[Memnoch]

Gladiator (OK, I know, not really fantasy). For swordplay, can't go past Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Here's a review of the AD&D movie from MrCranky.


In the review that ran in my local newspaper, Bob Thomas of the Associated Press describes Dungeons & Dragons as a board game. This sort of comment should give people pause in thinking of film critics as journalists, which is a word I consider an insult in the first place. Journalists are basically the scum who couldn't make it in the real writing classes. However, imagining that couchbound, donut-inhaling Bob couldn't even lift up his hand to spend all of five seconds to find out that D&D isn't a board game really brings new meaning to the words "lazy, fat, haven't seen my genitals without a handheld mirror in the last twenty years, bastard." You know, if you're going to belittle something, get your facts straight. As we all know, Dungeons & Dragons is played with life-size dolls by participants wearing adult diapers.
Apparently, the director of this film, Courtney Solomon, has spent the last ten years of his life trying to get this film made. Given the timelines of his little crusade, one wonders whether his next project, "Pet Rock: The Movie" will ever get off the ground. This movie contains writing so bad that it forces normal people to curse God for allowing human communication to even exist. The acting is so bad that one assumes that the actors were all separated from each other and forced to stand in front of a green screen and pretend there was stuff going on. This combination is the Hollywood equivalent of farting into an open flame -- it all seems kind of harmless until you realize the effect feels exactly like being sodomized by the Heat Miser.

Do actors even read scripts anymore? How did Jeremy Irons end up in this thing? He plays the evil Profion, who's trying to take over Empress Savina's (Thora Birch) kingdom by getting control of dragons. Almost every emotional scene Irons does is accompanied by putting both hands up in the air and waving them around for dramatic effect. Thora Birch is so bad that I actually felt glad for her having taken off her shirt in "American Beauty", else this would certainly spell the end of her career. She runs around cooing about making everybody in her kingdom equal and then, when she wins the fight in the end (big surprise), she pronounces everybody equal. "You're all equal," she says. For his part, Justin Whalin, who plays the hero-thief Ridley, uses the dramatic head turn to simulate despair as well as any porno actor who has ever walked the planet. When things get really bad for him, he drops to his knees and screams "Noooooo!" at the top of his lungs, as though he'd just discovered that somebody had taken a dump in his Chalupa.

Funny, that was exactly the same reaction I had when I heard this movie was coming out.


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