(c) Disney

Joining them in their task are Merlin (The Hours’ Stephen Dillane), here recast as a ‘master of the black arts’, which apparently entails wearing blue Braveheart make-up and standing around in the fog a lot, and one of his tribe, Guinevere (Pirates of the Caribbean’s Keira Knightley), who has received the most radical make-over of all: gone are the flowing gowns and ladylike trills of a Julie Andrews or Vanessa Redgrave. In their place is a primitive wild woman, running around with her bosoms tied down with leather straps and sporting tribal make-up right out of Quest for Fire; even more inexplicably, she joins the men in their fight, picking off Saxons left and right with a bow and arrow while the menfolk hardly bat an eye in protest of having a female in battle.

It’s all a rather trite exercise in hackneyed revisionism, with an unjustified, self-satisfied air of superiority over the ‘fairy tales’ that we’re all familiar with (and have enjoyed) over the years; but the fact of the matter, at least as far as this King Arthur goes, is blatantly clear: so-called ‘truth’ is not necessarily better then fiction.

Coming Soon in Toon Talk:

• Julie Andrews, Anne Hathaway and Hector Elizondo add another chapter to the diary in The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement, opening August 11^th.
• Mickey, Donald and Goofy are reunited for the video premiere of The Three Musketeers, an all-new animated feature coming to DVD August 17^th.
• Completing the Lion King trilogy on Special Edition DVD is The Lion King II: Simba’s Pride, available August 31^st.

And Coming Soon from Buena Vista Home Video:

July 13:

• The Barbarian Invasions, this year’s Oscar-winning Best Foreign Language Film.
• After Image, a crime thriller starring John Mellencamp and Louise Fletcher.
• The complete second season of Project: Greenlight, starring Holes’ Shia LaBeouf.

July 20:

• The two-disc Special Edition DVD of Lindsay Lohan’s Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen.
• People I Know, a political drama starring Al Pacino, Kim Basinger and Ryan O’Neal.

August 3:

• Hidalgo, the true-life adventure starring Viggo Mortensen and Omar Sharif.
• Just in time for the sequel, a two-disc Special Edition DVD of The Princess Diaries.
• Disney’s first foray into big budge science fiction, The Black Hole, is re-released, as are two literary thrillers, Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes and Florence Engal Randall’s The Watcher in the Woods.
• A young Sean Connery co-stars (and sings!), with Janet Munro and Albert Sharpe, in the classic Disney fantasy Darby O’Gill and the Little People.
• Robin Williams stars in Francis Ford Coppola’s take on the “adult-in-a-kid’s-body�? genre Jack, also starring Diane Lane, Jennifer Lopez and Bill Cosby.
• Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson co-star, along with Elijah Wood and Thora Birch, in the bittersweet drama Paradise.
• Wood also stars in the 1997 Wonderful World of Disney production of Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist.
• Another screen Fagin, Ron Moody, co-stars as Merlin in the space-age take on Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Unidentified Flying Oddball, also starring Jim Dale and Dennis Dugan.
• The coming-of-age drama Map of the Human Heart, starring Jason Scott Lee and Anne Parillaud.