movies: elizabeth: the golden age

Ma decided she was going to take the day off today (and that makes three days out of the last four I've spent with her), so instead of going to the movies in the evening, we went to the very first session of the day (which, okay, was actually 11am, but still)... of course that meant it was only us and two other people in the whole cinema (we very nearly were the whole entire audience, but they came in at the last minute... damn them).

And today's movie choice was Elizabeth: The Golden Age... which was the other possible choice from Sunday's movie visit. Neither Ma nor I had actually seen the original when it came out back in 1998 (or since), but luckily it was on during the day last week, so I taped it. Not that we necessarily needed to have worried, this "sequel" doesn't really rely on the first movie very much at all... but it was nice to know some of the backstory to the relationship between Cate Blanchett's Queen and Geoffrey Rush's Sir Walsingham, since they are about the only characters that exist in both movies. Plus I didn't really know that much about Queen Elizabeth, beyond a few random facts, so knowing how she got to where she is in the second movie was a help too.

I will say that it seems like all the royalty of that time period were a little insane... whether it was from all the inbreeding, the toxic substances (I'm think lead based makeup and the like) they would have ingested and whathaveyou... because both Cate as Elizabeth and Jordi Mollà as King Phillip of Spain seem, at points, to have climbed a little too highly up the crazy tree. Mollà especially seems a touch unbalanced (and I don't know, maybe Phillip was actually unhinged)... but at the same time he never really seems that "menacing" as a villain... but I suppose, being a historical drama they couldn't paint him as a complete moustache twirling bad guy, because that would have been disrespectful. I did keep expecting his little daughter to just give him a slap though... she might have been under 10, but even though she never uttered a single line she had that whole disdainful look down.

As far as plot goes, since I already kind of knew how the events (as far as the "war" everything is building towards) turned out, it was a little like Titanic... you know the ship is going to sink, you're just waiting to see when. And like I said before, there was a bunch of stuff that I wasn't aware of that was interesting (although whether some of it actually happened, or happened exactly that way or not, who knows).

Interestingly both with this movie and the original I felt a little like there was some of Cate's performance as Elizabeth in her performance as Galadriel (and given that she played the "Elf Queen" somewhere in the middle of her two turns as Elizabeth, there's probably some more of her Galadriel in this second outing as The Virgin Queen), even if it was only her whole tone of voice on occasion when she's getting all queenly and imperious.

The rest of the cast do really well (although the irony of having Australians in two of three lead roles in the movie kind of amuses me... three out of four if you count the amount of time that Abbie Cornish actually spends on screen, although she doesn't get her name above the title on the poster)... I will say though that Clive Owen just leaves me cold. He's not a bad actor as far as these things go, but he didn't come across as terribly sexy or charismatic or anything (certainly not enough that I was sad he never picked up the gig as James Bond)... to me anyway... I think Ma had a slight moment though.

I'm guessing that a lot of the Queen's costumes were based, at least in part, on paintings done of the real queen at the time, but even if some of them are just flights of fancy, costume designer Alexandra Byrne (who also did the first movie) did a beautiful job, as did the people in charge of Cate's hats (Christian Dior's milliner, Stephen Jones) and "hair tacos" (as Ma called one of the things that I actually thought looked more like a butterfly in Cate's hair). But then they do tend to get those things right on historical dramas for the most part.

All in all it was probably a fairly "level" movie... it was good, but not great... it found its level and I don't know that it really rose much above it (although on the plus side it never dipped down to become worse either). I mean, Elizabeth was always called The Virgin Queen, so that takes care of that plot... and it's historical fact who won the war with the Spanish and what happened to Mary Queen of Scots, so there really couldn't be THAT many surprises in the plot. So yeah... good, not great.

yani's rating: 2 armadas out of 5