Number 97 on IMDb's Top 250
A Knight and his squire are home from the crusades. Black Death is sweeping their country. As they approach home, Death appears to the knight and tells him it is his time. The knight challenges Death to a chess game for his life. Hilarity ensues. The Knight and Death play as the cultural turmoil envelopes the people around them as they try, in different ways, to deal with the upheaval the plague has caused.
Trivia: The penultimate scene in which Death is dancing away with his followers was shot when some of the actors had gone home for the day, using some technicians and a few tourists as stand-ins. The title is a Biblical quotation from The Revelation of St. John the Divine, chapter 8.
Okay, this was a little weird, too (see Wild Strawberries), but it was better then Wild Strawberries, at least I could follow it. This movie has spawned hords of copycats/parodies where somebody plays Death in some game for extra time in their life (They don't always play chess...Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey had them playing Death with checkers and then Twister) .
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3 comments:
So, do you wonder why movies like this get into the top 250?
Yeah, I figure that it is partly that there are a lot of foreign voters and then vote for what they know and part is that it is the "i have to vote for this movie or be considered a neophyte" feeling. It is a BERGMAN movie after all.
There seems to be a mystique around some directors like Ingmar Bergman and Akira Kurosawa and to turn the tables on us Americancentric movie goers, directors like Martin Scorsese. We tend to elevate their movie a couple of notches just because of who they are instead of the movies they make.
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