Three More M.A. Reviews

"POURING Coca-Cola in the cabernet, Sofia Coppola's dazzling "Marie Antoinette" couldn't be more anachronistic if it showed the queen of France saying, "Let them eat sushi." Coppola works in weird ways, but the real Versailles was so much weirder.

Just as Tobey Maguire proved that the superhero is about the vulnerability, Kirsten Dunst nicely unveils the innocence in the doomed queen of France.


The 1980s score and 818 dialogue ("I love your hair! What's going on there?") may strike you as a little too droll for l'école. But the story follows Antonia Fraser's biography, and the crazy flourishes simultaneously blast away the musty mists of history and make the audience feel, as the Austrian-born queen must have, lost in translation. [...]

Dunst, tearfully parting with her pug as her character exits Austria, practically has a dotted line around her neck with instructions to "cut here," and she makes no effort to starch up her squeaky American cuteness. But though the real Marie Antoinette was born an archduchess, she was no older than a highschool freshman when she married. After that, she was just a victim of fashion, a pleated skirt when history went Goth. Her story could just as easily be called "Clueless."

kyle.smith@nypost.com Source: The New York Post
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"Sofia Coppola is the Veruca Salt of American filmmakers. She's the privileged little girl in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory whose father, a nut tycoon, makes sure his daughter wins a golden ticket to the Willie Wonka factory by buying up countless Wonka bars, which his workers methodically unwrap till they find the prize. If Coppola's 2004 Academy Award for best original screenplay for Lost in Translation was her golden ticket to big-budget filmmaking, Marie Antoinette is her prize, a $40 million tour through the lush and hallucinatory candy land of 18th-century France. Of course, Roald Dahl's insufferable Veruca Salt was eventually seized by angry squirrels and hurled down a garbage chute. [...]

Given the film's cavalier treatment of their country's history, French critics, understandably, head up the haters' brigade. Agnès Poirier, the London correspondent for Libération, scoffs, "There are two things [Coppola] likes, dresses and pudding. ... Cinema is for Coppola a mirror in which she looks at herself, not a mirror she holds to the world." But many critics on both sides of the Atlantic defend the film, in indulgent language that often seems to apply to its creator as well. To Entertainment Weekly's Lisa Schwarzbaum, Marie Antoinette is "the work of a mature filmmaker who has identified and developed a new cinematic vocabulary to describe a new breed of post-postpostfeminist woman." (The triple negative threw me for a minute, but I think she means "not feminist.")

There's no question that making movies is, at least in part, always a matter of shopping. A director must select, and find a way to pay for, the right cast, the right music, the right cinematographer. And, as this recent piece in the Times travel section shows, Sofia Coppola is a peerless shopper. The movie's signature set piece is a montage of Louis-heeled Manolo Blahnik shoes in Easter-egg colors, filmed in fetishistic close-up to the strains of Bow Wow Wow singing "I Want Candy." It's exhilarating in the style of a high-end television commercial or magazine fashion spread. But, by linking the excesses of the French court of the 1780s with the pop culture of the 1980s, does Coppola intend to suggest that we're overdue for another revolution? Or just that, then as now, les filles just want to have fun? [...]

In a Vanity Fair profile last month, Evgenia Peretz wrote about the director's nontreatment of the rioting French proletariat in Marie Antoinette: "In neglecting them she has unwittingly taken a political stance." Unwittingly? It seems disingenuous to suggest that a movie about the fall of the French monarchy could be anything but political. I don't ask Coppola to be unsympathetic to the young queen, or even to devote any screen time to her arrest and decapitation. (The film ends abruptly as Jason Schwartzman's King Louis XVI and his queen flee Versailles in their royal coach after the storming of the Bastille.) But just because the film's heroine has nothing to say about politics, revolutionary or otherwise, doesn't justify Coppola being similarly dumbstruck.

"It's not like I'm a royalist," Coppola protested in a recent interview, when asked about her curiously blank take on the French Revolution. I'll take her word for it, but you'd never know it from the movie she's made, which is at least as nostalgic about the ancien régime as Gone With the Wind is about the antebellum South. Coppola's heroine lodges a similar protest in the film upon hearing about her alleged wish for the starving masses to nourish themselves on cake. "I would never say that!" the queen comments, shocked, to her ladies in waiting. According to the Antonia Fraser biography Marie Antoinette is based on, she never did say those actual words—but the rest of the film shows her as exactly the kind of person who would say them, so what's the difference? [...]" Source: Slate (by Dana Stevens)
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And the most negative, the third review by Lawrence Toppman for "The Charlotte Observer":

"After seeing Sofia Coppola's "Marie Antoinette," I realize there was no need for the bloodshed and turmoil of the French Revolution that made Marie and husband Louis XVI shorter by a head. Had the mobs left them alone, they'd have bored themselves and everyone else in the aristocracy to death. [...]

Marie celebrates her 18th birthday in 1773 in the scene just before Louis decides to help America in the Revolutionary War. (Nice of him, as it didn't start for three more years.)

Even Coppola's infamous decision to set the movie to New Wave pop music seems ill-judged, because she's not consistent. We get a "Pretty Woman"-style clothes-and-footwear romp to Bow Wow Wow's "I Want Candy," and then we're back to baroque-style chamber ensembles droning away for 15 minutes.

The casting is also unhelpful. Kirsten Dunst alternates between giddy smiles and a faux-pensive look as Marie, though the prospect of imminent death troubles her as little as an absence of petit-fours. (Or "petite fours," as Schwartzman's Louis would say.) Schwartzman tamps down his California cockiness but looks perennially uneasy, as if wondering whether his wig might be tumbling off. Both are as pinkly prettified and devoid of emotion as fresh corpses.

Supporting characters have energy, but the wrong kind. Rip Torn leers genially and blankly as Louis XV. Italian-born Asia Argento sneers as his mistress, Madame du Barry, like a high school girl from North Jersey planning to poke out a rival's eyes with a rattail comb. Judy Davis, whose twitchiness suggests the affliction of St. Vitus' dance, manages to overact even in scenes where she doesn't speak.

Coppola has said in interviews that she doesn't want to explain the movie, which follows an apparently ageless Marie and Louis from their nuptials in 1770 to arrest by the mob in 1789. But what can she want us to take away?

Are we supposed to accept the fatuous idea that teenagers have behaved the same in all eras? (Hardly true. Royals took on adult responsibilities as teens back then and were trained and educated differently.) Should we have special sympathy for this vacuous creature who stood by her equally clueless husband en route to disaster? The movie's not particularly kind to either: She comes off as a gluttonous airhead, he an amiable plodder.

The ultimate irony of the project is that Marie and Louis' main crime was self-indulgence: They had too little awareness of the discrepancy between themselves and their people, and they paid for ignorance with their lives. But if self-indulgence justified regicide, Queen Sofia would be ready for Hollywood's guillotine."

Thursday Dining

" · Thursday, October 26 at about 11 am

-Just as [Bryan] Singer was arriving with the boy caravan, Jake Gyllenhaal was just finishing up breakfast at Hugos. Not sure if they greeted each other.

· Thursday night late @ Little Door on 3rd in Hollywood. Love this restaurant it's cute. So it must have been date night. Jake Gyllenhaal was seated next to a short sexy brunette @ a big table of friends. The two of them talked all night and were the last to leave. Marcellas Reynolds came in and joined a big table and made out all through dinner with an older German guy. My wife and I could tell he was German because all night long they spoke German and French @ the table while laughing and taking tons of pics." Source: The Defamer

I liked very much what I consider Bryan Singer's masterpiece "The Usual Suspects" (1995),

Kevin Spacey had a key role in "The Usual Suspects" as Roger 'Verbal' Kint, chiefly his character was the atmospheric catalyzer of its plot twist. However I'm not nearly as much fan (more a hater) of his "X-Men", "X2" saga or "Superman Returns" (2006).
My brother insists that Singer's best film is "Public Access" (1993), which I haven't watched it yet.

Rocket Boy

In consonance with the review Part I by Anneka in Jake Watch of "October Sky" film (1999) directed by Joe Johnston, inspired in the book "Rocket Boys" relating the true story of Homer Hickam, a homage to the first important film who launched Jake's career:

ROCKET MAN

"Young Homer Hickam, had rockets on the brain.
To be a rocket-man, he had always hoped, to train.

His Daddy the coalminer, he was well respected,
but Homer's "Crazy Idea", he totally rejected.

"You'll be a coalminer, just like your old man,
on anything else, there is no need to plan."

This was a fate that Homer was not keen on.
Luckily, he had friends, that he was able to lean on.

His rockets, he did build, with the help of his buds.
Some of them, successful, most of them just duds.

After many struggles, a contest they did win.
His Daddy, the coalminer, was finally proud of him!

Somtimes a dream, can change your very life,
overcoming many obstacles of hardship and strife!"

(poem courtesy of Roco, previously published in the Jake Watch Messageboard)

Anticipated Christmas Gift

"New Line has set Peter Sarsgaard to star with Jake Gyllenhaal and Reese Witherspoon in "Rendition," director Gavin Hood's followup to his Oscar-winning "Tsotsi."
Kelley Sane wrote the script, with filming to begin this fall.

Pic centers on a CIA operative in the Middle East who questions his assignment after observing a secret-police grilling of a suspect in a suicide bombing.


Sarsgaard has completed the comedy "Year of the Dog" for Paramount Vantage. He also just wrapped the lead role in "Mysteries of Pittsburgh," which Michael London is producing and financing through his Groundswell Prods. banner.

Thesp is repped by CAA and man-ager Jon Rubenstein." -by Michael Fleming- Source: Variety

I'm really illusioned knowing that Peter has been casted in the next Jake & Reese film "Rendition" (2007). My new unexpected Christmas gift, with my two preferred hotties acting in it. In the picture below, it's me with Santa (he's not the same Jarhead Santa I would have liked, folks).

Good Marie Antoinette Reviews

Let them read a few positive reviews of "Marie Antoinette", which were leaded to me by Penny Lane.

"The opening lines of “Natural’s Not in It,” by the Gang of Four, are the first words in Sofia Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette,” and they suggest one of that film’s paradoxical themes: The pursuit of sensual delight is trivial compared with other undertakings — just as “the problem of leisure” is surely more of a privilege than a burden — but pleasure is also serious, one of the things that gives life its shape and meaning.

It may be tempting to greet “Marie Antoinette” with a Jacobin snarl or a self-righteous sneer, since it is after all the story of the silly teenager who embodied a corrupt, absolutist state in its terminal decadence. But where’s the fun in such indignation? And, more seriously, where is the justice? To say that this movie is historically irresponsible or politically suspect is both to state the obvious and to miss the point. [...]

It would be overstating the case to call it a work of social criticism, but beneath its highly decorated surface is an examination, touched with melancholy as well as delight, of what it means to live in a world governed by rituals of acquisition and display. It is a world that Ms. Coppola presents as exotic and unreal — a baroque counterpart to the Tokyo of “Lost in Translation” — but that is not as far away as it first seems.

Ms. Coppola, who drew upon Antonia Fraser’s revisionist biography of Marie Antoinette, “Marie Antoinette: The Journey,” in preparing her script, is less a historian than a pop anthropologist, and her portrait of the young queen, played with wily charm by Kirsten Dunst, is not so much a psychological portrait as a tableau of mood and atmosphere. Highly theatrical and yet also intimate and informal, “Marie Antoinette” lets its story slink almost casually through its lovingly composed and rendered images.

The costumes, designed by Milena Canonero, are arresting; K K Barrett’s production design is appropriately sumptuous; and Lance Acord’s cinematography catches both the swirls of high-fashion color and the quieter, candlelighted tones of the French court. No mere backdrop, Versailles, where much of “Marie Antoinette” was shot, is the film’s subject and, in some respects, its star. Like Hollywood — which it resembles in some interesting and hardly accidental particulars — Versailles is a place with an aura and a power of its own, with an almost mystical ability to warp the lives of those who, by accident or choice, come to dwell on its grounds. [...]

Molly Shannon and Shirley Henderson are two of the principal mean girls of Versailles, and their chosen scapegoat is the elder Louis’s mistress, Madame du Barry (Asia Argento), who is also Marie’s rival for influence at court. The mingling of private matters with affairs of state is a hallmark of this kind of monarchy, and in Ms. Coppola’s hands the analogies to modern celebrity culture are simultaneously clear and subtle. Marie’s life is one of obscene entitlement, but it is also heavily constrained, and the story the film tells is of her efforts to accommodate her headstrong, spirited individualism to the strictures of her role as queen.

She is profligate and self-indulgent, yes, impetuously ordering up shoes, parties and impromptu trips to Paris. She breaks with tradition by applauding at the opera, and then appears onstage herself. She takes a lover — a dashing Swedish nobleman — and turns Petit Trianon, a royal retreat that was a gift from her husband, into a kind of Versailles V.I.P. room, where she drinks, gardens, reads Rousseau and plays shepherdess. These activities have often been mocked — and were the source of scandal and outrage in the years before the revolution — but through Ms. Coppola’s eyes they are poignant as well as a bit silly.

And the film’s visual extravagance somehow conveys its heroine’s loneliness as well as the sheer fun of aristocratic life. We know how this story ends, and Ms. Coppola refrains from showing us the violent particulars, or from sentimentalizing her heroine’s fate, preferring to conclude on a quiet, restrained note that registers the loss of Marie’s world as touchingly as the rest of the film has acknowledged her folly, her confusion and her humanity.

“Marie Antoinette” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has glimmers of sexuality and brief glimpses of naked flesh amid all the fabulous clothes."


MOST HELPFUL READER REVIEW

people are missing the point, May 29, 2006
Reviewer: mcvarmazi

to those that expected your standard historical costume drama -- you missed the point. coppola said, and it is clear by her methods, that she was not trying to recreate a historical documentary of the time. her use of glam rock and contemporary sounding dialogue helped marie-antoinette and her entourage transcend the stuffy, stifled language that often kills movies with any historical background. they transcended what we usually think of as late 1700s aristocracy -- we saw them as characters with their follies, we understood their downfall as people and not as historical figures. yes, sofia coppola could have made just another historical drama, she could have given the revolution a fleshed-out background, but the movie is not about france or the revolution, it's marie-antoinette, the girl, her follies, her downfall. yes, people are products of their times, but it's a far more interesting creative experiment to examine a person in a fresh perspective. in this aspect, coppola's film was remarkably successful. if you're unwilling to view marie-antoinette from a new and different angle, you will find the purposeful decontexualization of her character unsettling and distracting. for the rest of us, it was a beautiful and creative romp. brava ms coppola! Source: New York Times Movies

"Dunst is perhaps the only possible casting for the young heroine: an intelligent, biddable young woman who glides through what is expected of her, irreproachably charming of dress and manner, and for whom dissent is restricted to a quizzical half-smile and elevation of the eyebrows. She is the new kid at Versailles High, weirded out by the local cliques and always on the point of saying out loud: "Like, hello?" Her only friend appears to be the ageing King Louis XV, lipsmackingly played by Rip Torn, and it seems at first as if Louis might even be Marie's Bill Murray-style confidant." Source: The Guardian
"Having now seen "Marie Antoinette" with expectations suitably managed, the royal we have four words for the haters:

Let them eat crow.

It turns out that "Marie Antoinette" may be the most fascinating cinematic Rorschach test to come down the pike (or land on the pike, as it were) in a long time. With "The Virgin Suicides" and "Lost in Translation," Coppola proved to be a gifted stylist with an unusual talent for evoking mood and atmosphere and emotional truth, but no one would have called those films particularly deep. [...]

By the time "Marie Antoinette" gets to its most notorious scene--an orgy of champagne, petits fours and shoes set to Bow Wow Wow's "I Want Candy"-- it's clear that Marie's famous appetite for baubles and bows was less the character flaw of a spoiled princess than a pathological response to the double bind of being both painfully isolated and claustrophobically scrutinized.

Following the lead of Antonia Fraser, upon whose 2001 biography "Marie Antoinette" is based, Coppola suggests that the queen was less a conspirator in the crimes of the Versailles court than a passive, inexperienced pawn of it, a sovereign whose only means to power was through pregnancy. Dunst's warm, spontaneous and exuberant portrayal allows viewers to sympathize, or at least better understand, what led this teenager to become the symbol for all that was morally and politically indefensible about pre-revolutionary France. [...]

People will come to "Marie Antoinette" with their own predispositions and will most likely leave with them intact; in all her work, Coppola invites the audience's projections with an unusually large and porous canvas. But those willing to take the film on its own terms will be confronted with a portrait that, while perhaps unsettling in its revisionist sympathies, offers a valid provocation at a time when Americans are debating the costs of isolation, both personal and political. Far from mere spectacle, "Marie Antoinette" is instead a slyly subversive film, seducing viewers with its endless montage of sumptuous excess, but also daring them to empathize with the girl drowning in it." Source The Washington Post

Is All Over Now?

"'Marie Antoinette' star Kirsten Dunst has blamed "the business" for ruining her relationship with actor Jake Gyllenhaal. Kirsten Dunst blames her split from Jake Gyllenhaal on work pressures.

She told In Style magazine: "We tried to be honest with each other and work it out but it is hard to have a relationship in this business." Source Msn Entertainment.

It seems that Kirsten chose to date herself in the business. Oh, sad news and sad times for nostalgics of Jake and Kiki. Sad, sad, sad.

"You must leave now, take what you need, you think will last.
But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast.
Yonder stands your orphan with his gun,
Crying like a fire in the sun.
Look out the saints are comin' through
And it's all over now, Baby Blue.

The highway is for gamblers, better use your sense.
Take what you have gathered from coincidence.
The empty-handed painter from your streets
Is drawing crazy patterns on your sheets.
This sky, too, is folding under you
And it's all over now, Baby Blue.

All your seasick sailors, they are rowing home.
All your reindeer armies, are all going home.
The lover who just walked out your door
Has taken all his blankets from the floor.
The carpet, too, is moving under you
And it's all over now, Baby Blue.

Leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you.
Forget the dead you've left, they will not follow you.
The vagabond who's rapping at your door
Is standing in the clothes that you once wore.
Strike another match, go start anew
And it's all over now, Baby Blue."

"IT'S ALL OVER NOW, BABY BLUE" (song by Bob Dylan)

Peter Baby Bump

I wasn't aware of this level of intimicy that our famous duo Gyllengaard has reached, it's touching how they are enjoying
together their "mutual" baby bump in family.