I foolishly spent $6.95 CDN to see “The Other Boleyn Girl” this evening.
sigh
I don’t know. Why do they do it? They got nothing right. Nothing. But the costumes were lovely. Really lovely.
What’s up with all these Tudor TV shows and movies right now anyway? I like the Tudors a lot, myself, but this seems a bit over the top.
vison, whatever you do, don’t spend an additional money on the book, because your brain will explode. Or so I understand. Friends have encouraged me not to read it, to avoid the 'splodey.
I don’t know what’s up with the Tudormania. Probably just inertia, since it kicked off with Elizabeth and Shakespeare in Love about 10 years ago, and there’s been about one production a year since then. Those movies are like documentaries compared to The Other Boleyn Girl, though. As TOBG is to The Tudors.
And also considering that the Prince of Wales/King Edward II did not marry her until 1308 – after his father Longshanks had passed away, and three years after Wallace was executed.
Assistant Well, you’d be surprised, actually sir. The Tudor economy’s booming, ever since Sir Humphrey Gilbert opened up the Northwest passage to Cathay, and the Cabots’ expansion in Canada, there’s been a tremendous surge in exports, and trade with the Holy Roman Empire is going… no, quite right, it’s no good at all.
Customer What?
Assistant It’s a dead loss. We haven’t put anyone in a job since 1625.
Customer I see.
Assistant That’s all?
Customer What?
Assistant That’s all you say?
Customer Yes.
Assistant No, no, we were the tops then. Drake got all his sailors here. Elizabeth, we supplied the archbishops for her coronation. Shakespeare started off from here as a temp. Then came James the First and the bottom fell out of the Tudor jobs. 1603 - 800 vacancies filled, 1604 - 40, 1605 - none, 1606 - none. The rest of the Stuart period nothing. Hanoverians nothing. Victorians nothing. Saxe-Coburgs nothing. Windsors… what did you want?
Customer Dirty books, please.
Right. (produces selection of mags from under counter) Sorry about the Tudor bit, but you can’t be too careful, you know. Have a look through these.
I haven’t seen Memoirs of A Geisha but I’ve read the book. What’s inaccurate about the movie [I loved the book BTW].
My irritation with The Tudors isn’t that they changed things for the miniseries so much as that
1- they changed things that were way too important to be tampered with
2- often the truth was no more complicated and far more interesting
Most specifically Henry’s sister’s marriage: they switched the old king from France to Portugal and the sister from Mary to Margaret. Now, the French marriage is relatively unimportant to history, it’s a “survivable” change since, as with the Portuguese marriage in the miniseries, it was short-lived and childless and resulted in the young widow queen marrying the king’s friend Charles Brandon, BUT since every single monarch from 1603 to the present is a direct descendant of the real Margaret’s *real *marriages in Scotland (a country I don’t recall even being mentioned in the miniseries), and since Henry’s real sister Mary married the real Charles Brandon, why did they make this change? Was it a typo? Were they afraid U.S. viewers would get his pre-teen daughter Mary and his sex-kitten sister Mary confused? Plus, they rob themselves of a great real life character- Margaret Tudor was a piece of work who hated her first husband then hated her brother for killing him in battle and then went on to have disastrous further marriages, and since she married before the action of the Tudors and was years older than her brother she’d be a great cameo role for a well known over 40 actress.
Same with the death of Henry Fitzroy- why have him die in early childhood when in real life he died as a teenager. In real life the idea had been tossed around that he incestuously wed his half-sister Mary, which would have made for an interesting move on the miniseries that would have shown the king’s desperation.
And I ain’t even going into how Wolsey died… that was just waaaaaaaay too “deviant” from history.
Well, I, for one, thought this was pretty clever. 
Also, the big Five Points rumble between the Dead Rabbits and the Bowery Boys happened in 1857, the Draft Riots in 1863.
In real life he died from natural causes. How’d he die in the series?
This part of the wiki article really got my attention:
Wallace had a human-skin sword-belt? That is seriously bad-ass. :eek:
Not as accurate as The Quiet Man, eh?
Agreed. In my experience, real fighting skeletons never scream.
Furthermore, they did not wear kilts in battle.
And for that matter, there’s no evidence of the kilt (the big wraparound great-kilt, I mean, not the skirt-thing later invented) being in use any earlier than the 16th Century.
Pearl Harbor is another. Ugh. Pearl Harbor (2001) - IMDb
BrainGlutton, whereas, the movie version of William Shakespeare’s Gay Boy In Bondage, was much closer to the truth, what a poet.
I’m ashamed. 75 posts and I’m the first one to mention this piece of recycled food
A couple of classics:
The Charge of the Light Brigade, with Errol Flynn and a very young Olivia de Haviland (with eyebrows for which I hope she shot the makeup artist).
Weirdly, this film has a pretty accurate reconstruction of the siege and surrender of Cawnpore during the Indian Mutiny–except they move it to Afghanistan instead of India, and before the Crimean War instead of after. (It would be impossible to stage the riverside massacre in Afghanistan, which according to the World Almanac has no navigable rivers.)
The titular Charge is then portrayed as a deliberate act of retaliation for a massacre which hadn’t happened (against an Afghan khan who didn’t exist and wasn’t in the Crimea anyway), instead of the pure accident it actually was… Idiocy piles on idiocy until you just give up and wait for the Tennyson poem to finish scrolling up the screen.
Mary of Scotland, with Katharine Hepburn, and even her presence can’t redeem this stinker. Even if you don’t know the history this isn’t very good (she and Frederic March, who plays Bothwell, have zero chemistry and can’t be bothered to actually kiss in their one actual embrace). If you do it’s unspeakable.
Just for starters, everyone full, modern-style Highland dress (or at least a freakish Hollywood version of it), even Lowlanders and Borderers like Bothwell who wouldn’t have been found dead in the kilt IRL. Enjoy the scene in which Bothwell walks up to a fireplace and hoists his kilt to warm his backside, then turns and hoists it again to warm his frontside.
The film also insists that Mary married Darnley out of cold political calculation and Bothwell out of True Love, which is almost exactly backwards (she married Darnley out of true lust, and was more or less forced to marry Bothwell). The inevitable face-to-face meeting with Elizabeth I (something Elizabeth evidently wanted to avoid, and which certainly never took place, yet it keeps turning up in films about Mary Queen of Scots) nearly turns into a screaming match. This film is a great argument for an MST3K for historical films (MHT3K?).
Heh, one of my favorite goofs in Pearl Harbor is the bit where Ben Affleck’s character is advising his comrades on the best way to fight a Zero: The P-40 Warhawk couldn’t outrun it, so they’d have to out-maneuver it.
Which is, well, completely backwards. The Zero could out-turn just about anything the Americans were flying at the time, but the P-40 was faster and more rugged, especially in diving hit-and-run attacks. Nevermind that it’s debatable how the guy could have come across this information flying Spitfires over Britain in 1940. :rolleyes:
Yeah, that’s pretty much my problem with The Tudors, too, though I haven’t seen a season all the way through because our Showtime preview ended. The Tudor family is enough of an historic soap opera that you don’t need to go changing things around to make things more dramatic. Or even sexy.
My main beef with the miniseries is that they rented/borrowed a lot of Tudor/Elizabethan costumes for lead female characters, and then proceeded not to fit the costume to the actor. I’m OK with them dressing Anne Boleyn in a dress that wouldn’t have shown up until about 50 years after she died. (That dress is from Elizabeth, and despite QEI’s seeming youth, it’s definitely 1570/80s.) But they should at least make alterations so it fits. That’s not historical inaccuracy; that’s just shoddy work.
I wish I’d had you guyz with me last night when I endured the tedium and nastiness of The Other Boleyn Girl. I would have left except my boys were in another part of the complex watching Owen Wilson in Drillbit Someone-or-Other and I suspect I would have liked it a LOT more.
The real Tudors were so fascinating, their real lives so dramatic, that I fail to understand, as someone above said, why film makers change so much. As for Braveheart, when it was released I heard my Grandpa spinning in his grave. He taught me to recite “Scots wha hae . .” when I was a mere slip of a lass and he gave me supreme hell for daring to wear a kilt - a girl? Wearing a kilt?
They don’t make grandpas like that any more.
