Movie Review: The Other Boleyn Girl
Posted by isecore on 3rd January 2009
It’s been positively ages since I last attempted to write a movie review, so here goes.
Drama/period piece featuring Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson and Eric Bana.
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Based loosely on the book by the same name which in turn is fairly loosely based on actual historical events, this movie tells the story of the Boleyn sisters -Anne and Mary- and their families and their scheming to climb the ladder all the way up to the top of the royal household via Henry the 8ths genitals and habit of thinking with the same.
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Mary Boleyn (Johansson) and her older sister Anne (Portman) are daughters of a fairly wealthy and succesful something-or-other. May goes off to marry her plain old love while her father and uncle concocts a scheme to make her older sister Anne into one of Henry the 8ths many mistresses. A plot occurs which ends with Anne being married to the king and Henry telling the catholic church to go shove itself.
Well, that’s pretty much the plot anyway. The movie is as previously stated based on a book, which in turn is based on actual historical happenings. Henry the 8th was well-known for not managing to keep his penis tucked away inside his pants, and Ann Boleyn became his second wife after she managed to persuade him to split from the catholic church (in order to get an annulment from his first wife). This is all fairly well documented, you can go off to Wikipedia and read up on Anne Boleyn and all that went on.
So does this work as a movie? Kind of. All the ingredients for a great movie is there. There’s intrigue, there’s betrayal, there’s hot women with lots of cleavage, there’s brooding kings and there’s death and executions. I’ll give praise to Portman and Johanssons portrayals, they’re quite good. Eric Bana is some kind of surly and male-chauvinist king and people around them are difficult to make out.
That’s the good stuff. The bad stuff is that the movie is so amazingly melodramatic. It’s full of hot air, and everyone speaks as if they’re giving a speech. This is not helped by the weird pacing which manages to ruin what might have otherwise been an interesting ordeal and instead turns it into yet another bleedin’ boring costume drama.
The final ten minutes where you actually start to care for the characters do not make up for the hour and a half where you’re yawning away and wondering whether you left the oven on or if you should go with red or green drapes around the windows.
Provided you’re heavily into costumed dramas and can stand the boring pace this movie might be something up your alley. Me, I can’t really say I recommend it.

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