Word: virginal
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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RICHARD BRANSON writing about Pan Am founder Juan Trippe is a little cheeky on our part, given that Trippe was a renegade who took on the entire industry for the right to create cheaper fares, while Branson, founder of Virgin Airlines, is a renegade who...well, you get the idea. Branson is probably the most colorful tycoon of his generation, with a penchant for starting new businesses and crash-landing balloons...
...volta. There may be something tenacious and unreadable in Cate Blanchett's Elizabeth, but Kapur doesn't help much, filming the young royal in pastel gowns with a bevy of handmaidens and a robust beau, prancing giddily in some absurdly verdant corner of the English countryside. This is the Virgin Queen before she was a virgin (to quote the preeminent Elizabethan scholar Groucho Marx)--and if this preposterous rapture is the best the film can do, one can't help but long for more chiaroscuro conspiracies and bloody assassinations...
...wolves as savage and wily as the Mafia barons of The Godfather or the Japanese businessmen of Rising Sun, it wrings its hands somewhat too emphatically at Elizabeth's shrewd, momentous steps to transfigure herself into an emblem to lead her country. If Elizabeth's mutation into the Virgin Queen is the death of her womanhood, and happiness, as the film asserts, her sexuality--that which she renounces to rule the nation--ought to seem a little more respectable...
Blanchett at the end of the film, martyred tothe state as the Virgin Queen, is not a grandpoignant enigma, but merely the astute resolutionto give the people of England the ruler theydesire...
What can we learn from the curious silence of our third group of religionists on this issue? Don't they respect the Bible? Evidently, God thought twig-picking to be just as abominable as homosexuality, as well as cursing your parents or not being a virgin on your wedding night. He did mandate the same punishment for each of these sins...