Poetry, and Bad Movie

[tahnan]

bookishfellow assures me that this is National Poetry Month. silkblade assures me that this is National Alcohol Awareness Month. Therefore, I would like to point my readers to "Terence, this is stupid stuff" by A.E. Housman, who knew what he was about. For the alternate viewpoint, see "A Study of Reading Habits" by Phillip Larkin.

OK, enough culture. Against all of our better judgments, a number of us watched Dungeons & Dragons tonight. We did not realize how badly a movie could suck. Very, very badly; as jadelennox put it, "I didn't expect this movie to start sucking thirty seconds into it." By twenty minutes in we were going for the alcohol.

But! For the sake of those poor, poor souls who did not see this movie on DVD: we watched the "deleted" scenes. With some trepidation, because, let's face it, we wondered how bad a scene would have to be in order to be cut from this movie. In fact, what was cut was the plot. So in the cut scenes, we saw--and this won't make sense to people who haven't seen it, but, look, I'm not worried about spoiling this movie for people:

• Jeremy Irons come to the council, subtly blame the fire that he started on the Empress, and announce that the Empress was intending to disband the Council of Mages;


• Ridley and Magechick inside the scroll, where they were actually told about the quest that they would have to go on, and were given the map that they suddenly had; during which, they argued briefly and Ridley explained that his father had had his mind wiped because he had invented something magical--thus giving character background, and explaining something of the class issues;


• The scene in the sewer, where the dwarf actually introduced himself;


• A character development scene in which Snails hit on the elf chick a little more;


• A serious character moment when the elf chick says to Magechick, after Ridley is injured, "You grieve for him. I grieve for his kindhearted friend";


• A decent ending, where it's just Ridley by himself and he simply walks off.

It didn't make the watching of the movie any less painful, but it was nice to know that there was, at some point, an actual, real, vaguely decent movie there.

Except Thora Birch, who should have had her SAG membership revoked. (At least Jeremy Irons seemed to know he was overacting.) And the dwarf, which is the worst dwarf ever, and makes Gimli look like Anna Karenina. And the plot, which was pretty much ripped off from various Star Wars or Indiana Jones moments--and the music, which was also ripped off from Star Wars, and...look, just don't see this movie.

Comments

[drastic.livejournal.com]

Mumbling about "budget" and "pacing" (if you did the commentary option on the deleted scenes, you know what I'm on about) now has a permanent injoke status between my bad-movie-afficionado friend and I.

I'm told that watching the entire movie with the commentary track on is interesting, as a study in how breathtakingly oblivious the people behind the flick were.