{"id":460,"date":"2008-03-01T00:12:23","date_gmt":"2008-03-01T00:12:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2008\/03\/you-take-what-you-can-get.html"},"modified":"2008-03-01T00:12:23","modified_gmt":"2008-03-01T00:12:23","slug":"you-take-what-you-can-get","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/03\/you-take-what-you-can-get.html","title":{"rendered":"You take what you can get"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So, what with today being the one day in a 15-day period that Michael was around, we decided to try to do something &#8211; a movie. How about it? Of course, this is the Late Winter Dregs, so there is really not a lot out there (<em>There Will Be Blood <\/em>is gone already&#8230;durn!). We settled on <em>Vantage Point<\/em>.<br \/>\nWe parked, walked up to the theater at about 5 for the 5:05 show. Michael went to the ticket kiosk, which told him the 5:05 was sold out. We looked around. There were two people in line at the ticket office and the lobby was empty. Private party? Buying out the 5:05 of <em>Vantage Point <\/em>on the last day of February?<br \/>\nSo we went up to the ticket office and I said, doubtfully, &#8220;The 5:05 of <em>Vantage Point <\/em>is really sold out?&#8221;<br \/>\n&#8220;Oh! Were you coming to see that movie?&#8221; said the girl at the window.\u00a0 Um, yes. &#8220;Just go into the lobby and I&#8217;ll send the manager out to talk to you.&#8221;<br \/>\nWhat? Had we stumbled upon some secret gathering? Were we suspected of something because we were going to see a movie about a political assassination in Spain? Had we inadvertently uttered a code that was going to get us entrance into a Secret Chamber in which they show late winter releases that don&#8217;t reek?<br \/>\nNo, the manager (a guy who might just have been the lost twin of he nervous physicist in <em>Lost<\/em>) explained &#8211; the time stamp on the print was messed up &#8211; it had something to do with it being February 29 &#8211; and so it wouldn&#8217;t run. (<em>But&#8230;who are you? Penny?!) <\/em>So we could go see any movie we wanted, no charge.<br \/>\nVery nice, except for the whole &#8220;Late Winter Dregs&#8221; concept still being in effect. Gee, what shall it be? <em>Semi-Pro? Fool&#8217;s Gold? <\/em>Darn, I can&#8217;t decide.<br \/>\nWe ended up at <em>The Other Boleyn Girl, <\/em>which didn&#8217;t displease me, even as it didn&#8217;t exactly thrill Michael.<br \/>\nMy verdict?<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\n<div>It&#8217;s loosely based on a novel which is loosely based on history, so what you basically have is a core &#8211; Mary Boleyn had an affair with Henry first, then Anne followed, then Anne was executed &#8211; that was historically accurate, but precious little else. I mean &#8211; Mary Boleyn wasn&#8217;t even present at her sister&#8217;s execution and certainly did not stalk off afterwards carting away little Elizabeth to raise in the country. I agree with Barbara Nicolosi that the central theme is a good one &#8211; the horror of the Boylens using their daughter as chattel in the quest for power &#8211; but the truth of the situation is far more complex than the movie allows.\u00a0 I think what interests me is that both of the sisters&#8217; characters are stripped of their strength and sophistication and given more\u00a0total victim status\u00a0than history hints they actually had. Anne was far more\u00a0accomplished and\u00a0substantive\u00a0than she is in the film and Mary&#8217;s character, in particular, is much different in the film than what history seems to indicate she was really about.\u00a0 As in &#8211; in the film, she&#8217;s portrayed as an innocent handed over by her family to Henry, when in fact she&#8217;d been around the French court a bit, history indicates, long before. \u00a0<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<div>It was pretty to look at, but oddly rather claustrophobic.<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<div>Fairly good acting, although I felt Henry could have been a stronger character and the American actresses &#8211; Scarlett Johannsen and Natalie Portman&#8230;well, the characters should have been portrayed by Englishwomen. Except not Keira Knightly. Please.<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<div>We decided that from now on, we really prefer that the\u00a0 all British historical dramas be acted out completely by the cast of <em>Rome.<\/em>\u00a0 That would be best. Thanks.\u00a0<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<div>All that said, I enjoyed it. Maybe I&#8217;m just desperate to get out of the house. And mind you, I&#8217;ll not be taking responsibility for <em>your <\/em>opinions if you rush out and spend your eight bucks on it. \u00a0Because, remember, I saw it for free.\u00a0 That makes everything better, in my book.<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So, what with today being the one day in a 15-day period that Michael was around, we decided to try to do something &#8211; a movie. How about it? Of course, this is the Late Winter Dregs, so there is really not a lot out there (There Will Be Blood is gone already&#8230;durn!). We settled&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-460","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>You take what you can get - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/03\/you-take-what-you-can-get.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"You take what you can get - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"So, what with today being the one day in a 15-day period that Michael was around, we decided to try to do something &#8211; a movie. 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How about it? Of course, this is the Late Winter Dregs, so there is really not a lot out there (There Will Be Blood is gone already&#8230;durn!). 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=460"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}