Flick Pick: The Other Boleyn Girl

Put together a period film thats set in England, is about royalty and history, and does not have Kiera Knightley in it, then I'm all for it. The Other Boleyn Girl is about an ambitious family that “pimps out” its daughters for the sake of power and prestige. Anne Boleyn (Natalie Portman) is the saucy flirt, her sister, Mary (Scarlett Johansson), the demure naïf. At the instigation of her uncle and father, Anne comes close to bewitching King Henry (Eric Bana) but makes the mistake of looking more proficient on a horse than he does. So it’s soft spoken Mary (a newlywed) who becomes his mistress, while Anne hatches a plot to flash her dark eyes at the goatish monarch and then refuse to put out. Driven half-mad by thwarted lust, the king discards Mary even after giving birth to a son that he's been perpetually waiting for, rebuffs the papacy, and forms a new religion to divorce Catherine of Aragon—who cannot bear him a male heir anyway, so Henry can claim there’s civic virtue in his vice. You know the Tudor drill. The movie pretty much is all about schemes, schemes, and more schemes. It started reaaalll slow then they fast forwarded the end. One scene Anne's pregnant, then she's conceived in the next. It's a good film to watch though. At least all of them speak with a British accent. After watching it, it sort of makes you want to buy the book (written by Philippa Gregory) just so you'd know about the other details they failed to show in the film.