Heroic Dreams - All Things Medieval

Epic fantasy can be a difficult thing to translate over to television. For that matter it can be a difficult thing to translate over to the big screen. There have been some big successes and also some big failures. So, what is one of the early indicators of whether or not a movie or tv series in the genre will be good? You can get a good clue by who they are casting to act in it.
Well, HBO has given the green light to producing a series based on A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin which is the first book in the Song of Ice and Fire series. This is simply one of the best fantasy series ever written (It made my top five list).

Ok, about the cast

The cast is in place and it has some pretty heavy hitters. Sean Bean, who played Boromir in Lord of the Rings will play the lead role of Eddard Stark, and the role of Queen Cersei, will be played by Lena Headey who starred in 300 Opposite Gerard Butler. These are some big hitters and you really couldn’t ask for any better than that.

This is not going to be a light hearted epic fantasy romp. It is going to be adult fare which makes sense because that is what the books are. They are well written and very deep with lots and lots of political intrigue and a whole boat load of cloak and dagger stuff.  There is a lot of buzz about this series and they are saying it could be one of the best that HBO has produced.

This series could bring the genre of fantasy a long way.  They have a great cast in place and it is rumored that the network spent between 5 and 10 million on the pilot. This is something that I am really looking forward to it and here is a quote from HBO programming chief Michael Lombardo “The fantasy is so incidental, it has a very adult tone. You forget it’s fantasy while you’re watching it, and that’s what I love about it.”

The first installment of the series is predicted to air somewhere around March or April of 2011.

I got an email from a cartoonist (gruhn) who has a website called webdonuts. He does daily single frame cartoons that are a real hoot and reminiscent of the old Gary Larson Far Side stuff - same kind of zany humor. Anyway he did a Medieval Comic that he thought I would like to share with my readers. He was right.

You can check out more webdonuts on his site at: Webdonuts.com

I received a press release about an interesting new book that is coming out in July

Here is the release:

“I’ll be honest, I see a lot of people join because their real life sucks. You can come here and be anybody.”

–Lord Duncan the Monster

Whether they’re bored office stiffs, housewives, or disgruntled war vets, the armor-clad members of the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA) like to get beat up the old-fashioned way. Boasting more than 30,000 members worldwide, and over 16 “Kingdoms” in the United States alone, the eclectic eccentrics of the SCA participate in a variety of rigorous medieval battle simulations. Suburban Knights is a series of portraits of these 21st-century warriors, in costume and in character as their knightly alter egos.
 
From 2003 to 2005, internationally renowned photographer E. F. Kitchen photographed and interviewed the fighters of the SCA on location at their battles. Kitchen’s unique approach dispensed with technologically sophisticated cameras, and she instead used a tripod-mounted, 8×10 bellows camera with exclusively handmade and antique lenses. The results are appropriately hoary, sepia-tone images of these fierce warriors lost in time.
 
Suburban knights willfully escape from the 21st-century and into the realm of the SCA, where one can come face to face with the formidable armor and lance of a knight calling himself “Nissan Maxima.” Warriors are icons for an idealistic code of behavior extolling power and virtue. The men and women of the SCA capture a bit of this past glory for themselves, and while a majority of the portraits obscure the faces of these knights, under their thick armor, their features couldn’t be made clearer.
 
E.F. Kitchen’s photographs are included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art among others. Her work has been published in books including The Greatest Alum Covers That Never Were (Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, 2003), and Flora Photographica (Simon & Schuster, 1991), as well as periodicals such as the Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Angeles Magazine, and View Camera. She is based in Venice, CA.

Leo Braudy is a professor, and the author of From Chivalry to Terrorism (Vintage, 2005), and The Frenzy of Renown (Vintage, 1997), among other books. He is also the coeditor of the Film Theory and Criticism anthology. His most recent book is On the Waterfront (British Film Institute, 2008) in the BFI Film Classics series, and he is currently working on a book about the intertwined history of Hollywood and the Hollywood sign

This book is available for pre-order on Amazon.com: Suburban Knights: A Return to the Middle Ages (Powerhouse Books)