Films/DVD Asylum

Posted by Harmonia (A) on October 15, 2007 at 20:38:47

In Reply to: RE: Liz' Golden Age: Jury's Out and Grits is too.... posted by mr grits on October 12, 2007 at 18:10:19

COSTUME PORN!

Or...THE SPANISH INQUISITION!!! (The Jesuits are coming!!!!!) Where are Monty Python when we need them?

I was hoping this would be better than the first film, but honestly this movie was pretty darned silly and overwrought. I don't mind a little creative license with historical facts or blending myth with reality for drama's sake, nor combining events or even time compression...but only if it's for a coherent point and going to make a better movie. Heck, I don't even mind a little soap opera. But this movie is like Elizabeth - the dream, the epic, the Bollywood acid trip!

I'm not a big fan of the director anyway, but I feel the blame has to be shared with the screenwriters, at least if what they wrote is anywhere near what was shot.

Cate sails through the silliness relatively unscathed, playing Elizabeth as at least three different people at the same time. Clive is dashing doing his Errol Flynn thing and Aussie newcomer Abby Cornish actually attempts to portray a three dimensional character. At the climactic moment of the Armada's invasion Elizabeth morphs into a combo of Joan d'Arc and Henry V while Raleigh apprently becomes an uber Sir Francis Drake and destroys the entire Armada with his little fireship. Geoffrey Rush is fine but his screen time is curtailed. Samantha Morton does the most with Kapur's bizarrely conceived Mary Queen of Scots (they really cleaned up her execution in the movie, and of course she had a French accent in RL, not Scots, but what the heck). Rhys Ifans and Tom Hollander are pretty much wasted.

Someday, maybe, HBO will make a great $120m miniseries of the fascinaing real events that Kapur attempted to portray here. A girl can dream.

At least I saw it for free.

(And no, I didn't read any reviews before I went, and still haven't.)

Grits: yes, you are correct - it was Drake that used fire ships to break the armada's formation. The Spanish fleet was anchored off the coast of the Netherlands, not England, where there was no deep harbour for them to shelter in. They were picking up extra troops from the Spanish Netherlands for the inavsion.

Drake's fireships destroyed a grand total of two Spanish warships: not very cinematic I admit. But they did cost the Spaniards a great deal...the interesting thing about that episode was that the Spanish captains had to cut their anchors free to escape the fire ships, which destroyed their formation and allowed them to be harrassed. The loss of anchors was to plague the Spanish when they ran into bad weather trying to go up the east coast of England and around the tip of Scotland. The weather had as much to do with destroying the fleet as the fireships, probably more. (At least you do see one anchor chopped away in the film.)