Spectacle! Boats! Boom!!

Elizabeth (The Golden Age) is one of the great movies of 1944, when the world was at war. The cinematography is lush and stylized, the music is bombastic and symphonic and Clive Owen as Sir Walter Raleigh just stepped out of an Errol Flynn wet dream. If England were currently in mortal combat with Spain, it would be perfect, but it's no problem to substitute either the United States of America and/or those who follow in the trail of Osama bin Laden for the fanatic Spaniards who are just a leetle too much into God and all the meanness he allegedly has in mind,

I liked it very much. I'm not complaining. Cate Blanchette does thwarted lust as well as anybody and better than most, and she does witty, brittle and (when needed) heroic and statuesque better than what is probably an entirely different set of most.

It was as if someone (preferably Cate Blanchette) were sitting next to me in the theater fondling me, so shameless but satisfying a manipulation was this movie.

Scenes of barbarism and torture were not the Queen's fault. Apparently, Walsingham was Rumsfeld gone wild.

Editor's Note: Goodness me. Having written, I go to rottentomatoes and find that I am in the majority. Kind of. In the "liked it anyway" end of the majority.