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April 19, 2008 6:43 AM
Remembering Lexington & Concord
Two-hundred thirty-three years ago this morning, a hearty band of farmers said, after ten years of provocation, "enough is enough."
God bless their memory!
Happy Patriot's Day everyone!
The Surface Driven Film
Queen Elizabeth Surrendered To..
My weakness for historical film, almost any historical film, had me laboring through Shekhar Kapur's "Elizabeth the Golden Age" this week, in a few different bouts, though "bouts" sounds like I was in a fighting match with the film. It was really more of a sleeping match. The deep ruby hues of the art direction and the somnolent ratcheting back to slow motion, even as Mary Queen of Scots is about to lose her head, did the trick. That's pretty bad when you sputter back to consciousness, blurting "did she lose her head yet?"
The fact is that we need a few more Cecile B. De Milles and a few more Charleton Hestons on the sets of these major epics, because these lush tales of the past seem to be almost completely controlled by the art director and almost completely devoid of heart and soul--at least that "heart and soul" that would define the times of the era under scrutiny. Some of these films achieve a kind of thread-counter's intimacy with the forms of the past (the appearance of the throne room, the elaborate gothic traceries of the hallways, the hair piece signature of the queen's ladies), but the soul of the era, the heart-collage of ideas that make up the time, feels painfully like a New Age teenager making a tie-dye circle print out of a Rubens canvas. Somehow, the keepers of England's Gothic cathedrals turned over their cultural heritage, and Good Queen Bess no less, to a band of Calcutta snake-charmers.
And rarely are the makers of a film so clear about their intent. Opines Tim Bevan, producer:
The whole idea was to make a film that spoke to a contemporary audience...and there were two things. One was the overall plot..for a religious fanatic who'll stop at nothing, basically, in order to have their message shoved through and that, actually that the only way forward is one of tolerance, and that we would portray the Queen as a tolerant woman, basically...
And Kapur takes Elizabethan England on quite a little space walk too:
..And so, the second one (the second "Elizabeth" movie in the series), really for me, was about divinity. Was when you have that kind of absolute power, you aspire to be divine...so if you look at the Armada, she finally does become divine, and that's why the Armada is shot in that way..and we've taken the armor off. [Elizabeth] is no longer the avenging. She's clothed, and, as the Spirit, really. And it's almost like the Spirit willed the waves. It's almost like the Spirit willed the fire...so she truly became of the gods..
Wow. A tolerant woman becoming one of the gods. That is so DEEP, man.
Why do the hard-eyed money men turn over good film-making money to idiots like this?
More of the Farm Journal -- April 17, 2008
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