Spartacus (AFI #81)

“Everytime I hear the name Spartacus, the next thing I hear in my head is “”Christian had a thing for Tony Curtis. So he brought over Some Like It Hot and Sporaticus””. Im sure ya’ll know what movie that is from. Minus 2 friend points if you dont. The next thing I hear in my head is Tom Everett Scott in That Thing You Do saying “”I am Spartacus””, which he says several times in that movie. Usually its the slow, deep voiced rendition when he’s on the phone with his gf. Couldnt find clips of either, but in my search I came across this. Totally unrelated, but it made me smile. 😀

The movie, on the other hand, didnt exactly make me smile unfortunately. I just had a hard time getting into it. Cant quite pinpoint precisely why that was. I was watching it online, which had two contributing factors against it. One is that when I have my laptop so close at hand, its hard for me to not be opening up other browser windows and surfing at the same time. I tend to get intimidated (thats not quite the right word, but the best I got right now) when Ive got a 3+ hour movie ahead of me, which puts me off to it and ups the probability of finding something else to do at the same time. The other being that the stream was a bit choppy. Sound was fine, but the visual seemed to be skipping pieces. I was this close to running over to Best Buy to buy it on DVD instead, but laziness and cheapitude won out.

I think another big hinderance for it was that it wasn’t quite what I was expecting. When they started with the whole gladiator school and storyline, I was thinking it would be along the lines of Ridley Scott/Russell Crowe’s Gladiator, which is one of my fave movies despite the fact that in every other movie besides that and 3:10 to Yuma I absolutely despise Crowe. But yeah when the storyline shifted from there, it really lost my focus, and never quite got it back.

Redeeming factor: Tony Curtis. Was really drawn to him in this film. He seemed to be the only one on screen that I ever really cared about. And no, I dont think the Clueless reference is responsible for that.

Yeah so as much as it pains me to speak ill of such an acclaimed movie, kinda glad I found it for free instead of paying 16 bucks for the DVD cause Im not exactly interested in seeing it again any time soon.”