Word: boorman
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EXCALIBUR Directed by John Boorman Screenplay by Rospo Pallenberg and John Boorman...
...soldered to the everyday. When a film attempts to soar into the oneiric, with voluptuous imagery and italicized feelings, it is likely to be grounded by those air-traffic controllers of popular culture, the critics. Excalibur is such a film. Viewers are advised to decide for themselves if John Boorman's retelling of the Arthurian romance is a dove or a dodo...
...Boorman set himself a task only slightly less daunting than the search for the Holy Grail: to tell, in 140 minutes, the epic of Arthur, Guenevere and the Knights of the Round Table. He has a millennium of tough acts to follow: Malory and Tennyson and Tolkien, Wagner and Lerner and Loewe. On screen in the '70s, George Lucas set the story in space (Star Wars); Robert Bresson made it austere (Lancelot of the Lake), and six English cutups made it funny (Monty Python and the Holy Grail) But Boorman has never been cowed by precedent or expectations...
...followed, but Boorman has not clipped his wings with Excalibur: it is extravagantly conceived, and it sprints like a deer through the thickets of legend...
Compared with Boorman, the other two major mannerists of the English cinema -Joseph Losey and Ken Russell-look like a pair of sensible shoes...