Though the first entry has already been posted, I still thought I should throw up a quick explanation of what this whole (Bad) Medieval Movie Club thing is about. ((And I’ll be backdating this post so that it doesn’t knock Thor off the top of the page just yet, so it’s almost like I did explain at the appropriate time. Future historians will, hopefully, look only at the post date and not the footnotes.)) So here we go.
This blog has long been situated comfortably on the margin between the groves of Proper Tweed-Jacket-with-Leather-Elbow-Patches ((Where does one get good elbow patches these days, I ask you? The academic’s cross is heavy and lonely.)) Academe and the Snark-Infested Waters of The Internet Beyond, and rather than push it further one way or the other, I intend to let it continue occupying that cozy niche. But, as I have been reminded of late, the Old Guy On The Porch in his Pajamas Yelling Profanities into his Keyboard model ((Apropos, the schoolboy’s rhyming mnemonic: ‘When one metaphor just won’t do / Take a chance and mix up two.’)) of blogging is not long sustainable and, thankfully, no longer the preferred mode.
Happily, this reminder has come less from my late unpleasantness and more from the pleasure I’ve had working with others on collaborative projects, such as the still often-linked Robin Hood review and my recent academic paper on medieval blogging ((Called, imaginatively, ‘On Medieval Blogging’, but if you follow the link you may find it’s buried inaccessible behind a paywall, alas.)) written with Brantley Bryant, the Tweed Jacket behind Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog. I intend the (Bad) Medieval Movie Club as a way to get my collaborate on and perhaps to shore up the fragile sense of community this blog has managed to enkindle in spite of my previous efforts.
Right. Enough preamble. (Bad) Medieval Movie Club will meet irregularly on Fridays. Irregularly, because I know better than to promise I’ll have an entry ready once a week, and because if I actually met a weekly target Got Medieval would be quickly drift until it became Got Medieval Movies (and a couple of monkeys), and nobody wants that to happen. I imagine it will end up in a sustainable gray area between every two weeks and once a month.
Each however-often-it-is, I’ll be teaming up with someone to tear into and tear down ((And possibly other prepositions attached to tear, who knows?)) a sufficiently medieval movie. But I don’t know who all the someones will be, and half the point is finding new ones in places I didn’t think to look. When I cast out feelers some months back, I asked for co-reviewers who have some reasonable claim to fame as either a funny person, a blogger, or a medievalist. I should expand the list to include people connected in some way to the Internet’s vast array of bad movie commentary–though, obviously, I’m not expecting the Floppers, the Agony Boothistas, the Red Letter guys, or the Angry Nerds of the world to beat a path to my door just yet, but that well is vaster and deeper than the most famous exemplars.
So if you think you have what it takes to collaborate on a movie review, and you have some combination of those qualifications or some other that I’ve not thought of, I want to hear from you. Use the comment form at the top of the page, or email this blog’s gmail account, whose alias is, imaginatively, gotmedieval. Just introduce yourself and (this is most important) what movie you’d like to talk about. Pitch me! I certainly have a lot of possibilities in mind, but that well, too, is vast and deep, and I’d rather be surprised by something off the beaten path that goes through left field than worry about my personal checklist. If you do have a blog or bloglike platform, I’ll happily split the review in two and host half at your site. ((Traffic here’s not always stable, but it might even prove a useful source of new eyeballs for you.)) The format will be the same as with Bettina and Thor, a staged back-and-forth that, I promise, will contain a decreasing number of self-reflexive jokes at the format’s expense the more entries accrue.
So far, I have tentative offers (and a couple firmer commitments) from people to discuss A Knight’s Tale, Beyond Sherwood Forest, Ironclad, and Timeline. Nothing’s calendered, and nothing’s set in stone, so that ground floor getting in on chance you hear so much about these days is still a possibility.
And even if you don’t want to tackle a medieval movie with me, please do feel free to join in the comments fray when the humiliated effigies of the tackled movies are paraded before you. As I’ve said already, (Bad) Medieval Movie Club is meant to be a club. Two people talking to each other, however wittily and incisively, isn’t really much of a club, and I don’t want to have to come up with a new name for this post series. ((♣ Reynard says, “Get medieval savings with Barnes and Noble coupon codes on the books of these movies.”))