Reviews
The horrible dissertation intro is written. And it is horrible. But it also brings my dissertation wordcount up to 79728 wds. And that's after cutting out a lot.

To celebrate my almost doneness I just watched the BBC (read: not the Hollywood) adaptation of The Other Boleyn Girl. (Yes, I am a Tudor geek.)

Final verdict: the acting was excellent, particularly Jodhi May as Anne Boleyn. She's easily the best actress I've seen in the role. But the BBC production departs dramatically from the book in some weirdly anti-feminist (to my eyes) ways.

In the novel (and in Showtime's The Tudors, for that matter,) Anne is clearly a smart political schemer who ends up in over her head. In the BBC adaptation she's a bit of a silly twit, driven by jealousy of her sister and not really thinking of the potential consequences of her actions until she's almost on the throne. And Henry VIII comes across as a more-or-less ok guy, who doesn't really have much choice but to cut his uppity wife's head off. The message: uppity womenfolk will get what they deserve, girls.

(Er... what?)

Throw in some weird Real World style visual choices and a 1 hr 30 minute running time (I thought the TV version would be longer than the film, but no), and you have a pretty mixed product. It's worth seeing for the amazing performances, I guess, but it fails in some surprising ways.

The other DVD I watched recently? Hitman. It wasn't as bad as I feared (though my taste may have been blunted by a back-to-back viewing of Star Knight and Bloody Mallory). The visuals and editing were pretty slick, which begs the question of how they could have cut such a boring-ass trailer from such interesting material.

I mean, even Mr. Voice sounds bored in that trailer. Not to mention that he appears to be reading the jacket on the Eidos game, which is weird because they changed some of the Hitman's backstory in the movie so the plot he's describing is partly wrong. A lot of times you see bad trailers that were obviously made my marketers who missed what was cool about the movie they are trying to sell (witness the terrible trailers for The Princess Bride, The Iron Giant, and the generic-looking Run-Lola-Run scored Bourne Identity trailer). In this case, though, there's nothing complicated to sell: it's a straightforward action movie with some cool visuals, barely any plot, and an incoherent script. Isn't that the kind of movie trailers were born to sell?

So the movie had interesting moments of potential, but it was hampered by a really dumb & poorly written script chewed on by drooling toddlers. The acting (despite Timothy Olyphant's monotone voice) is actually not bad, though I do agree that Olyphant, much as I love him, seems miscast. Every scene he's in with the thuggish-looking Dougray Scott I wanted to tap Olyphant on the shoulder and say, see that guy playing the dangerous, semi-psychotic lawman? That's YOUR part. If he and Dougray Scott had just switched roles, I would have been a lot happier.

Also: Olga Kurylenko is a model who can act. I love her.

Also: Ave Maria needed to be used more often, for god's sake.