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The Tudors - The Complete Second Season
Availability:
In Stock
Price:
$39.98
$25.61*
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| Part No: | B001EO748M |
| Manufacturer: | Showtime Ent. |
| MFG Part: | PARD892714D |
| Customer Rating: | 4.5 / 5.0 |
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Power, sex, delusion and tragedy were hallmarks of The Tudors: The Complete First Season, and they are all the more so in The Complete Second Season. The story of Britain's King Henry VIII (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), The Tudors is a dynamic history of a kingdom whose role on the 16th century world stage seems largely defined by Henry's narcissistic whims. Season two is very much taken up with Henry's determination to break free of papal authority in Rome and establish himself as head of England's church--all because he seeks to divorce Queen Catherine (Maria Doyle Kennedy) and marry Anne Boleyn (Natalie Dormer). Meanwhile, poor Catherine is kept locked away from court, unable to see her daughter Mary (Sarah Bolger) but refusing to relinquish her throne despite such punishment. As for Anne, she enjoys Henry's passion and commitment, but only to a point. When Henry marries her (in a union not recognized by Rome nor many British subjects) and she does not produce a male heir, his fickle attentions begin to wander, and a grand power play by Anne's father, Thomas Boleyn (Nick Dunning) begins to unravel. In time, Henry's focus shifts to soon-to-be third wife Jane Seymour (Anita Briem), whom the king sees as a symbol of his own redemption after the complications of his love life to date. Toward the end of The Complete Second Season, all the hints that Henry's lack of scruples is leading to a full-scale psychological breakdown begin to show, manifest in his many cruelties and--at the last minute--a clear sign of his notorious gluttony to come. Other stories woven into the colorful, lustful, intrigue-driven season two concern the fate of Henry's one-time mentor Sir Thomas More (Jeremy Northam), who refuses to cooperate with Henry's attempted separation from the Catholic faith and pays dearly for it. The pope himself (Peter O'Toole) turns up in sometimes near-comical responses to the king's intransigence, and the untimely fate of many interesting characters during Henry's wrathful sweep of his court proves a shocking development mid-season. All the actors are first-rate, even down to the smallest roles, and the show's spare but compelling use of nudity and sex scenes makes The Tudors powerful adult entertainment. --Tom Keogh
Genre: Television: Series Rating: NR Release Date: 30-DEC-2008 Media Type: DVD
| We purchased this disc set and when it came in the mail we opened it up and it had two disc 2's and no disc 1. So we reported it to , got it returned, and then exchanged (very quickly and effeciently I might add). Got the second order in the the mail and it too had only two disc 2's and no disc 1. I was very dissapointed that they would come that way and that it obviously was not a mishap the first time. So I had to end up returning the second order and ordering it through another distributer.
I love and will still shop here, dont get me wrong. But it is sad that I cannot get a hold of someone from to inform them of the defect of this particular disc set.
Owell hope everyone reads my review. |
| The Tudors 2nd season | 2010-07-26 | 5 / 5 |
| | Now we are back with Henry in season 2 and he is still up to his old tricks. This video protrayed the drama and trechery of man in the 1500's. What colors and pagentry, The dresses in the dance scenes alone must have cost a small fortune to re-create. People in court sure had a tenuous life. Here today and gone tomorrow. Get your popcorn and settle in for a great ride. Can't wait to get season 3. |
| 2nd season the Tudors | 2010-07-12 | 5 / 5 |
| | I was very pleased with the condition of the dvd's. They arrvied quicker than I thought they would and was glad for that. I have really enjoyed watching this series and can't get enough. The acting is outstanding. |
| Visually Gorgeous | 2010-07-04 | 5 / 5 |
| | Costumes, sets, deception, steamy sex, all in the sixteenth century. As you watch the beautiful bodies writhe around in sin bliss remember, these folks never bathed. Do I smell fish and chips? |
| A Mixed Bag, But Dormer Shines | 2010-07-01 | 4 / 5 |
| If I were rating Dormer's performance alone, this would be a five-star review. If I were rating the season without Dormer, my rating would be lower than four stars. The four stars thus represent a rough averaging of the two scores. Dormer really is wonderful--and that's high praise coming from me; I grew up with Genevieve Bujold's and Dorothy Tutin's performances as Anne Boleyn, and they are still to me a gold standard in terms of quality and interpretation of the role. But Dormer deserves credit for being the most multi-faceted Anne Boleyn yet. It does help, of course, that over the course of several seasons we get a far more in-depth portrait of this complex woman than we do in a one and a half or two hour production. And major scholarly work on Anne's life since Bujold's and Tutin's performances has also done much to reveal her important role as religious reformer in her own right, not just the sexy catalyst for Henry's break with Rome.
If there's a problem with the portrayal of Anne here, indeed, it is not Dormer's fault but rather the writers'--and I do think that she could have been given better scripts. Unfortunately, though, despite Dormer's prodigious talents, the plenteous faults with this production slant the portrayal of Anne in unfortunate ways.
Let me put it this way. This season is at its best--and this is unfortunately too rare--when it shows people such as Anne Boleyn and Thomas More struggling to make sense of their lives while the world they have hitherto known is crumbling beneath their feet. The season is at its worst--and this, alas, is all too often--when it follows the lead of such travesties as The Other Boleyn Girl and panders shamelessly to what it perceives to be the audience's taste for sex and violence.
And what is particularly galling about the gratuituous sex and violence is that, in order to pile it on, the show's creators purposefully get the history wrong. I doubt that Philippa Gregory could research her way out of a paper bag; she seems never to have heard of, let alone read, Eric Ives's magisterial biography of Anne Boleyn. But Michael Hirst and/or whoever worked on these scripts have not only read Ives, but remember such fine-print details as Anne's keeping an open English bible in her chambers for her entourage to read, and also giving the poor more money than her predecessors on Maundy Thursday. All that is here, but so too are gross inaccuracies that anyone who had read Ives and other recent historians, such as David Starkey, would know to be untrue. Ives claims that there is not one "scintilla" of evidence that George Boleyn engaged in homosexual acts, but sure enough George does here (when he's not raping his wife); similarly, the theory promulgated with startling lack of evidence by Retha Warnicke, and dismissed by Ives and a number of other historians, that the fetus Anne miscarried in January 1536 was deformed, is treated here as fact, as it is in Gregory's egregiously salacious and sexist novel.
I should point out my disgust with the George-Boleyn-as-homosexual plot does not proceed from my own homophobia, but, rather, from my outrage at the homophobia of this representation. The script-writers have no interest in portraying the inner conflicts surely experienced by people with homoerotic desires in an age that had no language for gay identity and which relentlessly demonized homosexuals. Instead, the portrayal of George's affair with Mark Smeaton presents homosexuality as just another nasty little deviance to add to the already orgiastic depiction of the Tudor court.
Indeed, the depiction of George and Mark Smeaton, and of Anne Boleyn and her circle more generally, suffers from what I call Cabaret Syndrome. Now the creators of the musical Cabaret, which depicts Germany on the brink of fascism, surely didn't mean to support the Nazis--presumably, quite the opposite. Disturbingly, however, the logic of Cabaret's plot appears to "explain" the emergence of Nazism by implying it was a reaction against the decadent stew of pre-Nazi German culture, emblematized by such behavior on the part of the cast as sleeping around and having abortions. Anne and her circle are similarly represented here as sexual decadents; note the dominatrix outfit she wears when she and Henry conceive the "monster" baby she later miscarries. When Henry (and the viewer) first glimpse Jane Seymour, she is, in contrast to the dark-haired, sexually aggressive Anne, a vision of white-clad, golden-haired innocence who cannot help (rather like the squeaky-clean Aryans at the end of Cabaret) but seem something of an improvement on what has come before. As in the case of Cabaret and its interpretation of history, I find this distortion of Anne and her circle not only simplistic and inaccurate but ideologically suspect--a kind of blaming the victims for their own fall, and moralistically linking that fall moreover to sexual behavior. History is a whole lot more complicated than that--as Dormer shows us when she is allowed to do her best.
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