Not That Boleyn Girl, the Other One!

Last year, I saw 26 movies on the big screen--not sure whether that's a record for me or not, but it was certainly the most in the five years since I started writing down the movies I see as I see them.

I had hoped to exceed that number this year by trying to average three movies a month, or 36 for the year. That plan took a major hit, when I had the flu for the majority of February and couldn't comfortably sit in a theater or even eat popcorn, which can make me cough when my throat is fine, much less when it's raw from hacking.

This weekend, though, the quest got back on track with two movies: The Other Boleyn Girl and Diary of the Dead.

Boleyn is a historial drama about the smokin' love life of Henry the VIII (Eric Bana) with the Boleyn sisters, Mary (Scarlett Johanssen) and Anne (Natalie Portman)--damn, it must be good to be king.

It's a fun movie to watch as spectacle and soap opera, with goreous costumes and a strong, multilevel performance from Portman, who goes from strong-willed girl to manipulative woman to doomed queen with equal conviction. As history, it's pretty much rubbish, as VB explained when she, JB and Dee went to Tank for sushi (yes, I'm eating sushi now--pick your jaws up off the floor, people) after the movie.

There was also a good bit of narrative shorthand used--the marriage to Anne, the split from the Catholic Church and the establishment of the Church of England all happen in space of two or three minutes (VB tells me that all took fabout ive years in reality)--and large crowds that are often heard, but rarely seen. Still, it's a great-looking movie, it moves briskly and it brings the pretty for men and women alike--throw in good dinner with good friends and dessert after at Taste of Heaven...what more could a boy want?

Well, a boy could want groceries for his nearly empty fridge, and Jessie helped with that by taking me to Trader Joe's Sunday morning. It's always so much easier to load up when a friend with a car helps out, so I'm pretty well set with a variety of tasty foods for the next three weeks. After I ate my freshly purchased pizza bagel for breakfast, I headed down to Pipers Alley for George Romero's latest zombie flick, Diary of the Dead.

This is pretty much a reboot for the series, taking it back to its lower-budget roots while at the same time winking at Romero's own cinematic past (it starts starts with students making a horror film when news of the dead rising breaks) and rendering social commentary, this time on the information age, media censorship/manipulation and the overreliance on technology. Unfortunately, Romero doesn't make his points with any subtlety, often delivering it via voiceover by one of the main characters. There are still some nice scares and, if you're into such things, serious quality kills involving scythes, arrows and difibrulator paddles.

It's odd, though, that the Blair Witch approach to horror films has come back into vogue in such a big way lately, with both this film and Cloverfield employing handheld camera techniques to give played-out subgenres (giant monsters and flesh-eating ghouls, respectively) a fresh, more immediate look.