I'm in a rush this morning so you get a day off from being hassled about World Youth Day and instead I'm going to rob from Decent Films to give to my blog.

What's interesting here is the way they set out to review one movie and somehow managed to review almost every single popular historical film of the last decade...

Ridley Scott wants you to know that the Crusades were a bad thing. Five years ago he made a whole movie about it, Kingdom of Heaven, but you may have missed it, or perhaps you saw it and forgot pretty much everything but the battle scenes.

Now Scott has made another movie with a more formidable leading man, Russell Crowe rather than Orlando Bloom, not to mention a more marketable title. While it’s not as central to Robin Hood, Scott would like to remind you of some of the finer points from Kingdom of Heaven you might have missed or forgotten: Christians committing atrocities against Muslims as well as their fellow Christians; the hypocrisy and corruption of bishops and even popes.

Like Kingdom of Heaven, Robin Hood is replete with the opportunism and foolishness of the Crusades. That the whole business was originally a Christian reaction to aggressive Muslim expansionism is an idea even more studiously ignored here than in Kingdom.

Once again a peasant hero reminds us that no man is a knight or peasant but thinking makes him so, and a blacksmith or a stonemason can, and in all likelihood will, shape the destiny of nations. Would you be astonished to learn that there is a proto-feminist heroine who dons armor for the climactic battle?

...

At this point I suppose I ought to discuss how the film is a sort of revisionist origin story in the gritty epic mode of Braveheart, Gladiator and King Arthur. It should be noted that the legend’s traditional themes of economic oppression, noble banditry and derring-do have been displaced by a Norman scheme of conquest, seditious Scottish noblemen, the sacking of England and the great principles of Magna Carta.

...

No, wait. I’m sorry. I can’t pretend to be objective here.

I’m just so sick of this. This grim, joyless, faux-realist medieval world, with its constant brutality, hypocrisy and debauchery all but unmoved by beauty, serenity and humanity.

I’m sick of movies in this King Arthur / Kingdom of Heaven mold that seem almost entirely lacking in sympathy and affection for their hero’s world. (Isolated moments — Robin’s fellows boisterously harmonizing on the Channel crossing back to England — seem almost to belong to another movie.)

I’m sick of movies that seem obsessed with rubbing our noses in the supposed harsh reality behind our romantic illusions of nobility and courtesy — especially in our age, when the harsh reality is taken for granted, and the romance and nobility and courtesy are all but forgotten.

Here is a small example. On the eve of the siege in which he will fall prey to an archer’s arrow, King Richard, noting Robin’s courage and honesty, and asks him candidly whether God will be pleased with Richard’s sacrifice. Somberly, Robin answers that by massacring innocent Muslims they have become godless men. Specifically, he recalls a Muslim woman whose last look was not one of fear or hatred, but pity. (Bad Crusades! Bad!)

Richard’s capricious response to Robin’s candor is to have him clapped in stocks. You see, Robin is brave, honest — and naïve. Betcha didn’t see that coming, huh?

Now here is another story about an archer and Richard’s death, from Wikipedia. Spotting a defender on the castle walls with a crossbow shooting at him, Richard was amused and applauded the archer — until a shaft went home. Later, the archer was captured and brought before the dying king, whose wound had become gangrenous. The archer (who said he was avenging family members killed by Richard) expected to be executed — but Richard, in a last act of mercy, pardoned him, gave him 100 shillings and sent him on his way. Isn’t that a better story than Richard clapping Robin in stocks?

Where Kingdom of Heaven made a flawed but credible effort to treat the Church with some measure of even-handedness, Robin Hood can’t be bothered. “Between the sheriff and the bishop,” Marion snaps, “it’s hard to say who is the greater curse on common English folk.” She says she’s praying for a “miracle,” namely, that the bishop (never seen) might show “Christian charity” and not rob the people of the seed corn they need for planting. At least there’s a suggestion that Christianity itself is better than its leaders.

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That's another interesting thing - the way people seem to find it so difficult to criticise Christianity without inadvertantly appealing to Christianity.

I've never read Brideshead Revisited. I wasn't even born when it was on TV. I know nothing.

That said, I can predict, with absolute certainty, that somebody is going to read about how THE CHURCH is against the new film and they are going to demand I explain why and they are going to say "It's only a film."

Da Vinci Code, Northern Compass (or whatever)... it's always the same.

How dare they.

No, I mean really, how DARE they?! Imagine if someone did a new adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird and it ended up savagely racist? That's what they've done here. A profoundly Catholic novel, in this "adaptation", Brideshead Revisited is viciously anti-Catholic. They turned a movie about God and the soul, into a lurid love triangle between a homosexual, his sister and a hapless hunk. It's lame. It's bad.

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I could cite probably twenty examples of the film's anti-Catholicism. But let me just use one of the most egregious. In the book, the Flyte family basically opposes Julia's engagement to Rex. In fact, the catchesis of the moral pygmy Rex Motram, who as a purely materialist capitalist is in Julia's words, "half a man", takes up the whole mid-point of the book. The family is seriously worried about Rex's lack of "spiritual curiosity," but Lady Marchmain respects her daughter's freedom too much to interfere in her daughter's marriage. Then, when it is discovered that Rex had been previously married and divorced, the Flyte family vigorously opposes the marriage and eventually Julia is cut off for leaving her faith to marry a divorced man.

In the movie, when Charles asks Julia why she married Rex she basically says that her mother forced her to do it because Rex was a rich Catholic.

Ya see what I mean?

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Usually when this kind of thing happens, I feel obliged to read the book and I have to force myself through bazillions of pages of banal tedium.

On this occasion, word on the street says that it's actually a good book.