CENTURION: The last siege of the
Romans against the Picts of Northern Britain in the year 117 A.D. Maybe.
WARNING:
Lots of fake blood squirting gratuitously everywhere and it always cracks me up when
Roman soldiers fighting the "
Brits" have their own
British accents.
What makes this movie so special, though, is that the Picts were the last of a
matriarchal culture in the region. In this film you'll see the
women fighting right alongside the men, chopping off heads and arms with the best of 'em... not my favorite form of entertainment, by any means (battle scenes). But the women? Damn cool... respected and fierce fighters. And this is HISTORY!
Basicly, I just fast-forwarded through to the women fight scenes. Even so, this 1:37 film felt like a 3 hour film. I DID love the ending, however. Not all of you will. "Witch" becomes Angel... very romantic.
Best Lines:
"Using Guerrilla tactics and the landscape to their advantage, they brought the (Roman) invasion to a halt."
And a Couple of more Patriarchal Counterpoints:
"He's a ruthless, wreckless bastard, and I'd die for him without hesitation."
"Hope... hope is the stuff of legend... and legend gets you laid."
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picts
"The name the Picts called themselves is unknown... The
Latin word Picti first occurs in a panegyric written by
Eumenius in AD 297 and is taken to mean "
painted or tattooed people" (Latin pingere "to paint"... pictus, "painted", cf. Greek "πυκτίς" - puktis, "picture")..."
"Their Old English name gave the modern Scots form Pechts and the Welsh word Fichti... In writings from Ireland, the name
Cruthin... (
Modern Irish: Cruithne) was used to refer to the Picts and to a group of people who lived alongside the Ulaid in eastern Ulster..."
"It is generally accepted that this is derived from *Qritani, which is the Goidelic/Q-Celtic version of the Britonnic/P-Celtic *
Pritani... From this came Britanni, the Roman name for those we now call the
Britons...
It has been suggested that Cruthin was a name used to refer to all the Britons who were not conquered by the Romans; those who lived outside
Roman Britannia, north of Hadrian's Wall."
"The Picts are often said to have practiced
matrilineal succession on the basis of
Irish legends... The kings of the Picts when Bede was writing were Bridei and Nechtan, sons of
Der Ilei, who indeed claimed the throne through their mother Der Ilei, daughter of an earlier Pictish king..."
"The Picts are often said to have
tattooed themselves... Naturalistic depictions of Pictish nobles, hunters and
warriors, male and female...
Pictish art can be classed as Celtic, and later as Insular... Irish poets portrayed their Pictish counterparts as very much like themselves..."
MOVIE TRAILER:
Image by Merlijn Hoek via Flickr
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