Back at my first ever SCA event (Ducal Prize Tourney, Labor Day, 1992), one of the people I was camping with brought out this baking tray wrapped in cloth. I asked her what it was and she said it was "way bread." She unwrapped it a bit and handed me a chunk. It was pretty heavy and I took a bite, to find that it was basically one huge pan-baked chocolate-chip cookie. "Way bread?" I asked. "Yep. Waaaaaay out of period."

It's with this in mind that I dub "A Knight's Tale" to be the Way Movie of the year, if not the decade. Not that that in and of itself is a bad thing, but don't kid yourself, the movie is baaad.

Karen and I got to see the movie at a campus sneak preview last Tuesday. As two recovered SCA geeks we saw the outing as an appropriate homage to having left it behind. From the very first scenes we see just how fitting it is.

Setting: A shire somewhere in France, not that you'd know it was anywhere other than England if you weren't explicitly told, four scenes in, that one of the characters is saving up money 'to go back to England.' Anyhow, there's a tourney ground with a jousting run and about 300 spectators up along the railings, chewing giant turkey legs, acting rowdy (though, as Ammy noted, surprisingly clean). Traditional Ren-fair-esque music playing into the background as the camera pans and pushes in on the crowd. The music morphs into Queen's We Will Rock You, which is bad enough, but it's actually being sung by every person in the crowd. And not just for a little while. They sing the entire song in a scene so out of place it can only be matched by the time I went to UC Berkeley's English Department graduation in 1994 and the valedictorian closed his speech with Copacabana, all 6 stanzas, on a dare.

Anyhow, the movie just gets worse, not because it's playing a Men in Tights to Excalibur's Prince of Thieves, but because it can't decide whether it's trying to be a parody or not. A parody should be funny-witty, not funny-lame which, I've gotta say, it is when the hero spends the afternoon in a barn learning French pavanne court dances for the evening's revel, then midway through the ball the music shifts into disco and all the nobles get-down. Dancing aside (and by the way there's not a bodice, or jerkin, for that matter, in the flick), the only thing bigger than the holes in the plot are the.. wait, there isn't anything bigger.

Throw in a love interest royal groupie and her maid (we never find out what kind of nobility she is, because that might get in the way of the plotholes) who seem to have no trouble traipsing their way from tournament to tournament in Medieval England, ending up at the 'Jousting World Championship' in London, a naked Geoffrey Chaucer with a gambling problem and a flare for the dramatic (don't worry, while they try to make allusions to a few of the Canterbury Tales, (including, duh, 'The Knight's Tale') you'd get more Chaucer out of eating the front cover of the Cliff's Notes), and a hero who, without explanation, teaches himself to joust with three weeks and a bag of dirt, yet can beat the best in Europe. In a nutshell, take the Karate Kid, steam it until all the substance is gone (doesn't take too long), slice Mr. Miyagi out of the flick, toss it back somewhere between 800 and 1200 years and cover it in velveeta and you'll have "A Knight's Tale."

Anyhow, if you like laughing at movies and are going to see it anyhow, do yourself a favor and see it opening weekend, becuase maybe you'll get some satisfaction from a packed audience laughing as a group, because in an empty theater it would just be funny-sad... On a scale of 10, I give it the rarest of rares, a 3. Not completely pathetic, but bad enough to fall on the lower end of the scale.