ELIZABETH and ELIZABETH:  THE GOLDEN AGE Starring Cate Blanchett and Geoffrey Rush Directed by Shekar Kapur
ELIZABETH ***1/2 (out of ****) Also starring Christopher Eccleston, Joseph Fiennes, Ralph Richardson, Richard Attenborough, Fanny Ardent, and James Frain 1998 124 min R
			ELIZABETH:  THE GOLDEN AGE **1/2 (out of ****) Also Starring Clive Owen, Abbie Cornish, and Samantha Morton 2007 114 min PG13
	“Elizabeth” is superb and never stuffy – just the right combination of histrionics, “Godfather” intrigue, costumes, and savagery.  Seeing it on home video, it’s hard to imagine just how effective “Elizabeth” was in the theater – all decapitations and heads-on-spikes and knife jabs of light across black spaces where any debauchery and treachery could be hidden in dark corners.  Everyone’s sleeping with everyone else, priests beat people to death, and you get to hear the pope call someone a “whore.”  The Bollywood influence – the director is Indian – is apparent not just in the costumes and color, but in “Elizabeth’s” attention to all the background figures – the lower castes – running the royal household.  Cate Blanchett’s defining performance shows off how quickly she can change her adorable girlish grin into something gaunt, grave, and goofy, as newly-crowned Queen Elizabeth suffers intrigue and treachery from all sides.  Geoffrey Rush is glowering and blackclad as her eventual henchman; he’s the only male character who never has to wear ridiculous poofy pants.  Two things offset the movie’s 100% Catholic villainy.  First, in the opening animation, Catholic and Protestant are represented by identical crosses.  Second is the deeply creepy ending.  Throughout the film, Protestant Elizabeth is accused of heresy for what sounds to modern ears like religious tolerance – yet what is her climactic transformation into the Virgin Queen if not the usurpation of the Blessed Virgin Mary?  And don’t think this is lost on the moviemakers, as they have her appear in terrifying makeup and speaking in unnaturally deep tones.  7 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Actress; winner for Makeup. The recent sequel – subtitled “The Golden Age” – is kind of all-over-the-place.  It feels more like the fourth “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie than a sequel to the 1998 “Elizabeth.”  Everything shimmers with CGI fakery, the cameraman can’t hold still to save his life, bloodthirsty monsters are replaced with bloodthirsty Catholics, pirates save the day, a hot chick gives a freedom speech that sounds suspiciously anachronistic in its open-mindedness, and the script has trouble pulling everything together. Yet the core of the movie – the relationship between the Queen and Sir Walter Raleigh (Clive Owen) – is good.  The sequence in which a smirking Raleigh regales the Queen with the spoils of the New World is flawless; the smirk Clive wears while promoting potatoes and tobacco is just shy of sarcastic and the guarded “let’s get it on!” quips he and Elizabeth trade are priceless.  It’s like they’re both amused by how obnoxious Raleigh is and what a predicament this is.  Blanchett is good as always, lonely at the top.  She’s so sad when she hears of that vast beautiful emptiness of a New World she’ll never see.  The third act is dominated by a sea battle with the Spanish armada that lasts for days – a sea battle in which the main character does not participate.  What could be the substance for an entire movie is here crammed into about ten minutes.  That’s pretty hard to pull off and director Kapur shows some cajones even attempting it.  There’s a lot of cramming going on – Mary Queen of Scots (Samantha Morton) and assassins and a pregnant maidservant and Sir Francis Drake popping up near the very end and the King of Spain bouncing about on bowlegs like a troll – and it doesn’t all come together. Finished Friday, December 14th, 2007 Copyright © 2007 Friday & Saturday Night