I loved No Country for Old Men.
At the begining of the session, it was as usuall, people rustling wrappers, whispering to each other, munching on popcorn.
By the end, when there was a sinsister pause as Chirguh went off screen and the camera closed in on his victim, there was absolute silence. I don't think anyone even dared breathe!
I've been seeing ahistoric bodice rippers, two of them.
If you don't like seeing the life of fascinating people like Houdini and Henry VIII turned into chick flick fodder, in a way that Barbara Cartland completely did and dusted before mercifully dying in her sleep, then steer clear of these.
Death Defying Acts
Was the better one of the two, with Hugh Jackman submerging himself in the Chinese Water Torture Chamber and chains as in the prestige (and, obeying the rule of movies, the crappier the story, the more delicious the flesh shown). Briony rides again, this time, the untruthful little girl Saoirse Ronan plays is the daughter and shill of an entertainer that pretends to be psychic and communes with the dead on stage.
Houdini (who was a sceptic and had a mission to expose frauds of this type) offers every psychic in Edinburgh $10,000 if they can demonstrate their powers by correctly stating his mothers dying words in scientifically controlled conditions . Of course, in real life, the last bit guaranteed the prize was never collected (and in real life, they only had to demonstrate supernatural powers, and I think the prize still exists, as it was a committee with a trust, administered by Scientific American. Also, he left ten code words known only to his wife, on his death, and dared anyone especially his friend Sir Coonan Doyle, the author of Sherlock Holmes, who believed Houdini used supernatural powers in his act - the ten words were selected from letters written by Sir CD to Houdini.)
The rest is guff, a love story basically.
It is pretty guff, well acted, and not too badly written, but really, this man was a pioneer of Hollywood, an actor, special effects advisor and stuntman for Pathé studios in 1901. After 18 years of making movies there, he opened his own studio in New York and produced a few of his own. He even started a laboratory that found new ways of developing film.
He was a pioneering aviator, (the first controlled flight in Australia was by him, in his Voisin, at Diggers Rest, Victoria. I say controlled, on the basis that a good landing is any landing you walk away from.)
He was an entertainer par excellence, and then, there were the stunts.
We barely see any of that here. It is a basic love story, (that never happened, of course) and you already know most of the plot.
Pretty lacklustre, but not as bad as
The Other Boylen Girl
Forget everything you knew about the Reformation, the creation of Britain by the union of England and Wales, Pope Clement and the Emperor Charles V.
Forget Woolsey and Sir Thomas Moore. Forget Cranmer, Gardiner, Foxe and all the bishops in the English parliament; forget the Treason Act 1534 and the royal right to slaughter any subject he choose. Blame the women. Blame the Boylens.
Add to this insult the injury of one of the clumsiest, most mechanical scripts I have ever heard or seen in my life. If the next version of PowerPoint comes out with a facility to storyboard a presentation with dot point speeches automatically assigned to characters to force the plot throughout the scenes it has to get through to get to the end, I will know for sure. At the moment, I only suspect it was written by a bot.
The two lead female actors show absolutely no chemistry - they both weep, simper and groan in childbirth dutifully where required, and they both appear to absolutely HATE Eric Bana. Eric Bana actually does a wonderful job acting the king - at first, an interested, intelligent man and later, (looking more like the real Henry) an inscrutable psycho with dead cockroaches for eyes. He is doubly brilliant for the little he had to work with.
There is a comic cameo of Henry Percy by Oliver Coleman as well, but on the whole the actors are only as good as the lines they are given.
The Costumes and the set are the real stars of this show. Both are brilliant and authentic, but seeing the two together, the costumes all brand new (and, thanks to technology, probably finer than anything King Henry VIII ever actually wore) and the sets all so old (we are talking 1500's and even earlier - although most of them were only brand spanking new back then). I wonder what it would be like in another 500 years, if there would be a dim and grimy but otherwise authentically preserved McDonalds as the set of a movie with all the actors in brand new psychedelic flares, each outfit more seventies than the next. I couldn't help thinking "A Curtain Died for that Outfit", on more than one occasion. And it is a very sad state of affairs, when the furniture upstages the rest of the movie.
