CONAN THE BARBARIAN remains one of my favorite films. I bought the DVD and enjoyed the commentary track, too. It sounds like Milius and Schwarzenegger shared a couple of 6-packs before doing the commentary.
Sandahl Bergman...*S*I*G*H... She was the "It" girl for me in the 1980s. I remember the cover of Esquire she did (just a shot of her muscular back) in the late 1970s. And her dance scene in ALL THAT JAZZ...Crikey!
Amazing how many special effects shots in CONAN were old-fashioned glass mattes, where the camera filmed through a sheet of glass with a distant city painted on it or an enhancement of a small set. They still look very good in these CGI days.
Fantastic score, great cast - James Earl Jones, Mako, Franco Columbu (in a cameo as a Pict), surfing champ Gerry Lopez...very cool that one of my favorite actors, Bill Smith, played Conan's father. Milius has used him a lot (he was the Spetsnaz commander in RED DAWN), and he was in umpteen spaghetti westerns and even more biker flicks as well as LAREDO. He was the bareknuckle boxer Clint Eastwood fought at the end of ANY WHICH WAY YOU CAN, and was in the bizarre AIP biker/Vietnam flick THE LOSERS (Hells Angels sent to Vietnam to rescue a diplomat taken as a POW - very bizarre!)
THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD was very good. I read D'Onofrio researched Howard and tried to incorporate little touches, like how Howard always wore the cuffs of his pants cut high so he wouldn't trip on them in any projected fight with the numerous "enemies" with which his mind populated his hometown. It was also neat that there was a mention of H.P. Lovecraft in the film - since it was marketed as a love story, I doubt most of the target audience would catch the reference, so it was nice of them to throw it in.
L. Sprague de Camp did a biography of Robert E. Howard that I would recommend to anyone who liked the movie - I think the title was "Dark Valley Destiny".
I watched BRAVEHEART the other day, which has always seemed to me like a well-filmed Robert E. Howard story - one of the many historical short pieces he did with Irish or Scottish or Pictish protagonists fighting an invading, occupying army of Romans or Brits. The battle scenes, especially, had a Howardian flair to them, as did Gibson's portrayal of Wallace.
"Flow with the Go."
- Rickson Gracie