Werewolves! Karate! Frilly Shirts!
Jul. 10th, 2004 12:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
malsperanzaWho here has seen the French movie Brotherhood of the Wolf? Anyone? I am in love! It is my new favorite B movie. It somehow manages to have nearly everything I love in a B movie, all mooshed together.
1) Set in the late 18th c. This means:
a) Men with long hair in queues, which they can then pull loose and shake. I love it when men do this quintessentially feminine thing.
b) Frilly shirts, tricorne hats... tricorne hats in the rain, great big wigs, long leather duster coats with big cuffs and sweeping skirts; and of course the all-important tall leather boots with cuffed tops.
c) Galloping on horseback; galloping on horseback in the rain.
d) Chateaux, torchlight. Bach in the soundtrack.
e) Borzois.
2) Martial arts
a) Hard to explain how a movie set in 1770s rural France and involving folklore, the Legend of the Beast, corrupt Catholics, satanism, incest, and shape-changing can also include a lot of kung fu (some of it nearly naked, yay, and some in frilly shirts and tricorne hats, double yay). But it does, and I am happy.
b) Also, kung fu with exotic weapons such as singlesticks, two-pronged garden implements, snaky swordy things.
c) Body paint and tats. Again, how this fits into 18th-c France is a little hard to follow, but nevermind.
d) Kung fu in the rain.
3) Gorgeous landscapes, often bleak and wintry, or fogbound and shimmering with silver and green lights, or silent and filled with the whispers of an animate Nature, watching. Also meadows at twilight; meadows at twilight in the rain. Also, slo-mo of horse hoofs splashing through same. And small flocks of birds flying up suddenly into sunlight.
4) Rain This does not require explanation.
The plot? Oh, the plot is something about a werewolf or something that is killing people in rural France. There is a lot of fancy stuff about the Enlightenment vs. the Dark and Ancient Forces of Nature, and the Ancien Regime vs. the Spirit of the New (i.e. looming French Rev), and Rationalism vs. the Old Ways, when humans and animals understood one another, and so on. There is a bit of a love story, and ample slash in the subtext. There is the wonderful Vincent Cassel, little known in the US (unless you saw him as Camille Desmoulins in the otherwise wretched "Jefferson in Paris"). And there is the veryverypretty Mark Dacascos, doing his veryverypretty thang. But really, who cares about the plot?
1) Set in the late 18th c. This means:
a) Men with long hair in queues, which they can then pull loose and shake. I love it when men do this quintessentially feminine thing.
b) Frilly shirts, tricorne hats... tricorne hats in the rain, great big wigs, long leather duster coats with big cuffs and sweeping skirts; and of course the all-important tall leather boots with cuffed tops.
c) Galloping on horseback; galloping on horseback in the rain.
d) Chateaux, torchlight. Bach in the soundtrack.
e) Borzois.
2) Martial arts
a) Hard to explain how a movie set in 1770s rural France and involving folklore, the Legend of the Beast, corrupt Catholics, satanism, incest, and shape-changing can also include a lot of kung fu (some of it nearly naked, yay, and some in frilly shirts and tricorne hats, double yay). But it does, and I am happy.
b) Also, kung fu with exotic weapons such as singlesticks, two-pronged garden implements, snaky swordy things.
c) Body paint and tats. Again, how this fits into 18th-c France is a little hard to follow, but nevermind.
d) Kung fu in the rain.
3) Gorgeous landscapes, often bleak and wintry, or fogbound and shimmering with silver and green lights, or silent and filled with the whispers of an animate Nature, watching. Also meadows at twilight; meadows at twilight in the rain. Also, slo-mo of horse hoofs splashing through same. And small flocks of birds flying up suddenly into sunlight.
4) Rain This does not require explanation.
The plot? Oh, the plot is something about a werewolf or something that is killing people in rural France. There is a lot of fancy stuff about the Enlightenment vs. the Dark and Ancient Forces of Nature, and the Ancien Regime vs. the Spirit of the New (i.e. looming French Rev), and Rationalism vs. the Old Ways, when humans and animals understood one another, and so on. There is a bit of a love story, and ample slash in the subtext. There is the wonderful Vincent Cassel, little known in the US (unless you saw him as Camille Desmoulins in the otherwise wretched "Jefferson in Paris"). And there is the veryverypretty Mark Dacascos, doing his veryverypretty thang. But really, who cares about the plot?
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Date: 2004-07-11 10:51 am (UTC)loves them both. Leslie Howard! But Merle Oberon wasn't a match for him.