I put this on at midnight last night. I've been reading Arnold's 2012 bio, "Total Recall," and I'm fascinated. It's a fucking phenomenal read. I'm about halfway through when he's talking about shooting Conan and I just had to watch it. The background info was just too much. I had to see it again.
Last time I watched Conan was probably 25 years ago. I tried watching it a few months ago and turned it off after 10 minutes. I just wasn't in the mood. But for whatever reason, last night I was ready to roll.
Here's the thing, I fucking love all things Conan, and I grew up a Schwarzenegger fan (how can you not when you came of age in the 80's). But at 35...I just wasn't into the campiness of Ahnold's shitty 'acting' in this flick. When you hold a character close to your heart it's almost impossible for the film version to hold up. However, we know it can be done b/c Sin City is quite literally a PERFECT cinematic version of the comic. So that's the bar. It's way high. Like, WAY UP THERE.
So I let my guard down and watched Conan. It was okay. I was surprised by how few speaking parts Arnie actually had. He rarely puts more than two sentences together at any given time. But I liked all his references to Crom.
It was cool to figure out which stories they had cobbled the plot from. It's neat to understand some of the back story re: Milius's directing. It's cool to see William Smith and Franco Columbu. There's a lot of history involved in the flick. But it's not a movie I'm going to keep coming back to. The tension isn't really there. It's a pale shadow of the comics or the original stories. Meh.
It was better than I thought it was gonna be. But it wasn't as good as it could have been by a long shot.
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