TV Thoughts
Gosh, I seem to be posty all of a sudden.
We've just finished the second season of the UK version of Life on Mars and I'm very curious what other people thought about the ending. What are we supposed to take away from that? It's better to commit suicide and embrace a satisfying hallucination than to deal with the complex emotions and difficult recovery process of the real world?
I don't watch The Tudors, but I read about it and see pictures in EW. I'm pretty familiar with the history of that era and I've just been reading a meticulously researched mystery series set in that time. While I love Jonathan Rhys-Meyers and can certainly understand that people would rather watch an attractive guy than a disgusting one, it seems to me--from this distance--that the show is really changing the historical dynamic by the inaccuracy of his portrayal. By the point that Henry VIII married Catherine Howard (where the show is this season), the king was grossly fat, no longer able to ride, and had a suppurating ulcer in one leg that generated an appalling smell. Observers mourned the fate of a man once called the best athlete in Europe and many were horrified to think of that aging pile atop a seventeen year old girl, although there was also much speculation that the king was impotent by that time. As I say, I haven't watched the show, but based on, for example this video, he may be limping, but Rhys-Meyers' Henry is hardly a disgusting ruin of a once-able man.
We've just finished the second season of the UK version of Life on Mars and I'm very curious what other people thought about the ending. What are we supposed to take away from that? It's better to commit suicide and embrace a satisfying hallucination than to deal with the complex emotions and difficult recovery process of the real world?
I don't watch The Tudors, but I read about it and see pictures in EW. I'm pretty familiar with the history of that era and I've just been reading a meticulously researched mystery series set in that time. While I love Jonathan Rhys-Meyers and can certainly understand that people would rather watch an attractive guy than a disgusting one, it seems to me--from this distance--that the show is really changing the historical dynamic by the inaccuracy of his portrayal. By the point that Henry VIII married Catherine Howard (where the show is this season), the king was grossly fat, no longer able to ride, and had a suppurating ulcer in one leg that generated an appalling smell. Observers mourned the fate of a man once called the best athlete in Europe and many were horrified to think of that aging pile atop a seventeen year old girl, although there was also much speculation that the king was impotent by that time. As I say, I haven't watched the show, but based on, for example this video, he may be limping, but Rhys-Meyers' Henry is hardly a disgusting ruin of a once-able man.