Of course, when I first heard about Showtime's The Tudors miniseries, I knew that I wasn't going to get Shakespeare. But their approach seemed sound: the court of Henry VIII was full of sex, lies and intrigue, and the young Henry was pretty smoking hot. The miniseries promised to play up the rock and roll aspects of Tudor life, and, with Jonathon Rhys Myers as Henry, it all sounded pretty good, in a music video sort of way.
Alas, there's good-bad, and then there's bad, and then there's just blah.
The Tudors is just blah. Now, I know that it would seem impossible for JRM to play blah, but he seems to be phoning his performance in. Great Harry should be a larger than life character, pompous, yet charming; witty, yet brawling; educated, but lascivious. JRM gives the impression that Great Harry is spending all his time wishing he were fishing in Scotland. In other words, he's pretty disengaged from the rest of the action. Oh there's intrigue, and hot ladies-in-waiting, and scheming cardinals, and deer-hounds, jousting, etc. Everything you would expect a Tudor movie to have, but there's no fire. No spirit. No va-ba-boom. There's a certain clockwork quality to the show. Five minutes of scheming, five minutes of feasting, ten minutes of canoodling. Then back to the scheming. So, while I was expecting to be disappointed, at least I was hoping to be entertained by the awfulness of it all. Instead, I was just bored.
And also, everyone's super clean. Somehow I don't think people in Tudor England were quite that super-clean. Nor the roadways, or the hallways, or London Bridge, for that matter.
I think I'll go watch Velvet Goldmine again--a movie that's the very antithesis of blah.
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That's funny that you mention the cleanness. I started to watch the show on the link you provided a few weeks back here at work (I don't have TV at home), and got as far as the unlacing of drawers in the first sex scene, and all I could think was, "Man. In real life, these people would be stinkin' to high heaven!" Still, I would've liked to watch the whole thing but there's only so much goofing off I can get away with here. And now that you tell me it wasn't up to snuff (or sniff), guess I won't bother. That is a pretty cute guy, though, and would do well for Ban in his twenties. But who would you get to play him as a teen? I told you about my cousin's book a while back (Flight of the Goose). Her agent has been trying to sell the movie rights and first Leonardo DiCaprio's "people" were looking at it, and I was horrified because I really didn't picture her hero as looking anything like Leo. But now the production company that put out Inconvenient Truth and some other films like that is nibbling. Of course, it may not sell at all, which would be fine with me since I'm a book person not a movie-fan. But I'm sure my cousin would appreciate a wider audience. She's not really a fame-hound, but the issues are VERY important to her, and I think the story was really torn straight from her soul. I'm sure you know the feeling. That's one of the things I sense about Califa: how much you love it yourself. On that note, I'll end this totally rambling comment.
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