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Film: The Last Musketeer
Mar. 6th, 2025 12:56 pmMy mother used to be very keen on keeping physical media. Less so these days, as she lives in a smaller space. Consequently, she handed over her boxes of DVDs to my discretion, and since I only have slightly more space, they are stacked out of the way and I can only go through them one at a time. It is a hodgepodge of her particular interests:
BBC and other British productions. Some comedy collections (Fawlty Towers, Python, Jeeves and Wooster), lots of Acorn Media.
Anything set in particularly northern climates (Iceland, Scotland, Scandinavia and so on). Crime thrillers, romance, survival, fantasy - any genre if there's potential snow on the ground.
Foreign films, which I suspect will mostly be from Europe or the middle and far east.
Horror. Hammer Films, grindhouse, American Werewolf in London, The Thing.
Costume dramas. Might be some Merchant Ivory. Adaptations of classic literature.
A small selection of classic Hollywood. I glimpsed All About Eve and a Joan Crawford film.
A random assemblage of sci fi TV shows. First season of The X-Files and Carnivale. Season 3 & 4 of Lexx. Dead Like Me (which she tried to get me to watch years ago and I bounced off it hard). Kolchak. Odyssey 5.
So this will keep me occupied in some of my endless evenings. Giving it a try, I began with The Last Musketeer, a Scottish Television movie starring Robson Green (who I spent the entire film thinking of as discount Jason Isaacs, but he's a big deal for fans of Wire in the Blood and gave an enjoyable performance). He's a wannabe Olympic fencer with anger management problems and a criminal "past." He starts the film as a rat bastard, runs away from a gun deal gone bad and hides out at a Scottish girls' school as the new fencing teacher, where he proceeds to bond with an equally angry student (who gets a crush on him) and have an unprofessional affair with the headmistress (to allay audience fears about the former point). He learns more than his students and becomes a better man, facing up to his past and all that.
I'm not sure the plot is particularly realistic, although it was made in 2000 so maybe hiring a man in an educational position with zero background checks and not throwing him out when he confesses to having been in prison was less eyebrow-raising at the time.
Maybe it was my mood, but I found it very agreeable regardless. It's got fencing (in slow-mo so you have a hope of seeing anything), it's got a knife fight, it's got overly-intense age gap interactions and it pretends to be a crime story but is actually a nice character study as Rat Bastard grows as a person. It has Philip Hinchcliffe as executive producer and I might be the only person in three states who has a copy, so I am content to keep it.
BBC and other British productions. Some comedy collections (Fawlty Towers, Python, Jeeves and Wooster), lots of Acorn Media.
Anything set in particularly northern climates (Iceland, Scotland, Scandinavia and so on). Crime thrillers, romance, survival, fantasy - any genre if there's potential snow on the ground.
Foreign films, which I suspect will mostly be from Europe or the middle and far east.
Horror. Hammer Films, grindhouse, American Werewolf in London, The Thing.
Costume dramas. Might be some Merchant Ivory. Adaptations of classic literature.
A small selection of classic Hollywood. I glimpsed All About Eve and a Joan Crawford film.
A random assemblage of sci fi TV shows. First season of The X-Files and Carnivale. Season 3 & 4 of Lexx. Dead Like Me (which she tried to get me to watch years ago and I bounced off it hard). Kolchak. Odyssey 5.
So this will keep me occupied in some of my endless evenings. Giving it a try, I began with The Last Musketeer, a Scottish Television movie starring Robson Green (who I spent the entire film thinking of as discount Jason Isaacs, but he's a big deal for fans of Wire in the Blood and gave an enjoyable performance). He's a wannabe Olympic fencer with anger management problems and a criminal "past." He starts the film as a rat bastard, runs away from a gun deal gone bad and hides out at a Scottish girls' school as the new fencing teacher, where he proceeds to bond with an equally angry student (who gets a crush on him) and have an unprofessional affair with the headmistress (to allay audience fears about the former point). He learns more than his students and becomes a better man, facing up to his past and all that.
I'm not sure the plot is particularly realistic, although it was made in 2000 so maybe hiring a man in an educational position with zero background checks and not throwing him out when he confesses to having been in prison was less eyebrow-raising at the time.
Maybe it was my mood, but I found it very agreeable regardless. It's got fencing (in slow-mo so you have a hope of seeing anything), it's got a knife fight, it's got overly-intense age gap interactions and it pretends to be a crime story but is actually a nice character study as Rat Bastard grows as a person. It has Philip Hinchcliffe as executive producer and I might be the only person in three states who has a copy, so I am content to keep it.
