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djemsostylist · 4 years ago

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An Arthurian Film Adventure, Part 3: Lancelot

Today, we are tackling Lancelot. Arguably the most famous knight of the Round Table (besides Gawain), the story of Lancelot and King Arthur and Queen Guinevere is a timeless one. Forbidden love, broken friendships, civil war, downfall of a kingdom. Plus, he’s great with a lance. Throw in a child who achieves the Grail Quest, and you’ve got yourself a pretty great story, and a pretty easy character too, right?

Nope, wrong again. Firstly, because he doesn’t even exist in one of them, and secondly because he fucking sucks in the other ones.

I should point out, before I begin, that there are several versions of Lancelot which exist. Depending on whether you go with de Troyes, Malory, Vulgate, or Post Vulgate, you get some different characters. Universally he is kind and brave and selfless, devoted to Arthur but also damned by a love for Guinevere. He also can be prideful, angry, a touch selfish, and ultimately fails at achieving the Grail Quest. Anyway, onto the ratings!

1. Knights of the Round Table

This Lancelot is, by far, the best Lancelot. Here, Lancelot follows the post Vulgate version (he is just a wandering knight who wants to join the Round Table, rather than having grown up with the Lady of the Lake). He is sort of the ultimate knight--kind, brave, selfless, great with a lance or sword. He and Arthur get along immediately, forming a fast friendship built on mutual respect, understanding, and trust. Lancelot is brave and selfless and kind, but he is also an individual with his own wants, needs and desires. He can be prideful and arrogant, but he is fiercely loyal.

Here, Lancelot is close friends not only with Arthur and Guinevere, but also Gawain, Gareth and Percival, the latter of whom he takes under his wing. He and Arthur quarrel and reconcile, he goes knight erranting (is this a verb?) and lives in the castle Joyous Guard. He also marries Elaine, whom he loves in his own way, and fathers Galahad. Here, his love for Guinevere is acknowledged and central, though never consummated, but it is his connection with Arthur and the other knights of the Round Table which sustain his story.

The downfall here is tragic, both because though he and Guinevere love each other, they have not actually committed treason, and because his estrangement from Arthur leads to an actual splintering of the Round Table. Also, he has a horse named Beric that he loves a lot, his relationship with Elaine is honestly really sweet and sad, and he also wears beautiful surcoats and has a huge red feather on his helm.

Attractiveness: Honestly number 1 easily. He has some slightly weird facial hair, and he’s not big enough, but he’s hot. (Fun fact, Robert Taylor also played Ivanhoe in the single best Ivanhoe of all time, so).

2. Camelot

So, this Lancelot is pretty good. My main problem here is that this Lancelot is more Galahad than Lancelot, in that he is super pure almost the point of ridiculousness. Like, he is so pure his purity actually brings a man back from the dead, which could be the whole “healing of Sir Urry thing” but is mostly just strange. Here, we get a post-Vulgate Lancelot backstory (he is supposed to be French is this version but he is played by the most Italian Italian I have ever seen and it’s great). He and Arthur meet and are super close almost right away (“did we just become best friends?!”) but surprisingly and refreshingly, Guinevere is actually deeply annoyed by him when they first meet. (She has been going a-maying and Arthur shows up and she just wants to fuck him but he just wants her to meet his new best friend, and she is like, wow ur friend is deeply lame, come have sex with me instead pls.) She eventually falls in love with him when he cures a dead man from death, and then what follows is a tragic love story of friends who are sort of stuck in this terrible situation and just trying to make the best of it.

The downfall here is that Lancelot has literally no other friends at court, so while his betrayal is tragic for him and Arthur and Guinevere (like in the 1953 version, he and Guinevere never actually commit treason), it doesn’t really affect any other friendships or relationships. He also doesn’t ever get married or have a baby here, and his purity can be grating, though the earnestness offsets it well enough.

Attractiveness: Number 2 tbh, but mostly because he is so damn earnest it’s endearing. Also he wears beautiful armor.

3. King Arthur

So, this Lancelot is from Sarmatia, which is both weird and never really explained. Also, he is neither Arthur’s best knight or actually even a knight at all. He doesn’t have a relationship with Guinevere other than throwing what I assume are supposed to be longing looks in her direction (tbf Arthur didn’t have a relationship with Guinevere in this movie either beyond aborted heavy petting). He also doesn’t bring about the downfall of Arthur’s kingdom, mostly because Arthur doesn’t have a kingdom. He also doesn’t have a son who goes on the quest for the Holy Grail, but that is mostly because this Arthur isn’t Christian and neither are his knights. Also, he fights with two swords and there are no lances in sight, which is a weird thing for Lancelot, since riding around and knocking people off horses is like, literally his favorite thing in the world.

Attractiveness: Number 3, mostly because I know they tried to make him hot here with the mop of curly hair and etc, but he will also be Mr. Fantastic to me, and Mr. Fantastic was honestly the worst.

4. First Knight

The thing is, Richard Gere should be last, except that Excalibur Lancelot was literally the dumbest person alive ever, so I guess that means since Richard Gere wasn’t literally just living in the forest stabbing himself with his own sword, he sucks less. (Look, I said this was a rough journey.) This Lancelot is just terrible honestly. Firstly, he’s not a knight, he’s just some dude who rides around hitting people with his sword. He meets Arthur when he helps rescue Guinevere who is on her way to marry her dad’s old friend bc he is old and sad and lonely. His introduction to Arthur comes during a tournament. And by tournament, I mean an extremely 90s, wacky, American Gladiator style wooden obstacle course thing that involves swinging knife things, swinging wood things, and just...it’s bad.

He doesn’t want to be a knight, mostly because he thinks Arthur’s knights are boring squares (he is not wrong, but I hate him so-). He agrees only after he saves Guinevere from Melegraunce, which involves more wacky obstacle courses and swinging bridges. Also, he and Guinevere here give Arthur the horns, and also both suck. He doesn’t learn anything, he is genuinely terrible, and also he is played by Richard Gere.

Attractiveness: I’m gonna say last, mostly because his whole 90sness just irritated me and also because he was very moist through this whole movie and also I hated him a lot.

5. Excalibur

Look, this Lancelot was like, literally actually stupid. He showed up, tried to beat up Arthur and failed, then went to live in the woods. No like, he literally lived in the woods. He would tell Arthur he was leaving Camelot to go adventuring or whatever, ride six feet out into the forest, strip naked, and sleep in the roots of a tree. Also, he for some reason not only slept completely naked, but he also didn’t keep his sword in his scabbard so one night he rolled over and stabbed himself clear through the side. Also, he and Guinevere had sex is his tree thing, and I saw way too much of his side ass. I was honestly rooting for Gawain to kill him, and I didn’t even like this Gawain bc he was genuinely awful.

Attractiveness: I mean, better than Richard Gere. But, and I know I have said this before, I cannot express how ugly this movie was.

6. Legend of the Sword

This one was easy to rank, because he did not exist. This was an origin story, and Lancelot isn’t really a part of Arthur’s origin story so I guess we can give them a pass, except that I love Lancelot so this was a tragedy to me. On the positive side, his lack of existence means that he can’t be worse than Richard Gere, so I guess I should rank this nonexistent Lancelot in like, 3rd place.

Part 2: The Arthurs

#an arthurian film adventure #arthurian legend #arthuriana #lancelot du lac #lancelot

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podcake · 7 years ago

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Podcast Teatime: The Case of the Questioning Cheesecake

Hello and a happy August day to everyone. Welcome to a new Q&A to cap off the summer, starring the masterminds behind the adventures we’ve grown to love in The Penumbra Podcast.

As a loyal patron of the arts, I took it upon myself to do some of my own detective work for a change and see what’s going on in the heads of creators Kevin Vibert and Sophie Kaner .

(The following is a direct copy-and-paste from the email)

Question One: Let’s get the most pressing question out of the way first, at least for me: Is there any reason why you chose a hotel as a framing device for your stories? Was it always something you had planned?

Kevin: To start, Sophie and I were thinking that the Penumbra would be an anthology show, along the lines of The Twilight Zone or old radio drama anthologies like Suspense. The idea that the narrator would be a spooky, semi-omnipotent character voiced by the lead writer (hi) was Sophie’s, and is a very, very direct reference to Rod Serling’s narrator on The Twilight Zone. (“Shaken,” which is the one episode that remains mostly intact from this first view of the show, is full of Twilight Zone references — Louise’s surname “Serling” is not a nod to Rod Serling so much as a head-shake-so-hard-you-can-hear-our-necks-crack.)

As for the hotel itself: I have a real love of weird horror and descriptions of impossible places. House of Leaves, which is about ten billion things but one of them is a house that’s slightly bigger on the inside than the outside, was definitely bouncing around in my head as we were pitching ideas for the frame. So was The Shining, which is one of my favorite horror novels of all time, as well as Invisible Cities, which is a really bizarre collection of stories in which Marco Polo describes a bunch of cities that couldn’t possibly exist to Kublai Khan, saying they all lie somewhere in his empire. The description of the infinite hotel is definitely connected to that the most.

For season two we changed the game a bit, but I think even that has connections to this weird thing about places that are horrifying and impossible and kind of mundane — hotels and trolleys and things you see every day. I don’t know why I like making normal places scary. It is either a little bit of cruelty or a complete terror of everything around me, or both. Yeah, both.

Question Two: You have quite the talented cast to work with for your show. Did you have to look far and wide or was it a simple casting call? Or are these just close friends who happen to know how to act?

Sophie: Aren’t they great? It’s important to remember that the Penumbra Podcast was never intended to be a podcast in the first place; it was just going to be one radio play written for fun, except that one turned into two and then three and then we really let the whole thing get out of control. In any case, the first few people we brought on board (notably, the three actors at the core of the Juniverse: Joshua, Noah, and Kate) are old friends of mine from college, though I know them from a theater group, so it’s most accurate to say that I know them because they know how to act. We are always adding new actors, though!

I perform a lot myself, so I ask a lot of the talented people I’ve worked with in the past to join the show, and I’ve also solicited auditions from friends of friends. (I don’t hold open auditions: we are still too small a production for me to feel safe doing that.) One exception: last year I went to see a play with a friend, and the lead actor was so incredible that I said “THAT. That’s who I need on my show.” So I found him on Facebook and asked him if he would be interested in joining the production, and luckily he had not only heard of the show but was totally on board! (If you’re wondering, the actor was Matthew Zahnzinger, who now plays Ramses O'Flaherty in the Juniverse and Sir Damien in Second Citadel.)

Question Three: What is it that inspired Juno Steel’s adventures? Do you ever see yourself paying homage to Sherlock Holmes and the like or are you more interested in other media to act as a muse?

Kevin: This answer will be relevant in, like, two seconds. I promise.

Sophie has a theory regarding directing actors towards new voices that I really love: she likes to get people to do impressions of people they sound nothing like and then shape the voice from there. Leslie Drescher, who plays Sir Caroline, Valles Vicky, Cassandra, and Cecil, has thus far gotten the brunt of this: for Vicky Sophie sent her videos of Robert DeNiro and Jabba the Hutt, and they shaped a character from there. Cassandra was Joan Jett, Cecil was a French aristocrat and Scott Disick, and so on.

Anyway: the reason this works for voice acting is that you’re relying on the natural chemistry of getting someone to do something they can’t actually do perfectly. When Leslie imitates Robert DeNiro, she does not sound like Robert DeNiro. But she can use that approximation as a starting place to figure out how to sound like a tough, brusque crime lord, and that’s what we needed Vicky to be. And better yet: the voice she does it not one Robert DeNiro could do, and it’s probably not one any of us would have thought she should do until we asked her to do something way outside what she was used to.

We treat inspiration and genre in our stories similarly. In the Juno stories, noir and scifi are always what we go back to… but usually we start by looking at another genre or story that doesn’t quite fit, but that we really love. Juno Steel and the Train From Nowhere happened because we really wanted to write a Bond movie, and then we decided it would be interesting and new if Juno was the “Bond girl” instead. The framing device in Angel of Brahma exists entirely the way it does because I’m obsessed with the first section of the novel Dracula, in which Jonathan Harker is simultaneously a guest and a hostage in Dracula’s house.

It’s worth noting that neither of these episodes are very much like the source material, and that’s where the shaky line between “homage” and “inspiration” comes in. Very often we start with a story convention we love because we love it, and then over the course of outlining and drafting and editing naturally branch off in a new direction.

When I was younger I would get really self-conscious about having “original ideas,” and of course I still do — but it’s really important to remember that “original” is not the same as “immaculate conception.” Just because you can trace where an idea came from doesn’t mean you stole it. If I rewrote It or The Shining and changed the title to Juno Steel and the Day That Wouldn’t Die and tweaked a few names, that’d be plagiarism.

But if we read It and go, “Damn, I really wish I wrote this,” and then we examine what it is we like about the story, what we wish we wrote about it, what parts we don’t like and we’d take out, and what other influences we want to incorporate… suddenly we’ve made something brand new, even if the first thought was, “I really wish I wrote this story that already exists.”

Question Four: The Penumbra spans genres from mystery to fantasy and science fiction. Does it ever become a struggle to juggle so many different themes?

Kevin: For genre and theme, not really. The more difficult thing is bouncing between all these different characters.

Sophie and I talk incessantly about stories, and our interests dovetail really nicely for writing genre stories. I really like pulling apart plot structure and she’s obsessed with tropes; I like figuring out how a joke works and she likes figuring out how to make people cry.

So entering a new genre is never terribly difficult for us because chances are we’ve already had forty conversations about that genre anyway: that’s why when we wrote The Coyote of the Painted Plains, but we knew we didn’t actually like Westerns very much, we gave it all the structure and tropes of a swashbuckler instead, like Ivanhoe or The Three Musketeersand so on.

By the same token when I need to explain the Second Citadel stories to people, my shorthand is usually, “So there’s this fantasy world with knights and stuff, only the knights are kind of like superhero beat cops and the Queen is their chief, so it’s kind of a police procedural with a monster-of-the-week spin, and…”

So genre doesn’t tend to be an issue for us. But making new characters? That’s really, really hard.

Part of the reason we honed down to two main series in season two was because making new characters and getting an audience invested in them in half an hour was a good challenge, but completely exhausting.

I can’t tell you how many half-finished outlines we have for season one one-shots, just because we realized we’d never be able to get people invested in these characters quickly enough and also have time to complete an actual plot. We also just really fell in love with the process of diving deep into a few characters over a long period of time, honing in on the ones with conflicts unresolved and seeing where they go next.

Question Five: Would The Penumbra still be The Penumbra if it wasn’t audio? If it could be recreated in any other format, which would you pick and would it still feel the same? (By the way, I would totally read a novelization of Juno Steel mysteries.)

Sophie: Oh god, if we could make the Penumbra in another format, it would be a TV show–well, two TV shows, probably, one for Juno Steel and one for Second Citadel. And if we had the resources, we’d create an animated series with Penumbra artist Mikaela Buckley! But that being said, the Penumbra would definitely lose something in the transition from audio to visual. Many of the plot points were written explicitly with an audio format in mind (the abilities Juno gains from the Martian Pill, the Ruby 7 car chase, the action scenes in the Head of the Janus Beast), and other setpiece moments were designed in post-production without even being a part of the original script (Annie Wire’s death, the music at Ingrid Lake’s party, Sir Damien’s storytelling). Which is all to say that the Penumbra would be an extremely different show if it hadn’t been created as a podcast.

Question Six: How long does it usually take to make an episode? Including voice acting, sound editing, and of course writing, is it especially time consuming or is it something that can be knocked out in a day?

Sophie: This is a tough question to answer because the first part of the process–the dreaming up of the stories–is the part that can vary the most. Sometimes Kevin and I agonize over characters and plot points for months, but on some very special occasions, when we’ve been in a really great groove, we’ve been able to outline an entire episode in one day.

Once we have an outline, Kevin writes a draft, which can take anywhere from three days to three months (though both ends of the spectrum are very unusual). After that, we spend two to three weeks editing on our own and then with a few other people, and once the script is complete we can move onto rehearsal and recording.

This part is a ton of fun! Scheduling (handled by Noah Simes, our production manager) is a bit of a nightmare because the actors are all extremely busy, but we always do our best to have at least one rehearsal for everybody, and then 1-3 recording sessions. Those are usually long days, but we all love each other a lot, so it’s worth it. The final piece of the process is the sound design, which I usually spend about two full weeks on. I almost never think I’m going to get the whole thing done in time for episode release day, but so far I’ve always managed it!

BONUS: What are some future plans you have in mind? Without going into spoilers, can we can anticipate some new characters, exciting cases, and big reveals to come up?

Kevin: It is very much the Penumbra Brand to make sure all new information only raises forty new questions and makes everyone terribly upset, and so in that time-honored tradition I bring you this fun exclusive:

The structure of this Juno season — number of cases, number of episodes, plot structure, etc. — is so different from season one that we can’t even post a release calendar or tell you how many more you have left to expect, because it would spoil some major reveals coming up in… a few weeks? A few months? I don’t know. You’ll have to wait and see.

Thank you to Sophie and Kevin to taking time to answer my questions. If you haven’t already, check out The Penumbra Podcast yourself to get the scoop on Juno Steel and The Second Citadel as well as enjoying all the beautiful art provided by the talented @disasterscenario.

Another tea pot emptied and another case solved.

#the penumbra podcast #q&a #podcast teatime #juno steel gives me juno feels #sophie kaner #kevin vibert

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late-night-melancholy · 4 years ago

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So here is probably the best article discussing this:

Then when you get more into answering the question, I definitely think it is a matter of personal opinion. If you look under the Reddit subsection regarding this, there are many compelling arguements for and against Flip being the masked klansman.

Some ideas supporting this idea include those mentioning that he may still have been undercover (since in real life this was a sting operation that went on for numerous years and corroborated by the fact that Flip's character was outraged at the closing of the case), his name is literally "Flip" so his character change ought to be expected, his facial hair is unmistakable, it's easy to misconstrue his speech about "belonging to a group", he seemed to get into the "Birth of a Nation" viewing, and/or it helps to show how you can never fully be sure of anyone's beliefs (even today).

On the other hand, others say that they saw Ivanhoe's face and Adam Driver's performance gave no hints as to his intentions earlier on in the film (which would be very uncharacteristic if this were to be true).

Personally, I do think it probably was Flip. It's a Spike Lee movie, and when you read the arguements for, it makes sense. However, I don't think he was there out of malice; Flip was at the cross-burning either because he was still undercover with the station, or because he decided to "go rogue." When we remember the scenes that follow this, the ones of unyielding hatred and violence, I'd like to think the movie ended on a more positive note- with eyes that were staring at the cross detesting it's existence rather than worshipping it (but that just might be my white naiveté talking).

I'll end by linking Adam Driver's interview about why he accepted the role (spoiler: it was because he witnessed Klan activity as a child).

Blackkklansman ending. wtf?

So… watched it against night and noticed that in the burning cross at the end that sure looks like Flip.

And then I spent the rest of the evening wondering if that meant he actually joined the Klan or continued the investigation on his own.

Both seemed unlikely to me, but the first option, is just terrible and quite honestly ruins the whole movie for me.

If Spike Lee chose to show a jewish character, that throughout the movie showed (IMO) no sign of buying the Klan’s bullshit and hatred, become enamored with racism, well that’s a fucked up message and leaves a damn bitter taste in my mouth.

#flip zimmerman #adam driver #blackkklansman #spike lee #blackkklansman spoilers #kkk mention

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