"And I suddenly remembered my Charlemagne..."

[tree_and_leaf]

Last night I watched Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, in German, which is a curious experience. The dubbing is fairly well done, but there are a few changes of emphasis - the most obvious being the scene where Indy and his dad have been captured in the Austrian castle, Ilsa kisses him, with the words 'That's how we say goodbye in Austria', and the SS bloke says 'And this is how we say goodbye in Germany', and hits him. In the German, he says something like 'This is how the SS says goodbye.'

It's such a splendid film, though - and the rather free way it handles mediaeval history and literature (not to mention geography!) is not inappropriate, given the myriad sources from which the various versions of the Grail legend coalesced. (Although I admit I am biased in favour of a film in which mediaevalism is represented by Sean Connery!) Theologically, it's a lot better than one might expect.

Am going to see the new film on Wednesday night; have very low expectations, but after two hours of an academic planning meeting, I'm sure it can't fail to be an improvement on that

Comments

[bookwormsarah.livejournal.com]

I watched The Last Crusade (in English) last night, and was having thoughts about the geography of things. When they catch the airship, do we know the destination? At one point I thought they were going to the USA to head back to north Africa... I was also trying to work out where they crashlanded...

Fantastic film though, and I am really excited about the new one. It has been 'in production' for so long (I remember it when I first bought SFX back in about 1994) that I doubted it would actually happen.

Hmm, I no longer have an archaeology icon...

[tree_and_leaf]

I can't work out the geography at all. 'Hatay' seems to be unable to decide whether it's in north Africa or Asia Minor (which would be more plausible) - but how they managed to crash there, as I think is implied, in an airship from Berlin, beats me. I don't think we were ever explicitly told where the airship was heading, though.