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The Standard of the Black Knight
“The Black Knight always triumphs!” I should probably say “spoilers ahead,” even though the movie is 44 years old. Also, those of you looking for transcendent inspiration should go elsewhere.
We open with King Arthur traveling through the forest, where he encounters the Black Knight. This massive warrior is guarding a ridiculously tiny bridge over a minute, apparently dry brook. As the scene opens, the Black Knight dispatches an adversary after a ferocious battle. The King naturally asks him to join the knights of the round table, only to be met with stony silence. Arthur tries to proceed, but the knight blocks his passage with a thunderous “None shall pass” and the fight is on.
Arthur quickly lops off the knight’s left arm, but Blackie refuses to give up. He continues to attack and the King eventually severs all his limbs. Even so, he taunts Arthur: “Come back here and I’ll bite your legs off.”
The group I hung out with in college were fanatics about Monty Python and the Holy Grail and quoted lines from the movie ad nauseum. Any physical mishap on the intramural courts or fields would be met with a stoic “’tis but a flesh wound,” or “I’ve had worse” from the injured player. Our defensive line in football would chant “None shall pass.” (With about as much effectiveness as the original. I think we won one intramural football game in the two years I played.) Taunts from the opposing team would be met with “What are you going to do, bleed on me?;” and, as inevitably happened, we were getting our rears handed to us, someone would pipe up with “Okay, we’ll call it a draw.”
I’ll bet most of the frat boys and business majors who played against us thought we were nuts. Even so, in this supposedly enjoyable activity, we always seemed to have more fun losing than they did winning.
This also gave me a lifelong standard for judging movies. If your supposed masterpiece doesn’t have as many memorable lines as this one scene, it’s not quite up there in the Pantheon.
Published in Humor
Speaking of the nexus of comedy, violence, and video games:
“But society’s to blame!”
“We’ll be chargin’ them, too!”
The hand gestures are key.
Because you’re spelling it wrong.
“It’s people like you what cause unrest.”
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“Can’t I have just a little bit of peril?”
“Too perilous!”
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“I like Chinese. They’re cute and they’re cuddly and they’re ready to please.”
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“Do any of these words embarrass you? Shoe. Megaphone. Grunties.”
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“Look, this isn’t an argument. It’s just contradiction.”
“No, it isn’t.”
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“And each night our mommy and daddy would kill us and dance on our graves, singing ‘Allelujah!'”
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“We don’t get Buddhists blowing bagpipes in our bathrooms or Hindus harmonizing in the halls. You don’t hear Shintos shattering sheetglass in the… “
Mr. Blutarsky. Zero. Point. Zero.
My daughter was learning the major rivers of Asia, so I started singing, “We love the Yangtze, Yangtze Kiang…”
If you’re including quotable movie quotes you cant forget “Waynes World”:
Of all the SNL Alumni movies I think the first Wayne’s World movie is the best of them.
I grew up with Wayne and Garth — to the extent that I can be said to have grown up at all.
@arahant would probably agree.
Would you count Blues Brothers as an SNL Alumni movie? They weren’t a bit on the show but I think they did perform as a musical guest once.
Ok, You have a point there, I forgot about the Blues Brothers – only the first one.
There weren’t any others. Just like there are only three Indian Jones movies, and only Two Terminator movies. I guess in some possible distopian parallel dimension there could be others, but we live in the good time line, right?
There was a sequel, Blues Brothers 2000. (1998) If you havent seen it. Dont. OIC what you did here… I am just off the graveyard shift.
Big Bang Theory ruined Indiana Jones for me… Havent watched it since that episode…
Big Bang Theory on Indiana Jones:
The Chinese dialogue scene….
The criticism is completely true, but think about the lesson one can learn as a filmmaker: you can have a story with all sorts of problems, and the movie going audience just won’t care, so long as the characters are likable and memorable, the motivations of the characters are always clear, and the action sequences are edited so that the audience always knows what’s going on and why.
The amazing thing is how few moviemakers manage to grasp that.
It sure is, and I would never have thought of it on my own. I would never have examined the movie that closely.
Yeah, but see… the Maltese Falcon was just lead. It was the Black McGuffin. Just as the Lost Ark was the Golden McGuffin. And Cow Farts is the Green McGuffin. It’s all about the heroes.
Nope. Amy Farrah Fowler gets it ALL wrong! Indy is only in position to take the ark after the Nazis are all melted because: a) He chose not to destroy it, while b) trying to save Marion (“That all depends on how reasonable we can be; I just want the girl.”) Indy is rewarded in his quest to recover the ark precisely because his causes are higher.
Bottom line: Indy wins the ark AND gets the girl. PERFECT!
This is an interesting criticism of the movie, but like all glib millennial takes on classic movies it is witty but wrong.
It is true the Nazis who open the ark would die without Jones there, but without him being there and surviving who would reclaim the ark? The Nazis. Who would then get a second and third chance to figure out how to use it. Dr. Jones prevents this by taking the arc away from them. Without Jones there the ending shot isn’t some guy pushing the box with the ark in a US storage depot to be lost to the bureaucracy. It is Red Skull standing over the remains of Dr. Belloq saying “This defeat will be the father of future victories, Hail Hydra…” or something like that.
“I went to a hypnotist to get me to forget the Star Wars prequels. It didn’t work. I still remember both of them.”
There is a magic potion you can drink that will help you forget them. It’s called bleach.
Hot Rod.
Or even Anchorman, for my money.