A Sequel to "Elizabeth"?!!

OK - so I said that the next post would be about Popular Mechanics' analysis of Katrina. I'm going to hold off for a moment, because I just found out something...

Though it's not on my list, I really enjoyed the film Elizabeth, starring Cate Blanchett, Geoffrey Rush, etc. I love the spy genre, and this film had all those elements. Let's face it, Walsingham was a badass - for any era. A combination of George Smiley and an elizabethan "Shaft".

Anyhow, I was poking around on IMDB (trying to figure out what happened to Tia Carrere, since I was watching Wayne's World on the Tivo - she's doing voiceovers for animated films, by the way). And I came across Clive Owen's bio - I like Clive Owen.

So there it was, something called Elizabeth: The Golden Age. Turns out, they're doing a sequel, focusing on England's war with Spain, and Elizabeth's relationship with Sir Walter Raleigh (who will be played by Owen). Sounds pretty good.

Shakhar Kapur, who directed the original and will be directing the sequel, talks about it on his blog: http://www.shekharkapur.com/blog/archives/2006/02/may_the_force_b.htm#more

Turns out, it's going to be a trilogy...

Oh, and speaking of trilogies - a cool little side note. Like most of the fans of the original Star Wars films, I was disappointed in the prequels. But when The Phantom Menace was being filmed, there appeared on the net a series of bootleg and fake trailers. The coolest of these used scenes from other movies, spliced them together, and, in many cases, inserted graphics to make them look like Lucasarts scenes.

One of the scenes was from Elizabeth - the scene in which there is an assassination attempt on the queen. A cloaked assassin comes towards her in slow motion, his face hidden behind a monk's hood.

In the fake trailer, a light saber appeared from the monk's robes, a la a Jedi Knight.

Quite cool - and after the disappointment of the 2nd prequel, I realized that had Lucas done more to follow the examples of these filmmakers, those three films would have been much better (one of the other scenes in the fake trailer was from Braveheart, a mass battle scene in which the Scots take on the English en masse - the director of the trailer painstakingly substituted light sabers for the crude weapons the Scots used.

That's what I wanted to see - the dark mystery and suspense of a Sith lord stealthily approaching his prey in a creepy corridor. The excitement of a mass of passionate jedi flying into battle.

I wish I had a link to that trailer... wait, here it is:

http://download.theforce.net/theater/episode2/ep2_large.mov

You have to download it, and it's in Quicktime. But tell me that Lucas couldn't have learned a thing or two...

Now - next one should be about Katrina....

- Andrew Langer