Robin Hood

Cor, Patrick Troughton! I wish I'd seen more of these, but the Errol Flynn is terrific. (Spectacularly useless Brighton trivia: first pedestrian killed by a bubblecar in Woodingdean? Errol Flynn's mum)

how can "a cartoon fox" not win any poll?

Cary Elwes (1993) (if you vote for this you are certifiably insane)

he was better than Costner!

oodleolly oodleolly golly what a day

It has to be Flynn, doesn't it?

Errol, sequins and all. (I am still kinda amused by the fact that Little John in that film is the dad of the Skipper from Gilligan's Island -- plus a prime Erich Wolfgang Korngold score [Oscar winning at that] and both Basil Rathbone and Claude Rains chewing the scenery! Nothing wrong with that film at all.)

oooohdelally

the mix of english and american accents in the disney version is totally bizarre but it's great, peter ustinov especially.

The less famous of the 1991 movies is actually the best adaptation of the story I've seen, but I'm still not sure Patrick Bergin is as good as Flynn.

Flynn. Isn't that fox a little girly?

No, it's all man-fox

no daffy, no cred.

the disney cartoon was my first introduction to the story actually

I remember really liking 'Robin and Marian' as a kid but I haven't seen it since.

JD hits the jackpot.

Oh god, the Patrick Bergen version. So piss poor.
What's the David Wood version?

the answer is obviously flynn, but i voted for sean connery because i really like that movie and it's underappreciated.

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/6/10896155_2204e3fa25_o.jpg

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YES!

hey pash any chance you could ban the one person that voted for costner? thanks

I was watching the fighting around the wood trailer with Russell Crowe the other day and it dawned on me that I couldn't give a toss about Robin Hood in any incarnation or any aspect of the mythos. Worst National Hero ever.

omg y'all this new one is a god damned disaster

oh shit details pls

I mean Robin Hood with terrible generic modern dialogue and crappy action scenes seemed bad enuff but was it worse?

robin hood: graduate of kingsman

Robin Hood but with ATTITUDE

the director cut his teeth on Peaky Binders, it would have taken a miracle for this one to be even shit enough for a lol/hate watch.

can we just collectively agree that taron egerton was a mistake and move on pls

@ Neanderthal - yes, worse. actually some of the action scenes were okayish but went on too long. you can tell that at certain points in production and storyboarding, some of the people involved were working from the reasonable premise of "what would look like fun for robin hood to do" - so he jumps out of stuff and there are some rickety wooden towers and catwalks and stuff. the odder production choice is that one of their main shooting locations is auguste perret's remarkable church of notre dame du raincy, visibly built out of reinforced concrete and completed in 1922. it is, let's be honest, an improbable place to find robin hood and the sheriff of nottingham, but it's rarely been so well photographed and hopefully the church got a great chunk of change to help maintain and restore the place. anyway, clearly some production designers were thrilled to find worthwhile inspiration because tons of other background stuff in the movie picks up on perret's grids of abstracted medievalist ornament. i admit i am an architecture nerd and can get distracted by this stuff in better movies, but in this movie it was one of the few joys to be had - my hat is off to whoever was working that end of the production. i should have looked for their names in the credits but i was laughing too hard at the credits being peppered with onscreen quotes from the movie you just watched, none of which were good quotes because the script is a bad script.

SPOILERS BELOW!

oh man the sins of this thing though... i mean mainly it's just mean and ugly movie if you stop and think for a second. he kills SO MANY PEOPLE. like i get that robin hood is a guy with a bow and arrow but couldn't he be cheekily shooting people's hats off, or arrowing a door shut to buy time to escape, or pinning somebody's gauntlet so they can't attack? i mean it's just a violent murder-fest, this thing, but whenever it's a character scene he's supposed to be all winning and lighthearted until the very last scene when he remembers that he has PTSD from the crusades. the crusades, following a laughably brief montage to establish his idyllic young life, are the first twenty-five minutes of the movie, and they are quick-cut "middle eastern urban warfare" stuff that raises all kinds of issues w/r/t the present day world situation obviously, even though the movie is also trying to drop in these little leftie moments. sure wealth redistribution is innate to robin hood, but it's played up; also the commoners fighting the sheriff are obviously rendered as antifa protestors versus cops with riot shields, and the sheriff's big villainous speech to the public is all about demonizing immigrants. which is interesting to see in a would-be blockbuster but so incoherently delivered as to be a throwaway. everything is sloppy - big moments like the hood coming off or robin re-encountering marian after four years have no weight at all. there's a super half-assed attempt to make it 'batman begins' with a training montage, and an unconvincing "by day, you'll be a rich playboy" plot, but none of that works. robin's hood and face-covering scarf keep falling off all the time in broad daylight, but nobody seems to notice and the film forgets to even try and get suspense out of "was i recognized??" type stuff. they all have to be pretty dumb not to figure out who robin hood is btw because when robin gets back from the crusades his mansion's been burnt down and he's totally broke, but the day after robin hood starts robbing people, he's making big donations to the sheriff's campaign to get on his good side.

but here's the real thing y'all: sherwood forest doesn't appear until the last three minutes of the film. almost all the action is in dingy, gray urban streets. there are no merry men. little john has been combined with the morgan freeman character from prince of thieves to form jamie foxx as "john," who is forced to watch his son being decapitated and seeks justice slash revenge. great, what fun. everyone calls robin "rob" most of the time. there is no alan-a-dale; indeed, nobody sings any songs, nor are there campfires to sing them around (the closest you get are gas explosion fires at THE MINES where the peasants all work; these are adjacent to reinforced-concrete abandoned factory locations). friar tuck is like a patchouli priest sympathetic to the resistance or whatever, he's fine but none of his joke lines are actually funny. will scarlet is the guy who married marian in robin's absence, and he's a man of the people, except he's really just a jealous dude + politically ambitious climber. at the end, after rob and john cruelly murder the sheriff in cold blood, will scarlet becomes the new sheriff of nottingham and he has a burned up face. marian barely registers and is the only female character to have any lines of dialogue the sheriff, a sputtering ben mendelsohn, is reasonably campy-evil sometimes, but over the top diabolical at others, making the movie feel extra gross and icky. he gets a long and uncomfortable monologue about how what motivates him is that in the orphanage, there were certain lords of the realm who would hurt the children in any way they could. seriously, they thought the sheriff of nottingham needed an ORIGIN STORY. his plan is to work with the shriveled, decadent, evil catholics to secretly fund the arabs, so england will lose the crusade and he will become king. i'm not sure they know what the crusades were btw. or why anybody likes robin hood. in conclusion, this movie is awful but you should look up the concrete churches of 20th century proto-modernist auguste perret.

Flynn followed by Cleese is correct

that new movie sounds so depressing

i'm not sure the world needed another robin hood movie tbh

just took a look at my letterboxd and this is almost certainly the worst of the twenty-five 2018 releases i have seen, with hurricane heist being the only real competition. that one didn't have any great works of modernist architecture, but otoh it wasn't making a burnt-up lemon out of the lemonade that is robin hood.

Sean Connery's Robin Hood is Scottish (of course) so Nicol Williamson seems to have said, fuck it, I'll make Little John Scottish too.

... hold on, is everybody doing Scottish accents in this film?

... Audrey Hepburn however is sticking to the Audrey Hepburn accent.