I watched "Henry VIII" on PBS

Interesting and original three-hour movie, but the editing is a bit too zippy. It's all about the latter years of his reign, when he became a big jerk in his neurotic quest to produce male heirs, and the editors seemed to be sympathizing with ol' Henry's panic as they rush together through six wives and related misfortunes. I had read the king's Wikipedia entry beforehand, so I knew why his weight ballooned and his health plummeted during a "Two years later..." scene break in part 2; I'm not sure I could have otherwize puzzled out just what had happened to him. (He had this thigh torn open during a joust, and infection slowly crippled and then killed him. We get to see the injury happen, but the connection isn't made explicit.)

The star-power focal point seemed to be Helena Bonham Carter as Anne Boleyn, playing her as a freespeaking hothead. It wasn't clear to me why she rather quickly came to love Henry after he manipulated her into marriage by overtly blocking her intended wedding to another nobleman, but, whatever. Blame the editors again, I guess. Interestingly, hers is the only of the film's many executions where the production crew crafted a wax likeness of her bloodied noggin for the swordsman to display for the crowd.

Learned a cinematic trick: if you need a male actor of average build to look grossly fat partway through a production, but don't want to bury his face in prosthetics, have his character suddenly favor a full beard, shaped to suggest bulbous jowls and chin underneath.

There were way, way too many scenes showing an agitator agitating a crowd, except for a single scowling man in the back, who then slips into the shadows: dum-dum-dummmmm. Also the crowd during the (frequent) beheading scenes seemed to be the exact same people every time, standing in the same spots, but that's commoners for you, I guess.

I knew it would end with a fade-out on Elizabeth, though they didn't zip into the future to show her in full regalia as I expected.

Apologies Accepted

Oh man, I feel tears almost, for serious.

(It's a reaction to this site. There is apparently also a fuck you, frenchie reaction to it, which seems to be nonfunctional, HA-ha. Yanked from pseudomanitou.)