Talk of the fact that Ciaran Hinds is too old to play Aragorn in the moovies now got me to thinking — What about Clive Owen?

And in what I can only take as a sign that I must be on to something, Mark Steyn just so happens to have reposted one of his All Time Great movie reviews.  A sampling:

King Arthur (2004) is not your father’s Round Table. There’s no castles, no sword in the lake, no Mordred, no Holy Grail, no Camelot, no love triangle, no Richard Burton warbling ‘How To Handle A Woman’, and not a lot of women to handle in any case. Instead, this is supposedly the first Arthurian tale to be rooted in historical Arthenticity. There is a Round Table, but it looks alarmingly like the UN Security Council table, which, for all the claims of authenticity, I doubt you’d have found in a 5th-century Berwick furniture showroom.

And that’s where we are – the 5th century up at Hadrian’s Wall in the fag end of the Roman Empire. A group of elite soldiers from Sarmatia known as ‘knights’ are coming to the end of their 15-year tour of duty in Britain. Their leader is Arthur (Clive Owen), who’s no king. Instead, he’s half-Roman, half-Brit, but all knight, commander of the most respected band of fighting men in a fading empire. North of the wall is Scotland or, as it’s known here, Woad country, where the Woads live. The Woads are so called because they’re blue. You’d be blue, too, if your beloved native land was occupied by the Romans, and so a cunning Woad called Merlin is leading a guerrilla insurgency against Rome. If there was a song at this point, it would be ‘How To Handle A Roman’. But there isn’t, so instead the Woads slip across the wall, determined to push the Romans back down the M1: all Woads lead to Wome, as Elmer Fudd would say.

Nip over and read the rest.