Elizabeth: The Golden Age 2007
Shekar Kapur, director.
Shekar Kapur, director.
Oh, boo to this movie. I was so disapointed. I loved the first movie. There was sex, murder, castles, costumes and melodrama. There is a lot of that stuff here, but it all just seems a lot sillier.
Cate Blanchett doesn't disapoint. She perfectly captures both the power and the frailty of necessary for the role.
Clive Owen buckles quite a lot of swash as Walter Raleigh. Raleigh is young, worldly, adventurous. And looks like Clive Owen. He and Blanchett have a great time playing back and forth and there is some nice chemistry. But then the movie has him have an affair with Bess, the queen's lady-in-waiting, risking the queen's disfavour. Abbie Cornish is bland as Bess, it made no sense that she is a favourite of the queen or that she catches the eye of Raleigh.
I say to Raleigh, forget Bess and jump the queen. I really think she wants you to.
Anyway, Raleigh, after impregnating Bess and pissing the queen off, goes on to single-handedly defeat the Spanish Armada. At least, that's what it looked like.
Instead of Elizabeth the Golden Age,
See Cate Blanchett in her other Oscar nominated role of 2007 in I'm Not There. She plays one of the versions of Bob Dylan. She is prickly, wore a sock down her pants and says things like "A poem is like a naked person... "
Clive Owen is great in a lot of movies. Perhaps the sexiest ever in Gosford Park. But he was the star of one of my favourite movies of 2006, Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men, a futuristic movie where the UK is the only nation left standing and people can no longer have babies. Dark, sometimes funny, painfully sad and features some amazing camera work by Emmanuel Lubezki.
I watched an Australian film last summer called Somersault. Abbie Cornish plays Heidi, a lost teenager girl trying to work out the difference between sex and love. She is tender, charismatic and interesting, ie the opposite of what she is in Elizabeth. Southern Australia in this film looks a heck of a lot like Canada.
