Genius goes "Clunk"

(Originally posted on Tuesday May 15th 2007)

I'm a romantic at heart, although I'm sure you wouldn't know it to look at me. I can't hear a reading of "The Lady of Shallot" without sheding a tear and the ending of "Dr Zhivago" broke my heart.

When I first owned a DVD player, that same romantic streak drove me to collect a number of films that have never been epics or hailed as the greats of their genre, but nevertheless they were films that I had seen over the years and come to have a soft spot for. Most were fantasy films from the brief period in the eighties before Hollywood turned back to sci-fi for so long.The first was "Highlander", that over the top tale of duelling immortals throught the ages fuelled by a wonderous Queen soundtrack and the daft casting that saw a Frenchman cast as a Scot and a Scot cast as an ancient Egyptian swinging a katana. A film that should never have been cursed with a sequel (let alone more) and most people misunderstand by taking too seriously rather than just enjoying the ride."Conan the Barbarian" followed as possibly the greatest role ever handed to an overgrown Austrian. For me that film would have been nothing without the opening monologue from Mako. After hearing that I was set for the overacting and the silliness that is John Milius.

I had to add "Legend", the film that works far better as a series of visual images rather than a motion picture. The opulence and beauty of the unicorns in this film still stands up today as one of the best portrayals of a horse on the cinema screen.And then there was "Willow", twee, confused and full of terrible acting it was still one of those films that had enough humour and spirit to stand out a little. What author could not appreciate the scene in which the humble Willow almost turns the evil Badmorda to stone with an acorn and then fools her with a simple sleight-of-hand trick?

It was my fondness of "Willow" that led me to track down a copy of "Shadow Moon" the colaboration between George Lucas and Chris Claremont, which continues the story more than a decade later. As a somewhat cynical type, I was prepared to be let down by it due to the fact that there seemed more hype around the names of the authors than the actual content of the book. And thus far I've been proved right.

The opening 100 pages seems both confusing and needlessly dark as the world has been shattered by the pretty common fantasy cataclysm. Willow is wandering about as an intinerant mage and under the assumed name of "Thorn Drumheller" and steeped in angst at the death of his loved ones.

The authors throw in muddled ideas and obscure terms as they please and characters sound terrible ("Saw what I saw, an' tha's a fack" is a pretty standardly mangled piece of dialogue). But while I could have expected such a mess from Lucas, who can't write dialogue to save his life, I would have expected more from Claremont who's bio proclaims him to be the man behind seventeen years of the X-Men and a novelist in his own right.

Maybe it'll get better as I read on, but I can't help but think that this is a good example of how being a romantic can lead you to spend your time reading some of the most awful crap out there.