Anonymous

No probably not.

"Was Shakespeare a Fraud?"

Welcome to Thursday at The Tagline! Because I'm sure everyone else in the world is as interested in movies about conjectural British History during the Elizabethan Era, I thought today I would review Anonymous, which finally made its way to the top of my "Stuff I'll Watch Some Day" list over the weekend. Starring Rhys Ifans (He was Curt Connors in The Amazing Spider-Man) as Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, who if you know your English history was notable as a patron of the arts during the reign of Elizabeth Tudor, and also was notable as a general fuck-up, who was born as heir to the second oldest and perhaps richest earldom in the kingdom, and died having lost his entire estate and fortune, over a long life of mishaps, intrigue, and failed ventures. The movie puts forth, as a number of people have since the late 1920s, that Shakespeare was not the author of his works. Instead, Oxfordian theorists suggest that Edward de Vere was the true author, and that for various political reasons he chose to remain anonymous. This historically real and factually tenuous theory is the central conceit in the movie, and Oxford's love of poetry and theater (which is a matter of historical record) at odds with the puritanical views of the ruthless Cecils (well they're played as the villains in the movie) serve to propel the tragic events of the plot forward. I beg everyone to forgive me, because I am incapable of divorcing my experience with this movie from both literary scholarship and English history (and really if you are aware of either I don't see how you could) and so this post may end up being a history lesson in addition to being about a movie. 

The Moth Diaries

Or as I like to think of it, Lesbian Dracula.

"..."

Hey everyone, welcome to Thursday's Tagline! Today I thought we might take a brief detour to snowy northern Canada, so that we could talk about The Moth Diaries, another one of my spectacular late night Netflix adventures. Starring Sarah Bolger (who I remember as Mary in The Tudors as Rebecca, a student at an all-girls prep-school. Now I get a little worried whenever a movie starts with a girl narrating something she is writing in a diary (especially with the possibility of vampires in the offing) but I decided to press on anyway. Rebecca seems right off the bat like kind of a troubled girl. We find out that her dad killed himself a few years before the movie takes place, I guess he was a artsy writer poet or something, anyway, back to Rebecca, she is doing okay now, thanks in part to her besty, Lucy (Sarah Gadon, who I saw in Cosmopolis, some day I'll get around to reviewing it I swear) who she... really likes. Now I'm assuming the "feeling" is mutual, because I had lots of close friends who I didn't talk to while I was taking a bubble bath and they were playing with the bubbles. That's pretty good friends, and later events support my "not just friends" theory.