It's chick lit with a royal, historical twist: as this LA Times article points out, one only has to look at recent Oscar winners and nominees (like Helen Mirren and Cate Blanchett), the recently opened The Other Boleyn Girl, and the future projects of rising starlettes like Keira Knightly and Emily Blunt to see that the historical court drama is currently an "it" genre. It's melodrama mixed with political intrigue. It's interesting female characters who "paid for their ambition with their lives, or at least, their loins" in bodices. History moves away from stuffy to sexy, as in the case of Eric Bana's Henry VIII, who instead of being "a caricature with the chicken drumsticky thing...that we know from history books," is a "young, sexy Henry who can make girls swoon with his own unbridled brio, rather than just his position."
I've wanted to see The Other Boleyn Girl for probably the same reason I love books/movies like Pride and Prejudice: they're historical soap operas. As Altman points out, our culture tends to see melodramas and women films to be a lower kind of art; what's interesting to me is that even though many of these period movies are at their core, melodramas, they have achieved critical acclaim and popularity. Perhaps the historical elements and the period costumes give them more legitimacy (even though the plot sounds like something that could be on Days of Our Lives).
2 comments:
The book is entertaining in a very chick-lit sort of way, with a story that is decent. Not the kind of unbelievable literary prose you will find in a novel like Atonement (which I highly suggest everyone read, it's incredible), but still enjoyable for the "old world" human interest factor that Jim mentions has caught on. The characters have strong personalities, and the plot winds tightly before it unravels. In sum, read it. But read Atonement first.
While I was driving to class this morning, I heard Ryan Seacrest talking about The Other Boleyn Girl and he kept emphasizing that it's being marketed as a woman's film and hoping to reach women as the movie's target audience. I realize Ryan Seacrest probably isn't the most reliable source, but I still found that kind of entertaining since I always thought the movie took great pains to market ScarJo and Natalie Portman as reasons (for men especially) to see the movie.
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