Revisting Conan the Barbarian

Commenting on my post back in January in which I gave mixed reviews, along explicitly Aristotelian lines (derived from the Poetics), to the recent remake, James Brown brought up several very interesting points, which I'd pledged to follow up on:

I think of cinema as being primarily of a kind with the visual arts like painting, not with drama. It is, at base, moving pictures more so than filmed drama. We’re smack dab in the middle of imag...