Knights & Knaves Alehouse

Badmike wrote:As a depiction of Howard's character it's an utter failure on every single level. Every.....single.....level.

T. Foster wrote: The John Milius Conan movie is phenomenal -- the cinematography and locations (all in Spain, IIRC) are great, the production design, sets and costumes are all gorgeous and look exactly like Frazetta's art, the screenplay (heavily modified (i.e. pretty much totally re-written) by Milius from an original screenplay by Oliver Stone) is one of the purest expressions of Milius' career-long thematic obsessions (see also Dirty Harry, Jeremiah Johnson, The Wind and the Lion, the "Indianapolis" monologue in Jaws, Big Wednesday (one of my all-time favorite movies), Apocalypse Now, Red Dawn, and HBO's Rome for other examples), and last but not least the score by the late great Basil Poledouris is literally one of the best movie scores ever written. Yeah the acting by everybody except James Earl Jones and William Smith (in his two scenes at the beginning as Conan's father) is weak (Arnold was a bodybuilder, Sandhal Bergman (Valeria) a dancer, Gerry Lopez (Subotai) a pro surfer, all with minimal prior acting experience and presumably hired for their looks (and Milius' coke-fueled ego thinking "I don't need any fucking actors; I'm John Fucking Milius!")) and the story isn't true to Howardian canon (though IMO it's as true to Howardean themes as it needs to be) and Arnold doesn't look like Howard's descriptions (though he does look like Frazetta's art), but those are quibbles, and there's much much more good about this movie than there is bad. It is one of my favorite movies of the 1980s.

Conan the Destroyer is not nearly as good (note: John Milius had nothing whatsoever to do with this movie), but it is a lot of cheesy popcorn fun (IMO it's probably the closest a movie has ever come (and probably ever will come) to feeling like an AD&D adventure -- I don't think it's any coincidence this movie came out right when D&D was at the height of its popularity and TSR had just licensed "Conan" AD&D modules with Arnold's pic on the covers) and it still looks pretty good (same set and costume designers as the original, and cinematography by the late great Jack Cardiff) and the score is still pretty good (still by Poledouris, though he obviously wasn't trying as hard the second time around). I was 9 years old and had just gotten into D&D when this movie came out, and I loved it -- I didn't see the first Conan movie for another couple years, because it was rated R, but this one was PG. 15 years earlier and with the main character named Hercules instead of Conan it could've been a drive-in B-movie classic.

Red Sonja, alas, is 100% unmitigated shit.

James Maliszewski wrote:I recently read an interview with one of the screen writers behind the upcoming Conan film and he actually answered this question. His answer made some "sense," even if it pained me: when Hollywood shells out $100 million for a film, they want to ensure that it's accessible to as large a potential audience as possible. So that means marrying a recognizable "brand name" to an original story that spells it all out for those who know only the name and nothing more.

Badmike wrote:Why don't we just make a list of the bare minimum it would take to make a "Howard" Conan flick acceptable?

For me it would be:

The Conan that was a noted warrior since a young age (no "Conan the Slave", or "Thulsa Doom is my father", or any other ridiculous bastardization of what we know of Conan's past) and is about middle aged, having served as a mercenary, pirate, brigand, rogue, and is becoming well known for his escapades;

A Conan that is not a bodybuilder;

A Conan that is not a stupid brute, but shows intelligence and cunning to win battles and solve problems;

No love interest (except for Belit he never really had a long-term relationship before he became king);

At least an attempt to follow the outline of a great Howard tale;

A Conan that is wandering the world seeking his fortune, and an explicit theme comparing the softness of modern pampered society with the "triumph of barbarism over all";

Some interesting sidekicks that aren't Fantasy Cliche #1, #2, #3, etc

fingolwyn wrote:Conan is kinda like Tarzan...who (other than fans of ERB) remembers him as an educated British lord instead of the vine-swinging, clipped English-speaking jungle man of the Weissmuller movies?

James Maliszewski wrote:

fingolwyn wrote:Conan is kinda like Tarzan...who (other than fans of ERB) remembers him as an educated British lord instead of the vine-swinging, clipped English-speaking jungle man of the Weissmuller movies?

And, also like Conan, his name is constantly mispronounced

Random wrote:I would absolutely adore you if you would post a pronunciation key.
People have always said those names around me in completely different ways, so I'm not sure what's correct.

James Maliszewski wrote:

Random wrote:I would absolutely adore you if you would post a pronunciation key.
People have always said those names around me in completely different ways, so I'm not sure what's correct.

Conan and Tarzan are actually pronounced similarly, with the accent on the first syllable, not the second as many are prone to do. Likewise, the "-an" ending in both use a neutral vowel sound rather than a short a. So, it's "CO-nun" (as in Arthur Conan Doyle's name) and "TAHR-zun" rather than "Co-NAN" and "Tahr-ZAN."

Random wrote:I always pronounced it Conan like in Conan O'Brien.

Matthew wrote:

T. Foster wrote: Conan the Destroyer is not nearly as good (note: John Milius had nothing whatsoever to do with this movie),

I would go along with most of that, though I am probably harder on Conan the Destroyer

T. Foster wrote:

Badmike wrote:As a depiction of Howard's character it's an utter failure on every single level. Every.....single.....level.

What about as a filmic representation of Frank Frazetta's iconic Conan paintings? Because except for Arnold's hair being the wrong color I'd say it was pretty damn successful there. And, let's face it, at the time the movie was made (1982) those paintings were a lot more definitive in the potential audience's mind of "what Conan is" than Howard's texts (which were only available in de Camp & Carter's adulterated versions) -- if anything I think Milius et al. deserve a lot of credit for using Frazetta as their visual touchstone and going with his dark, bloody, R-rated feel over the more sanitized version seen in the Marvel comics (which is, essentially, what we got in Conan the Destroyer).

Also, I re-watched the first half-hour of the movie last night, and think the complaints about the infamous "mill" sequence are overrated -- it's a visual shorthand to show the passage of time and establish continuity between the kid and Arnold as representing the same character and is not to be taken literally (at even the most basic level he's wearing different clothes when he's pulled off the mill as an adult then when he's placed on it as a child, so although we only see him pushing the mill during all that time it's clear he must've been taken off it at at least some points). Furthermore, it's clear within the context of the screenplay that Conan spent considerable time as both a pit-fighter and in the Khitan school and was not yet fully "grown" when pulled off the mill -- it doesn't look that way in the movie because Arnold is the actor in all those scenes so he looks the same age in all of them, and ideally they would have hired one or two more "intermediate age" actors for those scenes and only had "adult Conan" (i.e. Arnold) appear at the end of that sequence (in the "what is best in life?" scene, presumably) but there are obvious practical reasons why that wasn't done. At a guess, I'd say Conan was intended to be maybe 11 when his village was wiped out, 14 when taken off the mill, 17 when sent to the Khitan school, and 20 when he escapes from it.

So, in summary, anybody who bases their dislike on the movie on the stupidity of Conan having spent half his life pushing a mill around a circle needs to get over it.

James Maliszewski wrote:

Random wrote: I always pronounced it Conan like in Conan O'Brien.

Precisely. And, in case anyone asks, we have it on pretty good authority that this is how Howard pronounced it. His one-time girlfriend, Novalyne Price Ellis, for example, expressed confusion as to why so many people said it "Co-NAN," since she never heard Bob Howard say it that way in all the years she knew him. As for Tarzan, Burroughs's daughter, Joan, is recorded in several places to have said that her father was dismayed by the way his character's name was pronounced in the MGM serials with Johnny Weismuller but not enough that he bothered to correct them on this point.

Badmike wrote: It doesn't fit Howard's character at all and I was disappointed with it the first time I saw it in the theater. It's as if the LOTR movie started out with Aragorn being trained as a ninja warrior or something, it's that jarring if you're familiar with Howard's Conan.

BlackBat242 wrote: The ONLY good thing in that movie was Grace Jones and the character she played!

Matthew wrote:
As jarring as the birthing sequence for the orcs or Aragorn saying "lets hunt some orc" as the final lines in Fellowship?