Word: boleyn
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...topic today is child stars, their appeal and limitations. In The Other Boleyn Girl, Natalie Portman, 26, and Scarlett Johansson, 23, play Anne and Mary Boleyn, one destined to be Henry VIII's second wife, the other his mistress. Penelope stars Christina Ricci, 28, in a contemporary fantasy about a girl who has a pig's snout for a nose because, as the family legend goes, a witch's curse had long ago fallen on her ancestors...
...Boleyn for Calumny...
...movies. The Other Boleyn Girl is based on the Philippa Gregory novel that wove the melodrama of Henry's rule into a bodice-ripping yarn. Not that the known facts aren't salacious enough: the King's impatience with his wife, Catherine of Aragon, in providing him with a male heir; his divorce of Catherine to marry Anne; his break with the Pope over the divorce and his establishment of the Anglican Communion as his own personal church. With all this as backdrop, Gregory foregrounded scenes of calumny and chicanery, of paternal pimping and near-incest, to create an international...
...small. No question that Portman's and Johansson's faces merit microscopic attention, but the film has a cramped feeling that turns every urgent, conspiratorial confidence into an italicized shout. That's a shame, because the movie has some excellent supporting skullduggery by Mark Rylance as the Boleyn girls' father, as well as a truly imperious turn by Kristin Scott Thomas as their mother. (She also played Johansson's mother in The Horse Whisperer...
...than a pay-TV romp à la The Tudors, it never leaves you in doubt that noble sentiment will win out over sexual intrigue, that hanky will trump panky. The resulting melange isn't awful, but you'll be forgiven if you wait for the DVDs of The Other Boleyn Girl - this one and the TV movie - for a leisurely home-viewing to compare and contrast...