Whoever still thinks that movies need intermissions is an idiot. There is no reason to have a movie long enough to need an intermission (LOTR included) and if a movie is actually good enough, you won’t even know the realize the time’s gone by, but Lawrence of Arabia apparently thinks it’s better than this logic because nothing is quite as exciting as watching a pasty face nutjob walk across sand for four hours. It’s like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade except it’s only Indy traversing the desert and instead of going after the Holy Grail he’s simply going back to his grandmother’s house because he forgot his jacket.
What Gandhi was to India, T. E. Lawrence was to Arabia except instead of preaching how violence wasn’t the answer, he simply said “I need lots of artillery,” to which I say “thank you! Now let’s spend the whole film not using them but watching you whine all the time about what the damn sun is doing to you.” Asshole. Originally sent to analyze the intentions of Prince Faisal, Lawrence (Peter O’Toole) became a military leader and Arab Council figurehead during the 1930’s war between the Arabs and the Turks. With no real military leadership experience, Lawrence used the “it’s so crazy it just might work” offensive…which we can either blame on too much sun or the fact that he was a few paper towels short of a turban. Of course, the film didn’t start out with this epic rise; it instead showed you how Lawrence died in “the least climactic death ever outside of choking on a sunflower seed,” by which I mean…he ran into a bush on his motorcycle.
The biggest problem that I had with Lawrence of Arabia wasn’t the length so much as the constant examples that the movie was just dragging things out for sheer laziness. Too many scenes occurred where someone was riding in from the desert or walking across the desert or a large group of people were walking across the desert that were quite literally 3-5 minutes of just the movement from one side of the screen to the other and not even the epic brass orchestra was there to keep you from falling asleep. I’m convinced that, if cut properly, this movie could have been half as long and you wouldn’t even need to change the plot synopsis on the Wikipedia page.
Anyway, it wasn’t until after the intermission that Arabia actually had some movement to it. Lawrence as a character stopped being such an overacting thespian and started finally being someone that had rational thoughts burn into his dried out brain. I don’t like that it took two and a half hours to actually start really enjoying this movie; under any other circumstance I would have turned this off and watched anything else…like Paint Drying…of Arabia. I appreciate that it looked epic every fucking chance it got but like Casino Royale yesterday overused gags to the point where they had no meaning, Lawrence of Arabia kind of did the same thing. It really gets the point across that the desert is a vast and desolate place but after a while I was half expecting to have the camera pass over an empty stretch of sand where someone wrote in “if you haven’t figured it out yet, the desert is a vast and desolate fucking place!”
Getting past the walking…and the walking…and the walking…and the fighting with Smeagol…oh wait, sorry…Lawrence of Arabia was actually a really good movie as far as its story. It follows practically the same exact formula as Gandhi, but Lawrence wasn’t really an interesting character and there just wasn’t enough to keep you interested so therefore, not nearly as good. Will I be watching this movie again? Probably not, but all things considered, I award Lawrence of Arabia 7 dustbusters out of 10.
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