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With a new dimension Cate Blanchett reprises her role as the canny British monarch

This has been the year of three in the English movie scene. Apart from there being quite a few third instalments of popular franchises, there have been three movies about queens. There was Stephen Frears acute and incisive “The Queen”. There was also Sofia Coppola’s glorious pageant, “Marie Antoinette”, and finally Shekar Kapur’s swashbuckling “Elizabeth: The Golden Age.”

Three directors — two men and one woman, an Englishman (Frears), an Indian (Kapur) and an American, who also happens to come from a very illustrious film family (Coppola) gave three very different views of women in power.

“The Queen” focuses on the tumultuous week following the death of Lady Diana. Dame Helen Mirren, as Queen Elizabeth II, in a performance that deservedly won her an Academy Award, presents a portrait of a monarch who is at once tough and vulnerable, who wishes to do the right thing but is perceived by her subjects as being cold.

Where “The Queen” is an elegant minimalist look at the events during the first week of September 1997, Sofia Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette” is a sumptuous retelling of the life and times of the doomed French queen. Coppola’s Marie played with brittle flamboyance by Kirsten Dunst, is as much a victim of the paparazzi as the People’s Princess was more than 200 years later.

The film was a sensory overload of gorgeous gowns (costume designer Milena Canonero fittingly won the Academy Award for Achievement in Costume Design), pink and white comestibles and thrumming rock music sound track. If Marie Antoinette lived her life under the spotlight 24x7, with every aspect of her life from the secrets of the royal marital bed to delivering a child in public up for scrutiny, another queen, Britain’s Elizabeth I, used the public gaze to firm up her claims to divinity in Kapur’s “Golden Age.”

Cate Blanchett reprises her role as the canny British monarch who needed to constantly show a tough-as-nails façade to her subjects and the world at large. Kapur’s Elizabeth has to face her femininity, which is at once her strength and her weakness. Her feminine side can understand and accept multiple points of view but also as a woman, she wants to love and be loved. The movie celebrates the conflict between the sacred and the profane, a tussle between the divine and the mortal self.

Apart from the royal trinity, we had the third instalments of movies like Shrek (“Shrek the Third”) where the not-so-jolly green ogre has to deal with fatherhood and also meet his destiny. The film, directed by Raman Hui and Chris Miller was competent but not side-splittingly funny as the earlier two movies.

There was the ultra sleek, uber stylish “Ocean’s 13” from Steven Soderbergh where Hollywood royalty were presented with their respective golden sheens – no surprise that they all wore shades! There was also the irreverent Capt. Jack Sparrow (the divinely delicious Johnny Depp) insouciantly swishing around in some sort of surrealist limbo in “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End”

“Spider-Man” swung on his web for the third time and also confronted his dark side, sporting the hottest togs. The stunts and baddies got cooler but director Sam Raimi has asked for time out from the franchise.

The first among “three-quels” has to be “The Bourne Ultimatum.” British director, Paul Greengrass, fresh from his work on the celebrated “United 91” struck gold with his baby-faced amnesiac assassin Jason Bourne. Matt Damon leaps and runs with gumption and gusto as he spars with his shadowy opponents for the third time. The Bourne movies from the start set a new template for action movies — speaking a grittier grammar.

Action movies moved in three directions — gritty muscle and sinew bound millennial outings like the Bourne movies (“The Kingdom” had a similar palate), the digital movies—“300” and “Beowulf” and the good-old fashioned kind that end in spectacular balls of fire like “Transformers”.

“300” based on Frank Miller’s graphic novel was a fictionalised retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae and used the blue screen to recreate both the comic book ambience and violence. “Beowulf” told a tale as old as time. Directed by Robert Zemeckis, the film pushed the animation envelope to such an extent as to make the gorgeous Ms. Angelina Jolie feel coy about her nude sequences.

Michael Bay’s “Transformers” was a riotous celebration of the big bang movies of the Eighties and the Nineties. There were warring aliens who transformed themselves into all sorts of cool cars and sundry devices who had chosen the earth for their battleground. Camp and cheesy, the film was incredibly great fun.

Unlike previous years, fantasy did not rule the screen. There was the dreadful “Eragon” which was the palest wannabe to the “Lord of the Rings” movies. Harry Potter has entered his fifth year at Hogwarts in “The Order of the Phoenix” and was quite the sulky surly adolescent in this workman like effort from David Yates.

The New Year promises “The Golden Compass”, based on the first novel of Philip Pullman’s beloved “Dark Materials” trilogy. The film stars Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig and one can only hope it would be a better deal than the wishy-washy “Invasion”, the fourth retelling of Jack Finney’s alien invasion tale that featured the two together.

Even if “The Golden Compass” has a pale, fully clothed Craig, we are promised much eye candy from the man himself in his reprisal of his role as the super suave spy James Bond in the 22 Bond film to come out in November 2008. Oh joy!

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