miller's Year One and the Legends of the Dark Knight series, Shaman. Of course with some Ra's Al Ghul thrown in for fun!
Posts: 514 | Registered: May 2005
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In general, though, I think it's more realistic (heh) for him to alienate people, and to be paranoid.
How is it more realistic? If that's ALL he does (and the comics that IS all he does), then no one would work with him or trust him. Making it even MORE unrealistic. And making him eventually too planning-ahead-stultified to deal with any X-factors like he does.
Unless you pre-suppose that only the negative side of his character is the powerful one, I don't think so. As writer Mark Waid said once, portraying Batman as _merely_ the "crazy obsessed" side of Bruce Wayne makes for a very two-dimensional, one-note character. Basically it makes him as much a cartoon as Adam West's Batman was, only a violent one.
You could just as easily portray Batman as being the way that Bruce Wayne brought the monstrous anger and grief he felt over his parent's deaths and controlled it into a way of making sure no one else suffered what he did.
It's hard to do that when we have the comic book Batman, who's totally okay with his ex-sidekick being brainwashed by the woman who violated him (and even teamed up with her!) because "I'm dead inside. Life is nothing but meaningless darkness, I hate you all, blah-blah-blah..."
I don't think that was Frank Miller's intent in writing DKR and Year One, but that's what his imitators did to it.
Posts: 6689 | Registered: Jan 2005
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I should've been more precise. I don't mean he alienates all people, just people who aren't as devoted and obsessed with the crusade as he is-which will necessarily include some of the people he works with.
quote:And it probably seems crazy to them that there are people out there who are "into" the sacredness of all human life because of the same scriptures they use to justify the taking of it.
This is what I mean. He is extraordinarily violent, and quite nuts-taking the risks he does constantly-because of this. The anger is controlled, or else he would've killed many criminals many times before. Also by portraying his charity work.
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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Actually I don't think we disagree, Puffy Treat. I only read the Batman mags I like, so it may be I haven't read the ones you did that turned you off so much. The ones I read do keep him pure at heart, and show all aspects of his character.
They don't have him paranoid, just very well-planned (he does have very powerful enemies out to kill him). As for the brainwashing, I may not be current-what's that about?
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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You know, Tim Roth is just really good at being bad. Not in that gotta-love-the-badboy way. Nope. In the I-really-REALLY-wanna-see-the-color-of-his-guts way. This a a big part of why I love Rob Roy.
The other sizeable chunk is that there are acres and acres of Liam Neeson, and I loves me some Liam.
He HAS been the Mentor, Whose Job is to Teach a Hero Something, Then Die for a long time now. Kingdom of Heaven, EpI, Gangs of New York (First ten minutes of that movie is about all that's really worth watching).
I think he'll be great in this, though.
Christian Bale, I also love. At least he's not really been stuck in the same sort of character roles consistently. Crazy serial killer, little English boy in Japan, Dragon Fighter, Gay boy coming of age in the 70s, emotionless killing machine... *sigh*
This will be good. Please, God, let this not suck.
Posts: 1664 | Registered: Apr 2004
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Well, there's only been one non-ecstatic review, and it was this French guy who felt that focusing upon the drama of the character and his evolution eliminated all the mystery of the superpower of the superhero.
..which is stupid, because Batman's only real power is his overwhelmingly strong character. Really, showing who he is and how he came to be is showing his "superpower."
Posts: 2258 | Registered: Aug 2003
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