I just watched that recent Robin Hood movie with Russel Crowe. I loved it. I gather that the critics and most of the public were not so well impressed. I liked it because it seemed like a real medieval story for a change, rather than just doing the usual romanticized typical Robin Hood story. It was wonderful visually, Cate Blanchett was stunningly good, as always, and everybody else suited their parts well too. It was a serious treatment of Robin Hood for a change...totally blows the silly Kevin Costner thing out of the water. It also showed characters like Richard the Lionheart and Prince John as flawed and complex characters...shades of gray, in other words...not your standard all-good-and-noble-Richard, all-bad-and-despicable-John, but real people with both strengths and quite notable weaknesses. That's refreshing! By golly, real people for a change instead of stereotypes. Rodney's treacherous role moving his loyalties between the King of France and the King of England was pretty typical of the sort of intrigue that was going on back then. All the royal families were related, and a clever knight might end up serving one line or another on his way up the ladder. Lots of good stuff in that movie. Was it flawed? Yeah...but it was a far more realistic portrayal of life back then than any other Robin Hood film I've ever seen. (As for the actual story of Robin Hood...that's almost entirely fiction...but so what? It's a good story.)