The Things I Do For England

If you've never seen The Private Life of Henry VIII, Netflix that tonight and skip the bodice-ripping, doggie-styling longueurs of Tudors, Showtime's 16th-century answer to what Showtime normally broadcasts after midnight. Whereas Tudors allows Jonathan Rhys Meyers to smolder and pout his regal way into historically inevitable blimpishness, The Private Life, directed by that great Hungarian emigre Alexander Korda, offered the same bawdy good fun at one-tenth the length and ten times the quality. Charles Laughton plays an older Henry, by now gleefully decapitating Ann Boleyn — successor to the heir-impaired Catherine of Aragon — and eating and fucking his way into high church Protestantism. (That today's evangelicals have the family values of this man to thank for their existence is an irony that deserves mention at every opportunity.)

Anyway, Sacha Zimmerman at TNR has a good review of the tumescent mini-series:

The lean, muscled, pale-blue-eyed "it" boy of the moment languishes shirtless throughout most scenes lustily eating juicy pomegranates, getting shaved by his dressers, bedding everyone but his wife, and even wrestling with the king of France. No doubt his many lovelorn fans will appreciate every shirtless, simmering shot. Nevertheless, the sex is decidedly laughable at times. At one point, before mauling a chambermaid, the king asks, "Do you consent?" as though it's 1994 at Antioch College. Another scene finds the young king receiving his first blow job from Mary Boleyn (Anne's sister) after indelicately asking her what she had learned during her time in France. It is simply Jonathan Rhys Meyers porn. Unfortunately, the writing is so dreadful, the normally evocative Meyers is reduced to stomach-churning frat-boy antics and the sulky tantrums of the boy king. Considering Henry was supposedly a Renaissance man of true order–a musician, an artist, a theologian–this insipid portrayal seems grossly gratuitous.