Season Of The Witch

Looking back, book reviews are hard. I think I may avoid those in the future. For now, here's a movie!

Season of the Witch stars Nicholas Cage (Behmen von Bleibruck) and Ron Perlman (Felson) as knights of the Crusade who, in order to avoid punishment for deserting, agree to ferry a suspected witch to a local monastery for trial. Sufficed to say, things don't go as planned.

First off, I'm gonna go ahead and get this out of the way, since it goes through my head every time I think about the title:

"She's a WITCH! Burn her!"

You may be saddened to know there was little to no newt transformations going on here. There were plenty of other minor distractions that didn't hurt the film, but what kind of amateur critic would I be if I didn't complain about them anyway, amirite?

First off, as with most period pieces, everybody has some pretty nice looking teeth, especially for being the 14th century. We're talking blindingly bright white teeth here. There are several times when it seems like the director put out a memo that said something along the lines of "Even though we're all European types from the 1300's, don't waste your time trying to have some kind of accent." Nicholas Cage ignored this memo, and apparently went with a "pretentious American" accent. Regardless of whether there was a memo or not, Ron Perlman went ahead with a "Ron Perlman" accent.

It didn't bug me at the time, but the more I thought about it, the more I was confused. At one point in the movie, Nic Cage's character tells a joke involving how he and Perlman came to join the Templar army. The jist is that Felson was enticed by the promise of absolution of sin through service, and jokingly signs up for "10 years." The problem is the duo are threatened with a death sentence for desertion, but the timeline of the battles they're in goes from 1332 to 1344...which is more than 10 years.

Speaking of their epic battles and desertion, these battles are filled with tons of slow-mo hack and slash action, mixed with slightly sped up killing. And, it's during the battle of Smyrna in 1344 when Cage has his crisis of conscience and deserts after taking issue with the killing of so many innocents. I'd say it's pretty impressive to have fought for a dozen years or so and never killed an innocent. Almost makes you feel bad he ruined a good kill streak.

A couple of new things I learned:

• If you come across a plague-ridden homestead, you've lucked into some free horses. Good work.
• When someone draws a sword from your closed fist, if you're wearing gloves, it sounds exactly the same as a sword being drawn from a scabbard.
• Christopher Lee is f-old and looks terrible with a hairlip and giant head tumor. This may apply to more people than just Christopher Lee, but they weren't in this movie.
• Middle Ages doctors are creepy looking. I'm not sure who thought it would be a good idea to practice their craft while looking like a raven, but I'm glad they knocked that off.

Probably the best way to summarize this film is Lord of the Rings where the ring is a witch, the fellowship is about a quarter the size, the trip is waaaaay the hell shorter, Gollum looks a lot like Eagle-Eye Cherry, and all that extra in-between shit has been cut out so you don't have to clear your schedule for the next week and half to watch it. Regardless of all these issues, the movie was pretty OK. Nothing spectacular, but if you've got nothing better to watch, give Season of the Witch a  go. There are worse things you could do with an hour and a half. Though if you're close to curing cancer, I'd stick with the research.

Since this was my original plan for rating movies, it's only fitting that we start with one he's in. I give this movie 3 Ron Perlmans out of 5. I figure it's a good rating scale since it seems like he's in just about every movie, whether you realize it or not.

Chris

From My Playlist
	Artist:	The Decemberists
	Song:	Rox In The Box
	Album:	The King Is Dead