Thursday Movie Picks: Period Drama

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Welcome, Thursdonians. Look at me, creating words. Anyhoo, for this week's Thursday Movie Picks, hosted by Wanderer at Wandering Through the Shelves, we're taking trips into the past. Specifically, we're talking about period dramas. It's a vague term, but let's try to narrow it just a bit. For me, it means dramas, duh, set in an era earlier than the one in which it was filmed. That's still pretty vast, but it helps. What doesn't help is that in the mood to be a jerk. That means we're talking period dramas you should avoid because they suck.

The Scarlet Letter

(1995)

I read and wrote a paper on Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic novel of the same name in college about a year after this movie was released. A few weeks after I turned in that paper (ahem...I got an A) I decided to watch the film. I mean, it stars Demi Moore. It should be all right. At least, that's what I told myself. Nope, I was wrong. It was terrible. The best thing about it is that Emma Stone makes fun of it in the 2010 movie Easy A.

Pearl Harbor

(2001)

As you probably know, Titanic came out in 1997, took a famous historical event, slathered a sappy fictional romance on top of it, and made goo-gobs of money. That last fact meant it was no surprise that Hollywood was scrambling for another tragedy to soften and romanticize. Fresh off the financial success of the craptacular Armageddon, which followed that template, Michael Bay gives us this crap.

Tristan + Isolde

(2006)

Oh, I don't know. Sigh. It's set in England during the Dark Ages, James Franco is in it, and that's about all I got. Okay, I put it on one night and suddenly sleeping gas started emanating from the screen and I was out. Knowing that sometimes I'm just too tired to finish a movie I start, and I'll love it when I go back to it at a more decent hour and give it another shot. So that's what I did. I pressed play on it during daylight hours and...phew...I made it through. However, I was sitting there slack-jawed out of boredom the whole time. I can't tell you what it was about or what happened. And I don't care. If you want to know, go watch it yourself. I don't recommend it, though.

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