My six year old adores the movie but the songs just don't arrive quickly enough. lol So I bought the cd for her so she can play the music whenever she wants. Good clean fun. Hey, it's from Barbie! What else would you expect?
Forget those stodgy portraits of England's portly King Henry VIII hanging in museums. This Showtime series introduces viewers to a young, hunky and lustful Henry. Jonathan Rhys Meyers is all dash and panache as the star of the historical soap opera, which bursts at the seams with sex, political intrigue, sex, dangerous court liaisons and sex. In the inaugural season, Henry craves a male heir that Queen Katherine of Aragon (Maria Doyle Kennedy) has been unable to deliver (but his mistress Elizabeth has given birth to an illegitimate son). With his interest in Katherine waning, Henry turns his attentions toward a stunning young beauty named Anne Boleyn (Natalie Dormer) and makes overtures to her to become his new mistress. Putting aside affairs of the heart to tend to affairs of state and religion, Henry welcomes his wife's nephew Charles V of Spain to court and dutifully tries to hide his lack of affection for his wife. After denouncing Martin Luther and his upstart theology, Pope Clement christens Henry a defender of the faith. With pressure from Anne to get a divorce, Henry sends the devious and opportunistic Cardinal Wolsey (Sam Neill) to Rome to petition His Excellency. Amid all the political, personal and religious goings-on, the stage is set for a monumental showdown between Henry, Rome, Spain and France, and all those involved do their best to keep their heads.
Customer Rating
5
You Think You Know a Story...
on December 25, 2007
Posted by: Eminent
from NY, NY
Being a Tudor/Renaissance scholar, I am thrilled with this boxed set of Tudors Season 1. Faces to go with names in a book. Voices to go with dialog on a page. The visionary aspects the mind imagines and the soul wishes it could travel back in time to experience. While some characters are amalgams of several people, and others are omitted entirely, and perhaps not every event is portrayed precisely as it occurred, we overlook such discrepancies as irrelevant. The grandeur, the story, the magic of the time...Jonathan Rhys Meyers IS Henry the Eighth. Forever. The acting is natural, the actors comfortable in their roles as a second skin. The settings are fantastic. And, being from Showtime and without the constraints of network censors, this is one of the most realistic portrayals we could ever ask for. It is, in short...perfection.
What's great about it: Repeated viewing--woohoo!!!