Sis-tahs 4-evah: The Other Boleyn Girl

The historical romance genre as kiddie porn: Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson in The Other Boleyn Girl (Photo: Columbia Pictures)

The Other Boleyn Girl, about two virtuous daughters who become rival whores for King Henry VIII, may reach its apex when Anne (Natalie Portman) takes her sibling Mary (Scarlett Johansson) by the hand, on the night before the latter beds the King for the first time, and exclaims, “My little sis-tah! My golden sis-tah! My milk-and-honey sis-tah!”

It’s no use wondering what real actresses might have done with these roles, because Peter Morgan’s screenplay (he also wrote The Queen) has almost nothing on its mind.

Liberty, Equality, and Torture: Goya’s Ghosts

In Goya’s Ghosts, the maverick filmmaker Milos Forman has accomplished the unimaginable: He has somehow wrested a good performance from Natalie Portman. As Inés Bilbatúa, a wrongly jailed woman who becomes politically inconvenient upon her release, Portman eschews the pipsqueak shrillness that made her so maddening in Closer and Garden State. She immerses herself in the character’s unglamorous fate, devolving from a happy-go-lucky blonde in white lace (we first see Inés as she poses in Goya’s studio) to a mentally disturbed, prematurely old vagabond whose teeth, hair, and skin have turned frighteningly ashen.

The movie begins in 1790s Madrid, where black-robed clerics at the Holy Office of the Inquisition denounce Francisco de Goya’s etchings (grim fantasies that reflect the injustices of the day) as “demonic filth.” One inquisitor, on learning that Goya’s prints are sold in Rome and elsewhere abroad, wails: “This is how the world sees us!” Forman seats these holier-than-thou hysterics at a long rectangular table in high-backed chairs—the joke being that the Inquisition could be a corporate boardroom at any place and time in history . . .

Continue reading at Willamette Week.

Closer: Julia vs. Clive vs. Natalie vs. Jude

Closer is a gift, an unassailable gift to movie critics. It’s a gift precisely because it’s so stupendously, outrageously, ludicrously bad, and therefore provides much merriment in the evisceration procedure.

British playwright Patrick Marber penned the screenplay, an adaptation of his 1997 stage work. I neither know nor care what Mr. Marber’s sexual orientation happens to be; he writes, however, the way a gay man imagines that straight men talk when talking about women. For example, in a scene where Clive Owen and Natalie Portman circle each other around a strip club’s private room, Ms. Portman’s character Alice is supposed to be sought after, fought over by men, though as Ms. Portman plays her (that is to say, as a bland pipsqueak) one cannot imagine why. “You have the face of an angel,” Mr. Owen informs her, before juxtaposing his observation with, “What does your

Innocent Hearts. Even More Innocent Heads

One of the most loathsome movie-going experiences at this year’s Seattle International Film Festival, Garden State, a vulgar, self-consciously quirky fiasco written, directed by, and starring Zach Braff, has now been excreted upon the cinema at large. As also pertains in the wretched, offensive, and Satanically unfunny Napoleon Dynamite, another Sundance acquired bomb foisted on the public by Fox Searchlight this summer, Garden State’s humor, an assaultive blend of slight rudeness, deadpan tone, and maudlin, gooey crap, revolves entirely around how stupid people are, how ridiculous they appear in contrived situations. Ahh, the good old United States of America.

I’m not surprised that audiences of rudderless 20-nothings are lapping this film up like so much spilled Hamm’s; what’s (mildly) surprising is that critics are fertilizing Garden State with laudatory manure.