hopscotchee: heath ledger score: 63.5 rating: pg-13 time: 132 minutes
woo wee mama!! holy calzone!! gosh darnie barnie!! what else can we say? straight up jjjeeeezzz!! like, after dark knight and brokeback mountain we 1000% deserved a happy heath ledger movie!! for real, why did we end batch 2 so rough? oh, right, because they were 'highly acclaimed movies' that's why. but you know what? we're gonna take the band-aid off. rip!! here it is, no matter how great a movie can be in all 'em categories, the better movie will always be the one you want to go back to. we said it!! that doesn't mean cinematically it's 100, but, you know, this is how the twilight saga got as far as they did. so, yes, as much as we loved watching dark knight and brokeback mountain for all the thingz, going bankrupt for tissue boxes is not our style, so we wanted to switch thingz up for batch 3 with a knight's tale.
you can thank our mom. literally. while we were sobbing our eye balls out of our sockets in her bed after watching brokeback mountain, she pulled up the trailer for this lil nugget of a film. instantly laughing from the cringe (sorry, just the gen z in us), this dramatic, but satirical, take on a medieval film was an immediate go-to-hop! so, yeah, thanks mom!!
and, to our pleasant surprise, this movie - that, sure, had some errors here and there - became an easy fav!! still grading it fairly, like always, we didn't take any points away from the poorly noticeable early 2000s green screen at the end. special effects and graphics are just a standard 'no touchy' because of course, anything not made today will look like crap even if it looked as real as gold once, just so you know. however, instead, this is what we will touch on...script, editing, and sound mixing.
despite being all behind the scenes, the lack of exposition in the script, heat flare exposure transitions, and clunky foleys still stuck out.
but, how can you get mad at batman begins for having too long of an exposition and then a knight's tale for having too little?? first of all, we're not mad. second of all, goldilocks. where batman begins took up too much time trying to fit every detail of backstory into their film, a knight's tale didn't take up enough time, leaving things up for question (spoiler) like 'how did the commoners know the knight who died?' 'how did the knight die?' and 'why was it worth breaking the law to enter the competition'. even though later in the story you get to know more of the characters' motives and reasonings, this created a disconnect from the story for a while, leaving you less emerged in the plot at the beginning. and yes, this luckily didn't stay consistent, but it was still enough to delay your engagement. you may think this is picky, but as much as slow movies can be a struggle bus for a viewer, so can shotgun starts to movies too.
next, you might be thinking what the h.e.c.k is a heat flare exposure transition? something very specific to the early oughts. that, unlike special effects, since we call out fades and cross dissolves all the time in other films, the heat flare exposure transition doesnt' get spared. ESPECIALLY because they use it - not once but - twice in this movie!! it's a pretty big oof. not even using it to transition between two scenes, the bright, warm, flash-dissolve is an eye-sore when placed in the middle of someone getting hit or falling to serve as a 'smooth?' cut away?? well, nice try, but it wasn't smooth. causing some disorientation in the middle of the fast action in fight scenes, it felt bulky to the typical quick, action-shots that we had been seeing before.
and the last thing is quick. sound mixing. too many foleys, although to dramatize the film, seemed a little outlandish. for just one example, (spoiler) an easy punch to the head sounded like a shattered skull. maybe this was intended to be comical, but it did make it feel a little jarring.
that said, even tho it didn't score the highest, we still think of it highly. and some films do that. so whether you go to watch a movie like this or even watch this exact one, don't think for one second that just because it wasn't up for an academy award, it's bad. and seriously, if you had the choice to watch a sad movie with heath ledger (may he rest peacefully) or a happy, adventure where he plays a charming knight who can wink perfectly. PERFECTLY!! which one are you gonna choose? cuz we choose the perfect wink ;) over the perfect score!!
-- thanks, heath xo
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