FlamingText

Barbarian Love

  So I'm sitting at home after rehearsal on Saturday when the phone rings. It's Emperor Norton:
"You want to go see a midnight movie of Conan the Barbarian at the Egyptian tonight?"
"Hell yes."

   Because what else am I going to say? I had mostly fond, though admittedly vague memories of the movie. Fond memories dating from the point in my life when I would gladly pay cash money to see any movie that featured a protagonist who wore a loincloth and wielded a sword. The fact that Arnold Schwarzenegger couldn't act and barely seemed able to speak English wasn't really a problem, because he didn't really have do a lot of acting in this movie. He just had to wave a sword and look scary, which was pretty much a slam-dunk. *

   As it turns out, Mr. Norton knows the dialogue and narration of this movie by heart. I know this because on the way to the theatre he was reciting it with perfectly reproduced accent and inflection. It didn't really strike me as all that strange. I mean, if it was the Music Man or something that would be weird. Anyway, after a brief, fully narrated walk in the rain, Mr. Norton, Mr. Galt and myself found ourselves in the Egyptian (located in what appears to be an old Masonic Hall) at midnight, surrounded by a packed house of drunken nerds* , listening to the bombastic, distorted strains of Basil Poledouris' score as Mako narrates in solemn tones about of "Age of High Adventure."

   Now I know I always say that I'm not going to review a movie and then I go ahead and say a bunch of stuff about it until it basically amounts to a de facto review, but I'm not going to do that this time. If you're the sort of person who would enjoy a movie like Conan the Barbarian, I trust you to know that about yourself. Nothing I could say will change that one way or the other. But what I will do is describe my favorite part of the movie. It goes by so quickly that it's easy to miss, which is probably why I didn't remember it from years ago when I last saw it. It's in the middle of the sex montage.

   At this point in the movie Conan has encountered Valeria, who is a warrior- woman and a badass. She is played by Sandahl Bergman, looking an awful lot like a very buff, oiled Lita Ford. She and Conan are clearly made for each other. They like all the same things: Robbing, pillaging, swordfighting and slaughtering the minions of Thulsa Doom. It's a match made in barbarian heaven! * So after stealing an enormous jewel from the Temple of the Serpent they get drunk together and end up in some kind of boudoir (it may actually be a tent) surrounded by candles and braziers, getting down to business on a giant bearskin rug.

   The scene starts out about how you'd expect. Like every scene in this movie the camera lingers rather lovingly on Arnold's taut and burnished musculature, although this scene spends a little more time on his taut and burnished ass than many of the others. As with any sex montage in an R-rated movie of the era there are a lot of fades between cuts of entangled firelit bodies, the actors arching their backs and making sex faces, and slow pans upwards into the flickering candle light that gradually go out of focus. Standard issue stuff. And then, right in the middle of the montage, there is a shot of Conan and Valeria, sitting next to each other on that same bearskin rug, eating a whole chicken. They are just gnawing on big ol' hunks of chicken bone right there in bed with no plates or silverware or napkins or anything. Because they're barbarians! And sometimes, to keep their strength up, barbarians have to eat a chicken in bed. That's just how they roll.

And then they go right back to fucking.

  Like I said, it went by pretty fast, and I wasn't sure if I had just seen what I thought I had just seen. Sometimes I imagine things. So I leaned over and asked the Emperor:
"Was that a chicken? Did they just eat a chicken?"
"Yes. Yes they did."
"Huh. You know, you don't see a lot of that. I mean, in regular movies."

  The next week I went with Krebsy to see the symphony. This has nothing to do with Conan, I'm just mentioning it to show how I like to mix it up. I go between highbrow and lowbrow so fast sometimes, I'm worried I'll get the bends! It can't be helped.

Nobody at the symphony ate a chicken. There was no sex montage. In case you were wondering.

Posted by flamingbanjo at February 21, 2007 12:45 AM