One Night With the King October 21, 2006
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The story of Queen Ester is very close to my heart. It was my dad’s favorite book of the bible and I have fond memories of us dressing him up as a king from our dress up box and fanning him with peacock feathers while he read it to us during family time. It deserves to have a great movie made about it; unfortunately, this latest one is a doozy of the highest order, hoping that the lavish costumes and computer-generated effects will distract us from the wooden acting and lamentable script.
First of all, it’s criminally misleading to call a movie with not the slightest hint of sex “One Night With the King”. C’mon, its the story of Queen Esther here, where’s the fun stuff? On the bright side, this means that as the parent of a JETT you can be at ease showing this movie to your impressionable young one, the purity level is about as high as it can get. Case in point: On the night of Esther’s “one night with the king”, instead of doing what should come naturally, they both start crying and he proposes. Geez!
It’s the same story we know and love (with a sub-plot thrown in here and there). Young Hadassah is taking from her doting Uncle Mordecai (played by John Rhys-Davies, one of the only believable actors) when the king banishes Vashti and calls for a round-up of Beautiful Young Virgins across the land. Having taken on a new name, Esther spends a great deal of time being beautified in milk and honey under the watchful eye of the obligatory Big Black Eunuch. She first meets the King late at night when he apparently calls for a random Beautiful Young Virgin to read to him from his archival scrolls. Esther instead charms him with the story of Jacob and Rebecca and from this nocturnal encounter, they both fall in love. A few weeks later, after their official one night together (in which nothing exciting happens), she becomes Queen of Persia.
The actress that plays Ester could have probably been believable if she would have had a decent script. She looks like a very nice Family girl; simple beauty, long hair, big smile etc. I have a feeling she’ll join someday and fit right in. The King looks like someone who could give you top-notch advice on skin care products and not much else. It’s also a little unnerving that he’s dressed much prettier than Esther for most of the movie. Strikes me as the kind of guy who would be best friends with Derek Zoolander. The costume designer must’ve really had fun with this movie, no style is left unexplored with the king. What really throws you off is when you meet of king’s counselors, who is this Chinese man with the authentic high-collared, red silk outfit. Uh huh.
The most amusing and ill-cast role, IMO, is the role of Haman. A shrimpy little guy who couldn’t weigh more than 120 pounds and looks like he just got out of grad school, he’s 90% eye balls that twitch a lot, especially when he’s making his eeeeevil face (the other 10% of him comprised of flaring nostrils). He has this really bad habit of talking about his plans for world domination and usurping the throne while holding his adorable toddler-age son. Tsk, tsk, Haman, one of the golden rules of parenting: don’t discuss problems around your children. When he’s not busy conniving in darkened palace corners and riding around the city giving eeeeevil looks, he’s campaigning in underground parts of the city, shouting “We must stamp out these Jews” to a group of folks who also really like to yell.
Through a series of pretty mean manipulations, Haman become a counselor of the king and convinces him that the Jews must go. Esther then summons her courage and saves the day by risking her life to appear before the king and plead for the lives of her people. In the end all is well and everyone is very happy, except for Haman, of course. There’s so many little twist and sub-plots in the attempt, I imagine, to make the movie more interesting, when it could have been perfectly interesting if they would have gotten decent actors in the major roles instead of the minor ones and not have the camera fade every time something remotely sexual begins to happen.
One major grievance I have with this film is that they give the incredible Peter O’Toole top billing. His name is on the poster of the movie. So I figure, “Peter O’Toole; great actor, top billing, must be good”. No. He’s in literally 12 seconds of the film at the very beginning, as the prophet Samuel in a flashback. But I’ve gotta say, he’s brilliant in those 12 seconds. After that, the movie goes steadily south.
Another grievance; and I’m sure this is a golden rule in Hollywood somewhere, you can’t substitute sweeping visuals for a bad script and bad acting. Every time the script starts to really lull (which is a lot), we get these sweeping aerial shots of the palace, which is real pretty and all (the palace looks like something out of Lord of the Rings with a tiny middle-eastern twist) but very overused. I remember this same tactic being used in “Glitter”, another bad movie; there were an unusual amount of aerial shots of New York to distract us from the glaring fact that Mariah Carey can’t act.
I believe that someday they’ll make a decent movie about the story of Esther. The actress will at least have a British accent instead of an American one, the word “OK” will not be included in the script, there’ll be more subtlety and less outright corniness, Haman will actually scare you instead of making you want to feed him something, you won’t be able to tell when the actors are wearing wigs, and by all that is accurate and historical and nothing to be ashamed about, we’ll get some real nudity, by golly!
P.S. There is a song to go along with this movie called, you guessed it “One Night With the King”. Criticism about this song could be a whole other post. Google the lyrics and have a good laugh.
P.P.S. Gosh, this is a long post. That’s what I get for suppressing the writers itch for too long.
Comments»
Score! Awesome post. Had me ROFLMAO (internally).
Lol. I can see you like this one about as much as Memoirs of a Geisha. I shall be sure to watch it with the JETTS for devotions one find day.
Memoirs of a Geisha was a work of art!
Jules, you can really say it when you want to!
Have you ever seen the movie “The Bible, Esther”. I thought that one was decently made.
The move One Night With The King was touching it actually spoke to me in many ways. I didn’t catch a sex scene it. Actually kissing is something done very commonly and that’s not saying that they are having sex. For your sake it’s their wedding night what did you do on your wedding night i know you didn’t just talk about the future i actually gave the move 10 stars.