I've been making Stella watch the BBC Robin Hood for the last fortnight so she made me watch this - pretty good! I like Alan-a-dale as a Pete Seeger-esque cockerel minstrel, I like the little kid shouting 'death to tyrants!', i like the way the snake moves, i like how many people have told me fox robin hood was there sexual awakening.
But I really want to write about the BBC show with camp Kieth Allen as the Sherrif and…
Think Brecht had a point about how you should resist the urge to do shakespeare in modern dress, and i also reckon something about Shakespeare as cinema never q lands (an art form of language reproduced in a basically illiterate genre) but still, great cast, some great performances and some indelible images (the knife protruding from RDJ like one of the chestbusters from alien, before cutting to the toy train set).
For all the lovers and the rockers! Rewatching this, it's exactly as good as I remember. It reminds me, weirdly, of Boyhood - both are arts of threats raised then (largely) dispersed, upsetting cinematic expectations of catastrophe. Not saying nothing bad happens in Lover's Rock, but that it works to evoke bad twists (eg., the endless sirens on the soundtrack, following on from Mangrove) which then don't materialise. Thinks that's what the man carrying the cross symbolises - when you…
