The Other Boleyn Girl

Note: Originally published on my other blog on June 18, 2008SPOILER WARNING, although if you know your history at all, not so much. Not that reality has much to do with this movie. Otherwise, Paul Giamatti would play King Henry, and only after gaining about fifty or seventy-five more pounds.* Eric Bana (MUNICH) should be King of something solely because he manages to look sexy wearing an awful lot of fur and some extremely silly hats. Bana is so cheerfully lusty and immoral as the king that, as I'm fond of saying, it appears he wandered over from a different, much better movie.* PG-13 sex scenes can be better than R-rated sex scenes, because they need to be more creative. They can also be boring and badly lit.* The two sisters fight and connive, because Mary won't keep her mouth shut and mind her own business, and Anne completely loses her shit every few minutes, and spends most of her free time swearing to avenge petty slights. Their dad wants one of them to do the king. The plot begins to mutter mutinously to itself and study its contract.* The dresses back then were much prettier. It took six hours to put on a hat, and every corset crushed your organs like a tube of toothpaste, but damn it you, looked awesome.* Natalie Portman (V FOR VENDETTA) is badass as Anne Boleyn. She has fun with the role, and doesn't take it seriously for a second. This saves her from the maudlin drama of the rest of the film. She also gets to be manipulative and conniving, which seems fun.* Scarlett Johansson (THE NANNY DIARIES) is mopey and wanders across the screen with a wounded expression on her face. It's hard to play the moral, ethical sister. The moral sister in this case being the one who has an affair with the married king and discusses intimate details about it in front of her husband and have a baby out of wedlock with him. Yet she's the one that's supposed to be mature. No wonder Anne was so pissed.* So the King really wants to get naked with Anne Boleyn, but she forbids all nudity until he stops seeing Anne and divorces his wife. He divorces his wife, throws the whole country into turmoil, then suddenly is all, 'hey rape is a viable option.' It's unexpected to say the least. And disconcerting. And a sick part of me kept thinking, 'if he'd thought of this earlier, we could have avoided the whole disaster.* Then she has Elizabeth, and we're all going 'ooh, baby-queen drool!' Although, in case somebody doesn't know who Elizabeth is, at the end they remind you that she becomes queen. People that young shouldn't be watching this movie.* Anne now has to be crazy and desperate for a boy, but she has basically every good scene in the movie. She gets raped, she experiences the joy of a daughter while knowing the kid has pretty much damned her, she has a miscarriage... Anne Boleyn was probably a bummer queen.* As if there isn't enough random to go around, now it's like, 'howdy, incest!' Because if your husband can't give you a healthy baby, obviously your brother is the best bet for a normal, non-flipper child. Although it IS Jim Sturgess (ACROSS THE UNIVERSE). Anyway, they don't do it. * Then the King starts doing the brother's wife, and their mom, Kristin Scott Thomas, (THE GOLDEN COMPASS) starts howling at her husband for screwing up all their kids so very badly, and the plot goes away and takes a nap as everyone screams and cries and schemes unsuccessfully.* The plot returns, grudgingly, in time for everyone to get decapitated. Except Mary, who remarries some dude and takes care of her niece, who will grow up to be - gasp! - Queen Elizabeth! Who knew?* More importantly, who knew royal intrigue, pretty people being bad, murder, adultery, betrayal, and rough sex could be so damn boring?

moreless