The Last Of Robin Hood
By Ian Brockway
The directing duo of Wash Westmoreland and Richard Glatzer (The Fluffer, Quinceañera) have a definite compelling swashbuckler on their hands with wonderful production design, yet the handling is just a little too fluffy.
“The Last of Robin Hood” stars a verbally agile Kevin Kline as the great, egotistical star with the rapier mustache, Errol Flynn.
Flynn is, if not at his twilight era, definitely seasoned in years here at 1958. The libertine actor has fallen in love with a presumed 18 year old jejune girl with Kim Novak cat eyes, one Beverly Aadland (Dakota Fanning).
Flynn spies the girl from afar on the studio lot and gets her to audition for a play. He is instantly smitten. Dinner and some libidinous poking follow.
Alas, whatever Errol wants, Errol gets.
Beverly is shaken up, then begins to enjoy the attention.
Beverly’s scattered yet obsessive mother (Susan Sarandon) encourages the affair.
Abruptly, the girl rebuffs and aloofly taunts the dashing if aging man. Flynn becomes incensed and driven in amorous conquest.
Kevin Kline is authentic, jittery, dilapidated and dashing as Flynn. And, he has the right tone and repartee with the best lines. The slickness of the film moves a bit too fast and gives this amorally compelling figure more speed than space and more glancing parry instead of sharp poignance.
We seem to see only a shade of Flynn, at times air fencing and doing spins. If only there was more glue to his ghost.
The production values are spectacular. The cinematography is facile with its fluid camera that moves in sweeping arcs reminiscent of the film “Hitchcock.” There are shimmering champagne dresses, cream colored cars, brown sweaters, fresh faced high school kids and swishing skirts swirled in the laughter of lipstick, scotch and cigarettes.
Dakota Fanning is satisfactory even though she feels slight and a bit blank with not much emotional range. She invariably fixes the screen with a large eyed feline “come hither” pout.
Susan Sarandon is fine here. too, but her voice-over interspersed throughout, goes over heavy and makes some tension seem like an hour TV movie. At one point, when she throws rocks at the window saying, “I’ll get you, you punks!” it feels like a serialized melodrama without much gusto.
Still, Kline saves the day. He is complete in this role, despite having only a peppering of earthy entrances with depth to his part, aside from being the arrogant Casanova.
One interesting element is the aspect of Errol Flynn as Humbert Humbert, chasing his Lolita from the reaches of Africa, to the sunlit surf of Cuba. Flynn risked all to remain virile, beyond the law, and on top of fame, but his unrestrained lust for teenage girls became a Faustian bargain, abruptly rescinded. It seems Kubrick did not know what to make of an overzealous and leathery Flynn or for that matter his vacuous, kewpie doll love.
“The Last of Robin Hood” is deeply evocative of its period, but the all too rolling swiftness treats all drama with a sugary coloring book fizz. Kline pops in with verve and bravado, but at last, the distinctive and looping curl on his lip that turns a questioning dare into a smile, looks like a Sharpie Ultrafine marker rather than a genuine detail of a life once lived in a black bottom pool
Land Ho!
Here is a road comedy co-directed by Aaron Katz (Cold Weather) and produced by David Gordon Green (Pineapple Express) about two older men who are also former brothers- in-law and lifelong friends.
While it is light on pathos, it is a kind of microscopic study in friendship. With only a few minimal touches similar to calligraphy, you do get a sense of these men.
Like a film employing a visual sleight of hand, “Land Ho!” is more than the sum of its parts. The film was shot with Red One cameras in order to better capture a minute fly-on-the wall feeling, rich in subtle unobtrusive gestures. The effect works, producing a swift and breezy account of an uncomfortable idyll in progress.
Mitch (Earl Lynn Nelson) is a doctor, who is part John Wayne, part Santa Claus. He is sex-obsessed. When his emotionally-reserved friend, Colin (Paul Eenhoorn) gets divorced, Mitch tells his friend that they are about to go on a “get-your-groove back” vacation.
But where? Miami Beach? Las Vegas? The Hamptons?
No, Iceland.
Colin is aghast. Surely Mitch can’t be serious?
Fear not. “Land Ho!” is no cornball version of “The Bucket List”. Instead, in the manner of a short New Yorker biographical sketch we see these people as they truly behave in public and private.
The melancholy Colin sees meaning and anxiety in a mixed media assemblage at a gallery, while Mitch only sees a physical sexuality. Art is merely porn to excite him.
Mitch and Colin go to the airport in Reykjavik to pick up Mitch’s cousin, Ellen (Karrie Crouse) and her girlfriend Janet (Elizabeth McKee). Horny devil Mitch lasciviously and creepily leers at the women as if they are bait on a hook, and the two girls attempt to flee to the bathroom.
In a pot and alcohol haze, the two go to a disco, where they are kicked to the curb, by the younger ladies. Colin and Mitch become prey to sluggish boredom, rapid nonsensical speech and a youth culture that is patronizing and chock full of little elements that they can’t understand.
Mitch’s earthy sour-ball joy keeps Colin’s Low-T fiesta from sinking beyond reach.
The two actors play off well together, having a light bounce that is irrepressible. Earl Lynn Nelson is a riot in his inappropriateness and blunt free associations that hover close to a snickering offensiveness. Mitch is a teenager in a baby boomer’s wrinkled body, a hopeless pothead prone to anxiety, while there is a juicy leap when the shy and awkward Colin feels the warmth of a Canadian kiss with the softly sensual Nadine (mosaic artist Alice Olivia Clarke).
As if to take a cue from PBS’ “East Enders,” these vignettes prove brief sketchy, and so pastel in texture that they might just slip under the eyelids.
Then in a clap, the episodes turn compact and form a whole, where the arc of a friendship can suddenly be seen like randy rockets from a hot spring: A septuagenarian geyser of steamy vapors which in a final jolt, form the shapes of two.
Write Ian at [email protected]
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