Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Elizabeth: The Golden Age / **1/2 (2007)

Shekhar Kapur’s “Elizabeth: The Golden Age” marks more than just a return to an England of visual opulence and intricate political intrigue, it also underscores a personal revelation in the life of this cinema aficionado, whose first self-appointed task in the fall of 1998, just a few short days after gaining certified status as an online film critic, was to see and review a fairly obscure indie costume drama that chronicled the early years of the reign of one of the country’s most important and famous monarchs. The person who invests much of his or herself into a personal pastime for an extended length of time never measures their dedication according to months or years, but when an occasion arises where we are reminded of where we’ve come from and how far the journey has taken us, it often boggles us. The appearance of this endeavor, a follow-up to a movie that I hold in high esteem for essentially being the first classic picture I saw from the perspective of a film analyst and writer, is a sobering prospect. It hardly seems possible that nine years have come and gone, and here I am still writing, analyzing, and caring about the material that I see on a theater screen.