April 12 movie: The Six Wives of Henry VIII. Parts 5 and 6: Catherine Howard and Catherine Parr. I read that the Catherine Howard segment was fairly ahistorical, which is sad because the rest of the series is so scrupulously accurate. And really, what's the need to fuck around with the history here? The true story is so incredibly dramatic as it is. I had the same problem with the Cate Blanchett Elizabeth; for instance that famous " I have but the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king" speech. In the Blanchett movie she gives that speech to a few people in her privy council. In real life she said those words while riding a horse, wearing armor, to inspire her army before battle. Why the heck would you change an event like that to make it less dramatic?
Anyway. I was annoyed at the inaccuracies in the Catherine Howard segment -- they make Catherine into a villain who coldly seduces Culpeper to try and get pregnant, while I think in real life she was just a silly young girl who had never learned to control her libido.
The Catherine Parr, segment, in contrast, was one of the best of the whole series. And that's saying something! I wish I had seen this miniseries before Elizabeth R. Because the actors who play Catherine Parr and Tom Seymour show up in both series. I recognized the actor who played Catherine Parr, and it was driving me crazy through the whole episode trying to figure out who she was. Looked it up afterwards and discovered that I've seen her in a couple of things, but the one I recognized her from was surely the "Checkmate" episode of The Prisoner. She played the Queen, the woman who is hypnotized into believing she's in love with Number 6, and then given a tracking device so the watchers can track him through her.
A few years back, one of the WNYC talk shows had as a guest David Starkey, a British historian and author of Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII. He sounded very Oxbridge, very formal, but he had a marvelous dry wit. When he got to Catherine Howard, he intoned, approvingly, "If you walk down the streets of Manhattan, you will find young women wearing pants dropped down so low that you can see the tops of their thongs, showing off the tattoos just above the cracks of their buttocks. That's Catherine Howard."
http://www.wnyc.org/stream/ram.py?file=ranyco/ll101303d.ra has a link;
Ah, the discussion is at 14:00 minutes into the interview. It's a hoot and half to hear this serious Cambridge don using the phrase "butt cleavage".