"Conan! What is best in life?"
Sep. 4th, 2011 11:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsOmaha and I went last night to see the midnight showing of Conan The Barbarian. No, not the one currently cluttering up the cinema, the original one, with a young Arnold Schwarzenegger and a powerful James Earl Jones, directed by Dino DeLaurentis, and full of lovely frontal nudity by Sandahl Bergman and other beauties before the routinizing of cosmetic surgery. You know, back when women weren't an assembly of every last possible sexual cue, no matter how ill-fit-together, but instead just had it, the way nature intended. (How, I ask you, is it at all possible that IMDB has no headshot photo of Sandahl Bergman!? The shame, the shame!)
Arnie doesn't say much in the film. Whole scenes go by where he says nothing at all. He grunts and groans a lot in that famous Austrian accent, of course, and he looks absolutely marvelous, such a hunk of man. (I'm a little disappointed that we never got to see much of Gerry Lopez' body, but that's a different story.) But surprisingly, he does hold the film together and he is wonderfully expressive with his face and eyes.
Ultimately the film has aged very, very well. The fight scenes, despite the obvious 70's choreography, look more brutal, harsher, more like fights and less like choreography. Thulsa Doom's lieutentants, "Red Hair" and "The Pict," still look like they ought to be fronting heavy metal bands. The terrain filmography is gorgeous, the sets and outdoor constructions are actually, you know, wood and stone rather than pixels, and when Conan gets to burn down the big set at the end of the film it's damnably satisfying.
The audience was wonderful, too. Half people old enough to remember the original, half hipsters out for an experience nobody else would appreciate, everyone cheered when Arnie came on the screen, laughed and grunted along at the first scene where he falls down into the barrow, and when the time comes for Arnie to deliver his signature line, the answer to the subject line, the entire audience chanted along:
"To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women!"
Arnie doesn't say much in the film. Whole scenes go by where he says nothing at all. He grunts and groans a lot in that famous Austrian accent, of course, and he looks absolutely marvelous, such a hunk of man. (I'm a little disappointed that we never got to see much of Gerry Lopez' body, but that's a different story.) But surprisingly, he does hold the film together and he is wonderfully expressive with his face and eyes.
Ultimately the film has aged very, very well. The fight scenes, despite the obvious 70's choreography, look more brutal, harsher, more like fights and less like choreography. Thulsa Doom's lieutentants, "Red Hair" and "The Pict," still look like they ought to be fronting heavy metal bands. The terrain filmography is gorgeous, the sets and outdoor constructions are actually, you know, wood and stone rather than pixels, and when Conan gets to burn down the big set at the end of the film it's damnably satisfying.
The audience was wonderful, too. Half people old enough to remember the original, half hipsters out for an experience nobody else would appreciate, everyone cheered when Arnie came on the screen, laughed and grunted along at the first scene where he falls down into the barrow, and when the time comes for Arnie to deliver his signature line, the answer to the subject line, the entire audience chanted along:
"To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women!"
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Date: 2011-09-04 08:59 pm (UTC)