At Princeton University, John Nash struggles to make a worthwhile contribution to serve as his legacy to the world of mathematics. He finally makes a revolutionary breakthrough that will eventually earn him the Nobel Prize. After graduate school he turns to teaching, becoming romantically involved with his student Alicia. Meanwhile the government asks his help with breaking Soviet codes, which soon gets him involved in a terrifying conspiracy plot. Nash grows more and more paranoid until a discovery that turns his entire world upside down. Now it is only with Alicia's help that he will be able to recover his mental strength and regain his status as the great mathematician we know him as today.
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Critic by Yazmin Ghonaim
A Beautiful Mind, directed by Ron Howard (How the Grinch Stole Christmas; Apollo 13) and written for the screen by Akiva Goldsman (who also wrote: Batman and Robin, Practical Magic), is based on the award-winning book of the same name by New York Times economics correspondent Silvia Nasar. A Beautiful Mind explores the complex mind of John Forbes Nash (1928 - ), a genius who battled with schizophrenia and who, in 1994, won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his contributions on game theory.*
A Beautiful Mind Movie Review
Upon entering the school of Economics in Princeton in September of 1947, John Nash (Russell Crowe: Gladiator) quickly separates himself from others by appearing detached and self-absorbed. During a welcoming reception, a camera follows Nash closely and aims at representing the character's point of view: he plays with a fine crystal glass and observes the beautiful --and almost imperceptible-- patterns produced by the bent rays of reflected sunlight. As Nash is engulfed by his observations, the camera seems to establish the character's obsession with patterns, and the quiet, lonely pleasure he derives from manipulating them. Surprisingly, in a subsequent scene, Nash observes another character and remarks: "There must be a mathematical explanation for how bad your tie is." Rather than merely summoning the other's (and the viewer's) sense of humor, this initial portrayal introduces the sub theme of Nash's social ineptitude. While some scenes focus on the protagonist's rebellious, self-confident nature --with such quotes to his Princeton classmates as "Classes destroy your potential for creativity!"-- other scenes effectively explore his insecurities. For example, annoyed by Nash's arrogance, Hansen (Josh Lucas: The Deep End) challenges his confidence by asking: "What if you never come up with your original idea? What if you lose?" While Nash's desperate response --"I can't fail! This is all I am!"-- introduces a narrative shift, where the plot begins to focus on the protagonist's weakness --that is, his fear of never attaining intellectual success-- A Beautiful Mind begins to focus on the usefulness of the character's genius. Quickly, Nash proves to his loyal colleagues the simple uses of his mathematical theories, by playfully modeling one after a game of courting women. Aided in part by the moral support of his roommate Charles (Paul Bettany), and by the self-esteem his builds through his new love interest and future wife Alicia (Jennifer Connelly), Nash's work ultimately attracts secret government agent William Parcher (Ed Harris), who recruits the mathematician for work in the Department of Defense. However, Parcher, who prefers to ignore Nash's improving human relations, and who insists that a "lack of personal connection may be an advantage", presents a constant threat.
A Beautiful Mind successfully lures the viewer into the mind of a character who is portrayed as defining everything in his world in mathematical terms; it does so by offering visual representations that suggest his mental patterns. Furthermore, the film defines Nash as a character that demonstrates a potential for creating revolutionary theories that will ultimately reward his extreme dedication to this scientific field. Unfortunately, while Nasar's book explores with evident honesty his life's adversities, the film is most concerned with offering a romanticized version of the man's life. This choice lessens the impact of the numerous blows the man admirably survived, and consequently fictionalizes many aspects of the life of the real man and presents a falsified homage to Endurance. Nevertheless, A Beautiful Mind successfully envelopes the viewer in the character's almost imperceptible delusions as it subtly integrates the character's schizophrenic state to plot narration. Yet the film's most intriguing attempt may be enjoyed in a scene where Nash astonishingly manages to grasp a momentary lapse of reason within his profound madness and finds a logical means by which to overcome his mental disease and prove his extraordinary intelligence.
*Nash won the Nobel Prize for "pioneering analysis of equilibria in the theory of noncooperative games"; basically, the application of mathematical formulas to decision-making. (http://nobelprizes.com/nobel/economics/1994b.html).
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Review by Matthew Turner
Well-made film with some deservedly Oscar-nominated performances - it takes some shocking liberties with its subject matter but remains engaging and enjoyable throughout.
The most important thing to say about A Beautiful Mind is that the less you know about the film going in, the more you'll get out of it. Conversely, the more you find out about it after you've seen it, the more chance it has of annoying you. With this in mind, if you're planning to see it, you should probably stop reading now, safe in the knowledge that it's a well-made, entertaining film with some great performances, principally by Jennifer Connelly, Russell Crowe (both deservedly Oscar-nominated) and Paul Bettany.
Still here? Well, don't say we didn't warn you. Russell Crowe plays real-life mathematician Professor John Nash, a shy, bumbling man who is obsessed with making his mark on the world by finding his "one, original idea". He finds it with his invention of 'Game Theory', which, in the film's most enjoyable sequence, comes to him in a flash of inspiration while down the pub checking out girls.
The rest of the film details Nash's marriage to one of his students (Jennifer Connelly, so who can blame him?), and his gradual, incomprehending descent into mental illness, before, in one of those Oscar-baiting 'triumph over adversity'-type deals, winning the Nobel prize in later life - director Ron 'Richie Cunningham' Howard has never been one to shy away from the schmaltz and here he trowels it on in no uncertain terms.
There has already been a sizeable backlash against the film, because it purports to be a biopic, yet has left out all the more unsavoury details of Nash's life, such as his divorce from Alicia (in stark contrast to the 'inspirational love story' on screen that both stars keep banging on about in interviews), a child out of wedlock and an episode in which he was arrested for soliciting homosexual sex in a public lavatory. This is equally annoying because you can't help feeling that the story would have been all the more compelling with those elements left in.
However, it has to be said that what remains is still an engaging story, though perhaps it would have been better with an 'inspired by the story of John Nash' credit. At any rate, the acting is superb, with Crowe once again completely inhabiting a real-life character as he did in The Insider. (That said, some may find his mannered performance a little too 'Rain Man' for their tastes).
He is given excellent support by Jennifer Connelly (hopefully her Oscar nomination will finally lead to her being given the more high-profile roles that she deserves), Ed Harris as a sinister government agent and Paul Bettany (stealing the film once again, just as he did A Knight's Tale) as his Princeton room-mate and best friend.
In short, providing you know next to nothing about the film going in, it serves up decent couple of hours' worth of entertainment, delivering some terrific performances, a number of enjoyably comic moments, several moving scenes and one or two genuinely jaw-droppingly shocking moments that are extremely well-handled (and are the reason you should avoid reading much about the film beforehand).
It doesn't exactly deserve to win the Best Picture Oscar (it's the current favourite), but it is nonetheless recommended.
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Emotions by numbers
Even before the opening credits for Ron Howard's A Beautiful Mind roll, the extensive previews for the movie have roused echoes of Scott Hicks' barely five-year-old Shine, the equally fictionalized-but-based-on-truth story of pianist, David Helfgott. While Howard's film avoids the temptation to "explain" the mental illness that strikes his protagonist (Princeton mathematician, John Nash) via the extensive childhood and adolescence psychiatry-by-numbers scenes in Hick's film, it's quickly apparent that the two directors view their raw material the same way. Both indulge an atavistic Romantic idolatry of tortured genius to idealize mental illness as spectacle, a feel-good gladiatorial games of the psyche where the human spirits always triumphs and love always blooms.
Howard's protagonist is based on the real Princeton mathematician John Nash (played in the film by Russell Crowe). The dazzling working-class scholar from West Virginia revolutionized economic theory in his 20s, married a beautiful and intelligent mathematics undergraduate, Alicia Larde (Jennifer Connelly), and then lost a high-profile backroom Cold Warrior career to schizophrenia. But, following biopic tradition, scriptwriter Akiva Goldsman and director Howard dwell heavily on the prelude to breakdown, the moment of breakdown and the ultimate triumph over breakdown, while glossing over the intervening decades of genuine anguish in a sequence of emotions-by-numbers impressionistic scenes. Despite the A-list acting firepower, and moments that hint tantalizingly at what this story might have been, A Beautiful Mind reduces both mathematical genius and schizophrenia to reassuring carnivals of containable eccentricity.
At first, though, Goldsman's script avoids classifying Nash (despite some crashingly obvious musical cues), allowing ambiguity about Nash's apparent idiosyncrasy: is it a function of how he is or how he is perceived? Sometimes he appears socially maladroit and intellectually isolated because of cultural displacement, his rural brusqueness and unabashed ambition scorned in the Ivy League indolence of gentlemanly competition. Sometimes he weaves across the screen as the muttering loner, drinking, living in the library for days at a time, yet saved from terminal alienation by a self-deprecating wit.
Sometimes his dissociation seems to lie in his monotheistic devotion to mathematics, his absolute faith in the power of numbers to translate chaos into clarity. In these sequences, the movie manages to illuminate both the beauty and humiliating absurdity of uninhibited intellectual obsession. In one scene, Nash is the down-at-heel buffoon mapping the feeding patterns of pigeons in the park. In another, he is the intoxicated artist scrawling mathematical equations across the library's mullioned windows. Like Nash, like his wife and his friends, the audience is lulled into a kind of perceptual blindness, in which sympathy for Nash's triumph over his social exclusion, or admiration for his unflagging ambition prevail over awareness of his deeper disintegration. Though Howard and Goldman here craft a conventional set up, they craft it well, with the nice touch of casting Christopher Plummer, an actor who has tried to obliterate Baron von Trapp in a series of roles as urbane sadists, exactly to enigmatic type as either the Russian spy seeking to abduct Nash or the kindly psychiatrist attempting to save his sanity.
Much of the power of these early sequences derives from the physicality of Crowe's embodiment of Nash. Whether hunching his shoulders after a defeat while playing Go with another student, smirking at a class of baffled undergrads, or sitting, shirt collar unbuttoned at a cluttered desk, Crowe projects an unfocussed but bristling sensuality, all the more tangible in contrast to the slender, fine-boned Connelly, and the archetypally blond and beautiful Paul Bettany (as Nash's friend, Charles). Ironically, some of the most poignant moments of Crowe's performance come as the movie abandons Nash as character and starts to invest in Nash as symbol. In this transition lies the kernel of the movie that might have been, the movie that mapped not the sensational, the onset of schizophrenia, but the quotidian, schizophrenia's grinding day-by-day, year-by-year battles for both Nash and, perhaps more remarkably, the woman who remained his wife.
This transition occupies the scenes that surround Nash's physical assault on his wife, chilling, because so mundane and domestic, in exposing the way the clash between delusion and reality precipitates violence. As Nash explores his decision to battle his delusions without excessive medication, the audience experiences for the first time the heart of his dilemma, that for him, normalcy is a world populated by familiar people who do not exist. Some are dangerous, such as the figure who incites him to attack his wife and almost precipitates her departure. Some are supportive and loving: as Nash says of one, "He's been a good friend to me." With a wry twist of his chin, Crowe adds both bashfulness (as if confessing a love affair) and an adult recognition of genuine loss to the Nash's confessions, first that he and this delusion have had some good conversations over the years and second, that he'll miss him.
But this glimpse into the future for Nash and Alicia is never more than a glimpse. Howard opts for time-lapse snapshots of Nash's subsequent life in Princeton (culminating in the award of the Nobel Prize), Crowe opts for well-costumed and heavily made-up caricature, the delusions pop up in increasingly risible formation, and Alicia disappears completely until the final scenes of the film.
For all his Capraesque aspirations, Howard's movies never really leave the ground because he never really takes any risks. Mental illness, even mental illness less catastrophic and more amenable to chemical manipulation than schizophrenia, is neither as domesticated nor (heaven help us) as uplifting as this movie claims. Howard could have told the story of John Nash and Alicia Larde as John Cassavetes told the story of Nick and Mabel Longhetti in A Woman Under the Influence. But instead he played safe, and told one more story of the American dream, where a poor boy can get the girl and the gold, conquer any adversity, even schizophrenia, and not encounter any more anguish than the average multiplex audience can endure on a Saturday afternoon.
2007年6月2日 星期六
2007年5月30日 星期三
Pirates of Caribbean At World's End
Plot Summary
After Elizabeth (Keira Knightly), Will (Orlando Bloom), and Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) rescue Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) from the the land of the dead, they must face their foes, Davey Jones (Bill Nighy) and Lord Cutler Beckett (Tom Hollander). Beckett, now with control of Jones' heart, forms a dark alliance with him in order to rule the seas and wipe out the last of the Pirates. Now, Jack, Barbossa, Will, Elizabeth, Tia Delma, and crew must call the Pirate Lords from the four corners of the globe, including the infamous Sao Feng (Chow-Yun Fat), to gathering. The Pirate Lords want to release the goddess Calypso, Davey Jones's damned lover, from the trap they sent her to out of fear, in which the Pirate Lords must combine the 9 pieces that bound her by ritual to undo it and release her in hopes that she will help them fight. With this, all pirates will stand together and will make their final stand for freedom against Beckett, Jones, Norrington, the Flying Dutchman, and the entire East India Trading Company.
_______________________________
A ship worth taking
Lawrence Toppman
I won't be able to talk anybody into or out of the "Pirates of the Caribbean" experience now, so I'll simply offer sage advice: Hit the bathroom just before it starts.
To miss any five-minute chunk of this densely plotted trilogy-capper will leave you confused. You could step out as the massive climactic battle begins - after all, it goes on for almost half an hour - but you'd come back to wonder why the ships Black Pearl and Flying Dutchman were locked in combat on the edge of a whirlpool. (Though I sat through the film without a break, and I'm not sure I could give all the details.)
The tale begins with the hanging of a child (among a hundred other pirates and sympathizers) and ends, if you sit through the endless roll of final credits, with an actor who looks just like that child setting up a cliffhanger that points to a fourth installment.
In between come two-and-three-quarter hours of betrayals, murders, derring-do, love lost and found and a story that almost justifies the length. It wraps up a dozen loose story threads that won't make any sense if you skipped "Dead Man's Chest." "At World's End" doesn't have the freshness of the first "Pirates of the Caribbean" (how could it?), but it's more entertaining than the muddled middle of the trilogy. It rounds off the narrative in a satisfying way that eluded "Shrek" and "Spider-Man." Maybe that's because writers Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, who worked on the first "Shrek" and all the "Pirates" movies, quit that series and stuck with this one.
The opening half-hour is especially novel, as we never see fey Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp). Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) plans to convene the nine pirate lords from around the globe; Lord Beckett (Tom Hollander), who has declared martial law in the Caribbean, plans to use Davy Jones (Bill Nighy) and his immortal Flying Dutchman to wipe all pirates off the seas. The plot eventually involves the sea goddess Calypso, who has been confined in the body of sorceress Tia Dalma (Naomie Harris); side-changing by lovers Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) and Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley); the machinations of Chinese pirate Sao Feng (Chow Yun-Fat); a past love affair between Calypso and Jones, which inspired the latter to cut out his heart and keep it in a box; and the salvation of Bootstrap Bill Turner (Stellan Skarsgard), who's serving a 100-year sentence aboard the Dutchman. And yes, sepulchral-voiced Keith Richards has one scene as a pirate historian and Jack's father.
The filmmakers occasionally forget to make sense of details. Jones has to obey the hated Beckett because the latter obtains possession of his heart. But when Jones gets his heart back again, he continues to serve this creep.
Director Gore Verbinski sets up a massive conflict between the nine pirate ships and the vast British armada commanded by Beckett. But when the fighting starts, they all sit around doing nothing, while the Dutchman and Pearl slug things out. (When the battle is over, the pirate lords start cheering wildly, as if they'd just accomplished something.)
Yet this is the first "Pirates" picture with emotional weight. You feel for Elizabeth as she's permanently separated from her governor father, and for Davy Jones and Tia Dalma/Calypso as Fate pulls them apart. We don't feel anything for Jack, of course, because he's a self-serving trickster; in fact, I wondered how he ever pulled a crew together that didn't mutiny in 20 minutes.
In the end, the filmmakers lacked the daring to kill off anyone who might be needed for "Pirates of the Caribbean Meet the Love Boat," or whatever the fourth film will be called. They protected the franchise rather than projecting a vision. But that's what blockbuster series do, and this one has raised the bar for the summer of 2007.
_______________________________
Another critic
Reviewed by Scott Tobias
The Marx brothers classic Duck Soup contains a bit that applies nicely to the bellicose Pirates Of The Caribbean trilogy, which reaches its conclusion with the nearly three-hour At World's End. When presented with a treasury report, Groucho's Rufus T. Firefly, the newly appointed President of Freedonia, declares it so simple that even a 4-year-old child could understand it. "Now run out and find me a 4-year-old child," he says. "I can't make head or tail of it." As a consequence of trying to turn a theme-park ride into a 463-minute trilogy, the Pirates movies are freighted by so much convoluted mythology and supernatural hoo-hah that perhaps only the very young can understand their dream logic. The last, longest, and most tedious of the bunch, At World's End sags under reams of exposition that not only fail to clarify the story, but take away from the slapstick tomfoolery that made the first film (and a couple of sequences in the second) escapist fun.
Picking up where the second entry, Dead Man's Chest, left off, the new film finds bland heroes Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley teaming up with the once-dastardly Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) to find Johnny Depp's Jack Sparrow, who's trapped in Davy Jones' locker. Here's where things get confusing: Bloom and the gang must first go through Singapore to get a special navigational map from Chinese pirate Chow Yun-Fat, who's one of several pirate lords who must unite in order to secure pirate freedom in the Seven Seas. (There's also some business about a "Brethren Of The Coast," and the "nine pieces of eight," but let's not get ahead of ourselves.) Meanwhile, the East India Trading Company has possession of Davy Jones' beating heart and has brought Jones and his Flying Dutchman ship into its quest to eradicate pirate-kind. And then there's Sparrow, whose predicament has left him with several metaphysical manifestations.
The Pirates Of The Caribbean trilogy—and At World's End especially—stands as a lesson in the perils in blockbuster filmmaking: What started out as a fleet one-off swashbuckler with novel supernatural elements has become loaded and graceless, with each new entry barreling across the goal line like William "The Refrigerator" Perry. The franchise's two chief assets—the surprise of Depp's swishy pirate and Gore Verbinski's dexterity at directing slapstick action sequences—have been eclipsed by expository scenes that confuse even more deeply in their attempt to clear things up. Should the franchise warrant still another sequel, the dialogue might as well be in Esperanto.
After Elizabeth (Keira Knightly), Will (Orlando Bloom), and Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) rescue Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) from the the land of the dead, they must face their foes, Davey Jones (Bill Nighy) and Lord Cutler Beckett (Tom Hollander). Beckett, now with control of Jones' heart, forms a dark alliance with him in order to rule the seas and wipe out the last of the Pirates. Now, Jack, Barbossa, Will, Elizabeth, Tia Delma, and crew must call the Pirate Lords from the four corners of the globe, including the infamous Sao Feng (Chow-Yun Fat), to gathering. The Pirate Lords want to release the goddess Calypso, Davey Jones's damned lover, from the trap they sent her to out of fear, in which the Pirate Lords must combine the 9 pieces that bound her by ritual to undo it and release her in hopes that she will help them fight. With this, all pirates will stand together and will make their final stand for freedom against Beckett, Jones, Norrington, the Flying Dutchman, and the entire East India Trading Company.
_______________________________
A ship worth taking
Lawrence Toppman
I won't be able to talk anybody into or out of the "Pirates of the Caribbean" experience now, so I'll simply offer sage advice: Hit the bathroom just before it starts.
To miss any five-minute chunk of this densely plotted trilogy-capper will leave you confused. You could step out as the massive climactic battle begins - after all, it goes on for almost half an hour - but you'd come back to wonder why the ships Black Pearl and Flying Dutchman were locked in combat on the edge of a whirlpool. (Though I sat through the film without a break, and I'm not sure I could give all the details.)
The tale begins with the hanging of a child (among a hundred other pirates and sympathizers) and ends, if you sit through the endless roll of final credits, with an actor who looks just like that child setting up a cliffhanger that points to a fourth installment.
In between come two-and-three-quarter hours of betrayals, murders, derring-do, love lost and found and a story that almost justifies the length. It wraps up a dozen loose story threads that won't make any sense if you skipped "Dead Man's Chest." "At World's End" doesn't have the freshness of the first "Pirates of the Caribbean" (how could it?), but it's more entertaining than the muddled middle of the trilogy. It rounds off the narrative in a satisfying way that eluded "Shrek" and "Spider-Man." Maybe that's because writers Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, who worked on the first "Shrek" and all the "Pirates" movies, quit that series and stuck with this one.
The opening half-hour is especially novel, as we never see fey Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp). Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) plans to convene the nine pirate lords from around the globe; Lord Beckett (Tom Hollander), who has declared martial law in the Caribbean, plans to use Davy Jones (Bill Nighy) and his immortal Flying Dutchman to wipe all pirates off the seas. The plot eventually involves the sea goddess Calypso, who has been confined in the body of sorceress Tia Dalma (Naomie Harris); side-changing by lovers Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) and Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley); the machinations of Chinese pirate Sao Feng (Chow Yun-Fat); a past love affair between Calypso and Jones, which inspired the latter to cut out his heart and keep it in a box; and the salvation of Bootstrap Bill Turner (Stellan Skarsgard), who's serving a 100-year sentence aboard the Dutchman. And yes, sepulchral-voiced Keith Richards has one scene as a pirate historian and Jack's father.
The filmmakers occasionally forget to make sense of details. Jones has to obey the hated Beckett because the latter obtains possession of his heart. But when Jones gets his heart back again, he continues to serve this creep.
Director Gore Verbinski sets up a massive conflict between the nine pirate ships and the vast British armada commanded by Beckett. But when the fighting starts, they all sit around doing nothing, while the Dutchman and Pearl slug things out. (When the battle is over, the pirate lords start cheering wildly, as if they'd just accomplished something.)
Yet this is the first "Pirates" picture with emotional weight. You feel for Elizabeth as she's permanently separated from her governor father, and for Davy Jones and Tia Dalma/Calypso as Fate pulls them apart. We don't feel anything for Jack, of course, because he's a self-serving trickster; in fact, I wondered how he ever pulled a crew together that didn't mutiny in 20 minutes.
In the end, the filmmakers lacked the daring to kill off anyone who might be needed for "Pirates of the Caribbean Meet the Love Boat," or whatever the fourth film will be called. They protected the franchise rather than projecting a vision. But that's what blockbuster series do, and this one has raised the bar for the summer of 2007.
_______________________________
Another critic
Reviewed by Scott Tobias
The Marx brothers classic Duck Soup contains a bit that applies nicely to the bellicose Pirates Of The Caribbean trilogy, which reaches its conclusion with the nearly three-hour At World's End. When presented with a treasury report, Groucho's Rufus T. Firefly, the newly appointed President of Freedonia, declares it so simple that even a 4-year-old child could understand it. "Now run out and find me a 4-year-old child," he says. "I can't make head or tail of it." As a consequence of trying to turn a theme-park ride into a 463-minute trilogy, the Pirates movies are freighted by so much convoluted mythology and supernatural hoo-hah that perhaps only the very young can understand their dream logic. The last, longest, and most tedious of the bunch, At World's End sags under reams of exposition that not only fail to clarify the story, but take away from the slapstick tomfoolery that made the first film (and a couple of sequences in the second) escapist fun.
Picking up where the second entry, Dead Man's Chest, left off, the new film finds bland heroes Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley teaming up with the once-dastardly Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) to find Johnny Depp's Jack Sparrow, who's trapped in Davy Jones' locker. Here's where things get confusing: Bloom and the gang must first go through Singapore to get a special navigational map from Chinese pirate Chow Yun-Fat, who's one of several pirate lords who must unite in order to secure pirate freedom in the Seven Seas. (There's also some business about a "Brethren Of The Coast," and the "nine pieces of eight," but let's not get ahead of ourselves.) Meanwhile, the East India Trading Company has possession of Davy Jones' beating heart and has brought Jones and his Flying Dutchman ship into its quest to eradicate pirate-kind. And then there's Sparrow, whose predicament has left him with several metaphysical manifestations.
The Pirates Of The Caribbean trilogy—and At World's End especially—stands as a lesson in the perils in blockbuster filmmaking: What started out as a fleet one-off swashbuckler with novel supernatural elements has become loaded and graceless, with each new entry barreling across the goal line like William "The Refrigerator" Perry. The franchise's two chief assets—the surprise of Depp's swishy pirate and Gore Verbinski's dexterity at directing slapstick action sequences—have been eclipsed by expository scenes that confuse even more deeply in their attempt to clear things up. Should the franchise warrant still another sequel, the dialogue might as well be in Esperanto.
單身部落 Single Blog
性，愛，哪一樣會讓女人更了解自己？三個同居女人，各自經歷著愛性交纏，將性愛進行得笑中有淚。 VI(谷祖琳飾)從不同的性愛中找到高潮，總會遇上荒誕奇情的性事。機械工程師(吳嘉龍飾)、準新郎阿健(黃浩然飾)等都是她的輝煌戰蹟，直至遇上一個戇直純品的牧場男人DON(陳輝虹飾)，DON竟誤會她是純潔女孩。令她終於發現，她需要的，不是床上的高潮，而是人生的高潮。人生總有兩面，KIT(李彩華飾)是VI的對倒。初戀男友WOODY(曾國祥飾)因為性而移情別戀，刺激著KIT尋求改變，去體驗性的吸引力。性愛高手阿海(連凱飾)，各樣荒謬而新奇的性愛大觀園，令她興奮過、痛過、笑過、哭過。她就像站在WOODY昔日的路上，明白當日的他，她再次遇上WOODY，一切能否重新開始？永遠的小女孩美華(董敏莉飾)，她不要太聰明，只要一直有人寵她就好。能幹的上司駱小姐(安雅飾)出現，她捨不得美華受傷，守護她成長。美華逐漸發現，愛，原來可以存在於兩個女人之間。女人的心思、女人的吻和撫摸，都比男人都溫柔細膩得多。三個女人，交織出三段截然不同的性情故事，她們發現，透過前所未有的愛和性，她們找到了自己。
The Motorcycle Diaries / Diarios de motocicleta
Plots summary
The Motorcycle Diaries is an adaptation of a journal written by Ernesto "Che" Guevara de la Serna when he was 23 years old. He and his friend, Alberto Granado are typical college students who, seeking fun and adventure before graduation, decide to travel across Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela in order to do their medical residency at a leper colony. Beginning as a buddy/road movie in which Ernesto and Alberto are looking for chicks, fun and adventure before they must grow up and have a more serious life. As is said in the film itself, it's about "two lives running parallel for a while." The two best friends start off with the same goals and aspirations, but by the time the film is over, it's clear what each man's destiny has become.
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A soulful film takes Che Guevara's radicalization slow.
by Kenneth Turan
"The Motorcycle Diaries" is not what you might be expecting. Though it links future charismatic revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara, criminally attractive Mexican actor Gael García Bernal and a Norton 500 motorcycle nicknamed "La Poderosa," the powerful one, don't expect to put it on the shelf next to "Hells Angels on Wheels." This might be the quietest, most meditative motorcycle movie ever made.
On second thought, however, maybe it does belong on that shelf. Like riders everywhere, Guevara and his friend Alberto Granado were changed by their bike experience, by the eight months they spent in 1952 going 8,000 South American miles, but not in the way they expected.
For significant historical figures — and Guevara, whether you consider him a beacon of truth or an example of what conservatives like to call "adolescent revolutionary romanticism," was indisputably that — are not all forged in caldrons of fire. As this soulful and reflective film, as gentle as it is potent, ably demonstrates, transformation is no less convincing for being a gradual process that comes on its subjects all unawares.
Brazil's Walter Salles, best known for his 1998 "Central Station," was the right choice to direct a film that, knowing enough not to push too hard, simply unfolds in front of us. Salles' brand of straightforward naturalness comes off as effortless, but it is a lot harder to achieve than it looks.
A key element in this process is screenwriter José Rivera. Working in Spanish from books written by both participants, he avoids thunderous epiphanies in favor of catching quiet moments on the fly. His script helps us feel we're on the journey with these two men as they "explore a continent only known in books" and discover not only life but their place in it.
And then there is García Bernal, already a star due to "Y Tu Mamá También" and sure to get bigger after this and Pedro Almodóvar's "Bad Education." At 24, roughly the same age Guevara was when the trip began, he has the gift of unforced magnetism, the ability to make unselfconscious sensitivity heroic on screen.
Guevara has been done by everyone from Antonio Banderas in "Evita" to Omar Sharif (opposite Jack Palance's wacky Castro) in 1969's "Che!," but what makes this performance stand out is that it does not tip its hand. Because García Bernal has the sense and skill not to play Guevara like the great man in training, we get to see an individual learn and expand from experience, to tag along as purpose gradually reveals its inexorable hand to him.
Nothing anywhere nearly this serious is in the offing when these two young men begin Alberto and Ernesto's Excellent Adventure. They will leave their native Argentina, head north through Chile, Peru and Colombia and end up in Venezuela at the top of the continent. "This isn't a tale of heroic feats," Guevara's voice-over says at the outset, setting the tone. "It's two lives running parallel with common aspirations and dreams." Like, it turns out, finding girlfriends in every country they visit.
Of course, it doesn't work out quite that way for Granado (Argentine actor Rodrigo de la Serna), a 29-year-old pharmacist whose bluster conceals a good heart, and Guevara, at 23 one semester away from his medical degree. Though he came from a politically aware family (something the film does not mention), Guevara had yet to evince interest in social issues.
The journey begins with a visit to Guevara's sweetheart Chichina (Mía Maestro) and her stuffy landed-gentry family, and then gets going in earnest. Or at least as much in earnest as these two guys can manage.
For it turns out that mishaps will characterize this trip as much as anything more purposeful. The travelers' tent blows away, they ineffectually chase women and scrounge for food, they take so many destructive spills the mighty Norton has to be abandoned, and the journey, amid much bickering, continues via walking, hitchhiking and the occasional passenger ferry.
Whereas Granado's conniving presence remains a constant, the sensitive Guevara subtly changes. He's always an idealist, someone who almost cannot tell a lie, a determined man whose inner toughness has been forged through a battle with debilitating bouts of asthma, but his travels give greater scope to a burning compassion and a slowly growing anger at injustice.
Because the deeper these men get into their journey, especially on foot, the more serious things get, the more the continent's problems of poverty, expropriation and exploitation quietly but steadily reveal themselves. An extended stay at a leper colony on the Amazon in Peru (leprosy was an area of specialization for both men) is the emotional climax of that journey, and of the film.
Put together by a multinational cast and crew, "Diaries" was especially fortunate in its French cinematographer, Eric Gautier. He shot in a combination of 35-millimeter for impressive landscapes and Super 16 for its ability to give the film an authentic eye for indigenous faces, like the small boy in Cuzco, Peru, who gleefully describes the differences between the Incas and the "in-capables," the incapable Spaniards who came after.
Though it's not in the film, one of Guevara's most often quoted sentiments is that "the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love." It is the triumph of "The Motorcycle Diaries" that it movingly presents the person who believed that sentiment and shows us just how and why he came to feel that way.
_______________________________________
Another critic
Before he was executed by a Bolivian firing squad in 1967, Argentina's Ernesto Che Guevara had become (at the side of Fidel Castro) an icon of guerrilla warfare, a killer in a beret who celebrated hatred as the key to revolution. That image of Che (a name he acquired later in life) has been co-opted by everyone from rockers to ad whores. But you won't find him in The Motorcycle Diaries, a mesmerizing look at an asthmatic, rich-boy medical student in the act of discovering his insurgent spirit.
The impetus for this enlightenment is a 1952 motorcycle trip that Ernesto (Gael Garc'a Bernal), then 23, took with his biochemist pal Alberto Granado (Rodrigo de la Serna), 29. Jose Rivera based his script on the diaries both men kept of their eight-month trip through South America (from the snows of the Andes to the heat of the Amazon. Cheers to Walter Salles, the Brazilian director of 1998's Central Station, for keeping the focus intimate and thrillingly immediate.
A good part of the film's power is the way it sneaks up on you. The boys are sniffing out adventure, not an odyssey that will change their lives. Ernesto has been living large in Buenos Aires. He stops off at a resort for a fast hookup with his girl (Mia Maestro). The tart-chasing Alberto just wants to get laid. Neither man is a paragon of Easy Rider cool. For starters, they're riding Alberto's junk bike, a 1939 Norton 500 he calls the Mighty One. Salles gets terrific comic mileage out of the bike, especially when it breaks down and forces the guys to hitchhike or journey on foot.
It's the slowing of the trip that gives Ernesto and Alberto a chance to observe the starving workers and the politically oppressed they encounter in Chile, Peru and Venezuela. Whenever possible, Salles shot in the actual locations, letting us see what the protagonists saw, including the remnants of the Incan culture in Machu Picchu.
Most moving of all is the visit to the San Pablo leper colony in the Amazon. Ernesto feels an instant connection with the lepers. It galls him that the patients and the hospital staff live on opposite sides of the river. His night swim (gasping for breath with each stroke) to join the lepers is the film's true climax.
Salles has already taken heat from critics who think the compassionate Ernesto doesn't jibe with the executioner he became when he and Castro took down the Batista regime in Cuba in 1959. That Che will be the subject of a planned Steven Soderbergh film, starring Benicio Del Toro. But look closer at the scenes Salles seems to catch on the fly, such as Ernesto throwing a stone at a mining truck carrying men to exploitative labor, and you see how quickly romantic ideals can harden into brutal ideology.
The actors meet the film's challenges every step of the way. De la Serna finds the humor and the messy humanity in Alberto, who joined Ernesto in Cuba and makes an appearance, at age eighty-two, in the film's coda. The Mexican Bernal, far from the erotic romp of Y Tu Mama Tambien, gives a breakthrough performance, playing Ernesto like a gathering storm. In his published diaries, Che wrote, "I'll leave you now, with myself, the man I used to be." In this wild ride of a movie that is part epic poem and part political provocation, it's that man who holds the screen as a portent of history.
The Motorcycle Diaries is an adaptation of a journal written by Ernesto "Che" Guevara de la Serna when he was 23 years old. He and his friend, Alberto Granado are typical college students who, seeking fun and adventure before graduation, decide to travel across Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela in order to do their medical residency at a leper colony. Beginning as a buddy/road movie in which Ernesto and Alberto are looking for chicks, fun and adventure before they must grow up and have a more serious life. As is said in the film itself, it's about "two lives running parallel for a while." The two best friends start off with the same goals and aspirations, but by the time the film is over, it's clear what each man's destiny has become.
_________________________________
A soulful film takes Che Guevara's radicalization slow.
by Kenneth Turan
"The Motorcycle Diaries" is not what you might be expecting. Though it links future charismatic revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara, criminally attractive Mexican actor Gael García Bernal and a Norton 500 motorcycle nicknamed "La Poderosa," the powerful one, don't expect to put it on the shelf next to "Hells Angels on Wheels." This might be the quietest, most meditative motorcycle movie ever made.
On second thought, however, maybe it does belong on that shelf. Like riders everywhere, Guevara and his friend Alberto Granado were changed by their bike experience, by the eight months they spent in 1952 going 8,000 South American miles, but not in the way they expected.
For significant historical figures — and Guevara, whether you consider him a beacon of truth or an example of what conservatives like to call "adolescent revolutionary romanticism," was indisputably that — are not all forged in caldrons of fire. As this soulful and reflective film, as gentle as it is potent, ably demonstrates, transformation is no less convincing for being a gradual process that comes on its subjects all unawares.
Brazil's Walter Salles, best known for his 1998 "Central Station," was the right choice to direct a film that, knowing enough not to push too hard, simply unfolds in front of us. Salles' brand of straightforward naturalness comes off as effortless, but it is a lot harder to achieve than it looks.
A key element in this process is screenwriter José Rivera. Working in Spanish from books written by both participants, he avoids thunderous epiphanies in favor of catching quiet moments on the fly. His script helps us feel we're on the journey with these two men as they "explore a continent only known in books" and discover not only life but their place in it.
And then there is García Bernal, already a star due to "Y Tu Mamá También" and sure to get bigger after this and Pedro Almodóvar's "Bad Education." At 24, roughly the same age Guevara was when the trip began, he has the gift of unforced magnetism, the ability to make unselfconscious sensitivity heroic on screen.
Guevara has been done by everyone from Antonio Banderas in "Evita" to Omar Sharif (opposite Jack Palance's wacky Castro) in 1969's "Che!," but what makes this performance stand out is that it does not tip its hand. Because García Bernal has the sense and skill not to play Guevara like the great man in training, we get to see an individual learn and expand from experience, to tag along as purpose gradually reveals its inexorable hand to him.
Nothing anywhere nearly this serious is in the offing when these two young men begin Alberto and Ernesto's Excellent Adventure. They will leave their native Argentina, head north through Chile, Peru and Colombia and end up in Venezuela at the top of the continent. "This isn't a tale of heroic feats," Guevara's voice-over says at the outset, setting the tone. "It's two lives running parallel with common aspirations and dreams." Like, it turns out, finding girlfriends in every country they visit.
Of course, it doesn't work out quite that way for Granado (Argentine actor Rodrigo de la Serna), a 29-year-old pharmacist whose bluster conceals a good heart, and Guevara, at 23 one semester away from his medical degree. Though he came from a politically aware family (something the film does not mention), Guevara had yet to evince interest in social issues.
The journey begins with a visit to Guevara's sweetheart Chichina (Mía Maestro) and her stuffy landed-gentry family, and then gets going in earnest. Or at least as much in earnest as these two guys can manage.
For it turns out that mishaps will characterize this trip as much as anything more purposeful. The travelers' tent blows away, they ineffectually chase women and scrounge for food, they take so many destructive spills the mighty Norton has to be abandoned, and the journey, amid much bickering, continues via walking, hitchhiking and the occasional passenger ferry.
Whereas Granado's conniving presence remains a constant, the sensitive Guevara subtly changes. He's always an idealist, someone who almost cannot tell a lie, a determined man whose inner toughness has been forged through a battle with debilitating bouts of asthma, but his travels give greater scope to a burning compassion and a slowly growing anger at injustice.
Because the deeper these men get into their journey, especially on foot, the more serious things get, the more the continent's problems of poverty, expropriation and exploitation quietly but steadily reveal themselves. An extended stay at a leper colony on the Amazon in Peru (leprosy was an area of specialization for both men) is the emotional climax of that journey, and of the film.
Put together by a multinational cast and crew, "Diaries" was especially fortunate in its French cinematographer, Eric Gautier. He shot in a combination of 35-millimeter for impressive landscapes and Super 16 for its ability to give the film an authentic eye for indigenous faces, like the small boy in Cuzco, Peru, who gleefully describes the differences between the Incas and the "in-capables," the incapable Spaniards who came after.
Though it's not in the film, one of Guevara's most often quoted sentiments is that "the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love." It is the triumph of "The Motorcycle Diaries" that it movingly presents the person who believed that sentiment and shows us just how and why he came to feel that way.
_______________________________________
Another critic
Before he was executed by a Bolivian firing squad in 1967, Argentina's Ernesto Che Guevara had become (at the side of Fidel Castro) an icon of guerrilla warfare, a killer in a beret who celebrated hatred as the key to revolution. That image of Che (a name he acquired later in life) has been co-opted by everyone from rockers to ad whores. But you won't find him in The Motorcycle Diaries, a mesmerizing look at an asthmatic, rich-boy medical student in the act of discovering his insurgent spirit.
The impetus for this enlightenment is a 1952 motorcycle trip that Ernesto (Gael Garc'a Bernal), then 23, took with his biochemist pal Alberto Granado (Rodrigo de la Serna), 29. Jose Rivera based his script on the diaries both men kept of their eight-month trip through South America (from the snows of the Andes to the heat of the Amazon. Cheers to Walter Salles, the Brazilian director of 1998's Central Station, for keeping the focus intimate and thrillingly immediate.
A good part of the film's power is the way it sneaks up on you. The boys are sniffing out adventure, not an odyssey that will change their lives. Ernesto has been living large in Buenos Aires. He stops off at a resort for a fast hookup with his girl (Mia Maestro). The tart-chasing Alberto just wants to get laid. Neither man is a paragon of Easy Rider cool. For starters, they're riding Alberto's junk bike, a 1939 Norton 500 he calls the Mighty One. Salles gets terrific comic mileage out of the bike, especially when it breaks down and forces the guys to hitchhike or journey on foot.
It's the slowing of the trip that gives Ernesto and Alberto a chance to observe the starving workers and the politically oppressed they encounter in Chile, Peru and Venezuela. Whenever possible, Salles shot in the actual locations, letting us see what the protagonists saw, including the remnants of the Incan culture in Machu Picchu.
Most moving of all is the visit to the San Pablo leper colony in the Amazon. Ernesto feels an instant connection with the lepers. It galls him that the patients and the hospital staff live on opposite sides of the river. His night swim (gasping for breath with each stroke) to join the lepers is the film's true climax.
Salles has already taken heat from critics who think the compassionate Ernesto doesn't jibe with the executioner he became when he and Castro took down the Batista regime in Cuba in 1959. That Che will be the subject of a planned Steven Soderbergh film, starring Benicio Del Toro. But look closer at the scenes Salles seems to catch on the fly, such as Ernesto throwing a stone at a mining truck carrying men to exploitative labor, and you see how quickly romantic ideals can harden into brutal ideology.
The actors meet the film's challenges every step of the way. De la Serna finds the humor and the messy humanity in Alberto, who joined Ernesto in Cuba and makes an appearance, at age eighty-two, in the film's coda. The Mexican Bernal, far from the erotic romp of Y Tu Mama Tambien, gives a breakthrough performance, playing Ernesto like a gathering storm. In his published diaries, Che wrote, "I'll leave you now, with myself, the man I used to be." In this wild ride of a movie that is part epic poem and part political provocation, it's that man who holds the screen as a portent of history.
The Devil wears Prada
Story Plot
Miranda Priestley, of "Runway" magazine tears up the landscape as a demanding fashion editor. She is a terror to everyone who is around her as is quickly depicted in the opening scenes of the movie. Her first assistant strives to please her and tries to emulate her, but one can sense that she is not quite as hard as she tries to put on. Into this mix comes a young woman who knows nothing of the fashion industry, has never read the magazine, and doesn't know who Miranda Priestley is. She only sees this as a stepping stone to another journalism position. Showing no fashion sense and immediately scorned by everyone, Miranda nonetheless hires her as the second assistant. When Miranda demands that she obtain the next unpublished Harry Potter manuscript, you can sense that she is trying to force her to quit, but it makes the young woman dig in to please her boss. With the help of one of the magazine's fashion editors, she gets a complete makeover and a new security. However, with her new appearance and the demands placed on her, she starts to lose her friends, family and her live-in boy friend. As she is whisked away to Paris with Miranda and faces all of the glamor that could be hers, including a flashy if not artificial freelance journalist, she is forced to make the decision of where she wants to be in her life.
_________________________________
A very formulaic tale about a naive young woman who nearly loses her soul after being caught up in the woman-eats-woman world of fashion, the book must have obviously lost something in the filmic translation.
_________________________________
A critic by Stella Papamichael
The humour is as spiky as a pair of Manolo Blahniks yet The Devil Wears Prada isn't just a satire on the fashion industry. Anne Hathaway provides a soft centre as wannabe journalist Andy struggling to reconcile her ambition with a deeper core of human decency. Except for a dull romance plot, helmer David Frankel brings believable warmth to Lauren Weisberger's scathing book. Still, the real joy is in a smoulderingly sinister turn by Meryl Streep as Andy's egomaniacal boss.
Magazine editor Miranda Priestly is so imposing, she doesn't need to shout. Her indictments of Andy's weight and dress sense are softly spoken, languid and bitterly funny. As one colleague points out to the new assistant, "pressed lips" denote "catastrophe". But Streep presents more than a simmering cauldron of evil. Besides the designer clobber, she wears a discreet veil of tragedy and draws sympathy even while turning her nose up at the less fabulous.
"HOLDS A MORBID FASCINATION"
Frankel wisely avoids any mushiness in portraying what is basically a sadomasochistic mentor-protégé relationship. Andy takes as much humiliation as Miranda can dish out, but within that perverse dynamic, mutual respect develops convincingly and quite movingly.
It's a shame that Frankel ties pretty bows around the story in the end and it could have had more bite. Still what he does reveal about the fashion biz holds a morbid fascination. Understated moments like the withering once-over Andy is subjected to during her interview with Miranda are classic. Hathaway is an endearing foil, but it's Streep strutting her best stuff that really ties it all together.
______________________________________________
Reviewed by Sara Michelle Fetters
Streep Covers Uproarious Prada in Gold
“The Devil Wears Prada” is hands down the best American comedy released in 2006 so far. Sharp, observant, witty and full of moments of outright hilarity that left me speechless, it also features a titanic tour de force performance from Meryl Streep, one of Hollywood’s first lady’s of cinema in an Oscar-worthy portrayal that left me giddily dumfounded.
Based on the best selling novel by Lauren Weisberger, the film concerns Northwestern graduate Andrea “Andy” Sachs (Anne Hathaway, “The Princess Diaries”), a journalism major who takes a job as an assistant to the most powerful woman in fashion, Runway Magazine editor Miranda Priestly (Streep, “Adaptation”). Miranda rules over fashion with an iron fist, making and breaking careers with the nod of the head or a raise of the eyebrows. She’s a demon in designer clothing, and nothing Andy’s ever done in her life has prepared her for the sheer volume of hell this woman is about to drag her through.
Soon the young wannabe journalist realizes that to make it as Miranda’s assistant is going to take more than just delivering the woman’s coffee piping hot or being able to answer the phone by the second ring. While she’s completely wrong for the job (the girl doesn’t know Dolce from Gabbana let alone what part of the body a Manolo goes on to) but she absolutely refuses to fail, figuring out that a girl that can survive a year working for Ms. Priestly is a girl that can write her own ticket to any publication in the country.
What Andy doesn’t realize is that success comes with a price. With the help and friendship of the magazine’s fashion guru Nigel (a brilliant Stanley Tucci) the girl transforms herself into just the kind of stiletto-clacking fashionista she once despised. Now Andy knows her Gucci, adores her Versace and wouldn’t be caught dead without wearing her Jimmy Choo’s. But this transformation comes at a price, and soon she can’t help but wonder if the price of living Miranda’s fabulous life is one far too high for her to be willing to pay.
Let’s not mince words. I loved this movie. “The Devil Wears Prada” may not have anything all that new to say; beauty comes within, real friendship takes work, material things do not bring happiness, etc., etc.; but it is phenomenally funny. There is real wit, razor sharp slice your wrists in half with a machete wit, here, and it stings and cuts so brilliantly I think I spent the first twenty minutes of the movie sitting in the theater with my jaw hitting the floor dumfounded. This is one of those movies you just don’t see coming, a flick sure to be another in a long line of sappy chick flick syrupy gooiness that you on initial glance don’t give a passing thought about.
But this is not that movie. The mores it’s presenting may be tired and cliché, but it does so with so much energy and verbose cleverness you can’t help but stand up and applaud. Director David Frankel (a man behind such HBO successes like “Entourage” and “Sex and the City”) handles it all with devilish glee, assuredly maneuvering through the more tired corners of Aline Brosh McKenna’s (“Laws of Attraction”) otherwise solid screenplay with expert comedic precision. He makes a smooth transition from small screen to large, guiding this film to the finish line with such confident grace I couldn’t help but be suitably impressed.
Without Streep, of course, none of this would remotely matter because she is the dynamic glue gleefully holding even the most tiresome elements of the picture together with her demanding take-no-prisoners performance. But not over the top, the actress refusing to make Miranda a hissy-fit she-devil beheading assistants with her verbiage. Instead, this is a controlled, icy, methodical performance, one that makes those sitting in the audience tremble with fear every time the editor dismisses someone with a quiet, almost polite, “That’s all.” Yet Streep does what the book didn’t and that’s make Miranda a human being, a look here and glance there more than enough to make you realize that the cost of the life she’s chosen to live hasn’t been completely missed by the meticulous fashion spinning dynamo.
The rest of the cast adds solid support but this is, without a doubt, Streep’s show beginning to end. Still, Hathaway continues to mature nicely, her rapport with the Oscar-winning legend surprisingly strong. I also liked Adrian Grenier (star of Frankel’s “Entourage”), as Andy’s low maintenance boyfriend) and Simon Baker (“Something New”), as a successful writer smitten by the girl’s charms, quite a bit, but it was Emily Bunt (“My Summer of Love”) who really knocked my socks off. Playing Miranda’s clotheshorse first assistant Emily, she’s a ball of ever-tightening gut wrenching supercilious energy and I just loved the way she kept reacting to Andy’s transformation from meek to chic. She’s wonderful, and if I had my way Frankel would have used a heck of a lot more of her than he does.
I could nitpick. The movie is a bit too long and it doesn’t end quite as well as I would have liked. While the for the most part the director eschews letting the film’s emotions play out like a VHI music video, there is one montage at about the midpoint I really could have done without. But these are all minor when taking in the picture as a whole. I laughed, a lot, and it started during the first scene and didn’t stop until the final credits started and the film faded to black. The Devil may indeed wear Prada, but in the case of this movie the only thing this melodious masterwork needs to be covered in is box office gold.
Miranda Priestley, of "Runway" magazine tears up the landscape as a demanding fashion editor. She is a terror to everyone who is around her as is quickly depicted in the opening scenes of the movie. Her first assistant strives to please her and tries to emulate her, but one can sense that she is not quite as hard as she tries to put on. Into this mix comes a young woman who knows nothing of the fashion industry, has never read the magazine, and doesn't know who Miranda Priestley is. She only sees this as a stepping stone to another journalism position. Showing no fashion sense and immediately scorned by everyone, Miranda nonetheless hires her as the second assistant. When Miranda demands that she obtain the next unpublished Harry Potter manuscript, you can sense that she is trying to force her to quit, but it makes the young woman dig in to please her boss. With the help of one of the magazine's fashion editors, she gets a complete makeover and a new security. However, with her new appearance and the demands placed on her, she starts to lose her friends, family and her live-in boy friend. As she is whisked away to Paris with Miranda and faces all of the glamor that could be hers, including a flashy if not artificial freelance journalist, she is forced to make the decision of where she wants to be in her life.
_________________________________
A very formulaic tale about a naive young woman who nearly loses her soul after being caught up in the woman-eats-woman world of fashion, the book must have obviously lost something in the filmic translation.
_________________________________
A critic by Stella Papamichael
The humour is as spiky as a pair of Manolo Blahniks yet The Devil Wears Prada isn't just a satire on the fashion industry. Anne Hathaway provides a soft centre as wannabe journalist Andy struggling to reconcile her ambition with a deeper core of human decency. Except for a dull romance plot, helmer David Frankel brings believable warmth to Lauren Weisberger's scathing book. Still, the real joy is in a smoulderingly sinister turn by Meryl Streep as Andy's egomaniacal boss.
Magazine editor Miranda Priestly is so imposing, she doesn't need to shout. Her indictments of Andy's weight and dress sense are softly spoken, languid and bitterly funny. As one colleague points out to the new assistant, "pressed lips" denote "catastrophe". But Streep presents more than a simmering cauldron of evil. Besides the designer clobber, she wears a discreet veil of tragedy and draws sympathy even while turning her nose up at the less fabulous.
"HOLDS A MORBID FASCINATION"
Frankel wisely avoids any mushiness in portraying what is basically a sadomasochistic mentor-protégé relationship. Andy takes as much humiliation as Miranda can dish out, but within that perverse dynamic, mutual respect develops convincingly and quite movingly.
It's a shame that Frankel ties pretty bows around the story in the end and it could have had more bite. Still what he does reveal about the fashion biz holds a morbid fascination. Understated moments like the withering once-over Andy is subjected to during her interview with Miranda are classic. Hathaway is an endearing foil, but it's Streep strutting her best stuff that really ties it all together.
______________________________________________
Reviewed by Sara Michelle Fetters
Streep Covers Uproarious Prada in Gold
“The Devil Wears Prada” is hands down the best American comedy released in 2006 so far. Sharp, observant, witty and full of moments of outright hilarity that left me speechless, it also features a titanic tour de force performance from Meryl Streep, one of Hollywood’s first lady’s of cinema in an Oscar-worthy portrayal that left me giddily dumfounded.
Based on the best selling novel by Lauren Weisberger, the film concerns Northwestern graduate Andrea “Andy” Sachs (Anne Hathaway, “The Princess Diaries”), a journalism major who takes a job as an assistant to the most powerful woman in fashion, Runway Magazine editor Miranda Priestly (Streep, “Adaptation”). Miranda rules over fashion with an iron fist, making and breaking careers with the nod of the head or a raise of the eyebrows. She’s a demon in designer clothing, and nothing Andy’s ever done in her life has prepared her for the sheer volume of hell this woman is about to drag her through.
Soon the young wannabe journalist realizes that to make it as Miranda’s assistant is going to take more than just delivering the woman’s coffee piping hot or being able to answer the phone by the second ring. While she’s completely wrong for the job (the girl doesn’t know Dolce from Gabbana let alone what part of the body a Manolo goes on to) but she absolutely refuses to fail, figuring out that a girl that can survive a year working for Ms. Priestly is a girl that can write her own ticket to any publication in the country.
What Andy doesn’t realize is that success comes with a price. With the help and friendship of the magazine’s fashion guru Nigel (a brilliant Stanley Tucci) the girl transforms herself into just the kind of stiletto-clacking fashionista she once despised. Now Andy knows her Gucci, adores her Versace and wouldn’t be caught dead without wearing her Jimmy Choo’s. But this transformation comes at a price, and soon she can’t help but wonder if the price of living Miranda’s fabulous life is one far too high for her to be willing to pay.
Let’s not mince words. I loved this movie. “The Devil Wears Prada” may not have anything all that new to say; beauty comes within, real friendship takes work, material things do not bring happiness, etc., etc.; but it is phenomenally funny. There is real wit, razor sharp slice your wrists in half with a machete wit, here, and it stings and cuts so brilliantly I think I spent the first twenty minutes of the movie sitting in the theater with my jaw hitting the floor dumfounded. This is one of those movies you just don’t see coming, a flick sure to be another in a long line of sappy chick flick syrupy gooiness that you on initial glance don’t give a passing thought about.
But this is not that movie. The mores it’s presenting may be tired and cliché, but it does so with so much energy and verbose cleverness you can’t help but stand up and applaud. Director David Frankel (a man behind such HBO successes like “Entourage” and “Sex and the City”) handles it all with devilish glee, assuredly maneuvering through the more tired corners of Aline Brosh McKenna’s (“Laws of Attraction”) otherwise solid screenplay with expert comedic precision. He makes a smooth transition from small screen to large, guiding this film to the finish line with such confident grace I couldn’t help but be suitably impressed.
Without Streep, of course, none of this would remotely matter because she is the dynamic glue gleefully holding even the most tiresome elements of the picture together with her demanding take-no-prisoners performance. But not over the top, the actress refusing to make Miranda a hissy-fit she-devil beheading assistants with her verbiage. Instead, this is a controlled, icy, methodical performance, one that makes those sitting in the audience tremble with fear every time the editor dismisses someone with a quiet, almost polite, “That’s all.” Yet Streep does what the book didn’t and that’s make Miranda a human being, a look here and glance there more than enough to make you realize that the cost of the life she’s chosen to live hasn’t been completely missed by the meticulous fashion spinning dynamo.
The rest of the cast adds solid support but this is, without a doubt, Streep’s show beginning to end. Still, Hathaway continues to mature nicely, her rapport with the Oscar-winning legend surprisingly strong. I also liked Adrian Grenier (star of Frankel’s “Entourage”), as Andy’s low maintenance boyfriend) and Simon Baker (“Something New”), as a successful writer smitten by the girl’s charms, quite a bit, but it was Emily Bunt (“My Summer of Love”) who really knocked my socks off. Playing Miranda’s clotheshorse first assistant Emily, she’s a ball of ever-tightening gut wrenching supercilious energy and I just loved the way she kept reacting to Andy’s transformation from meek to chic. She’s wonderful, and if I had my way Frankel would have used a heck of a lot more of her than he does.
I could nitpick. The movie is a bit too long and it doesn’t end quite as well as I would have liked. While the for the most part the director eschews letting the film’s emotions play out like a VHI music video, there is one montage at about the midpoint I really could have done without. But these are all minor when taking in the picture as a whole. I laughed, a lot, and it started during the first scene and didn’t stop until the final credits started and the film faded to black. The Devil may indeed wear Prada, but in the case of this movie the only thing this melodious masterwork needs to be covered in is box office gold.
Marie Antoinette
Sofia Coppola rivets on the singular experience of a vilified royal. By Carina Chocano, Times Staff Writer
Sofia Coppola's "Marie Antoinette" opens with a shot of the last queen of France reclining on a chaise while a maid tends to her feet, surrounded by a parapet of pastries. On the soundtrack, the 1980s post-punk band Gang of Four belts out its class-baiting, anti-consumerist anthem, "Natural's Not in It." ("The problem of leisure / what to do for pleasure," it goes.) A confection herself, Marie Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst) selects a pastel-colored macaroon from a tray and takes a nibble. The whole time she's gazing saucily at the camera as if to ask if we'd like to make something of it. Maybe we would.
It's funny, when it's put to you this way, how much of the lore surrounding Marie Antoinette is dessert-related. Combine the cream-puff fashion and design sense, the infamous (and apocryphal) cake quip and the sweet retaliatory indulgence of her demise, and you get a clever, visually gorgeous theme that's both emblematic of an unfathomable life and somehow weirdly familiar.
"Marie Antoinette" gives a wide berth to the conventions of period dramas, especially their time-capsule remove, and instead tries to mainline the singular personal experience of the arch-villainess of French history (and freedom history, for that matter). The result is a startlingly original and beautiful pop reverie that comes very close to being transcendent.
Since the movie's premiere at Cannes, where legend has it was met with a chorus of boos (who was in the audience, Robespierre?), the reaction to the movie has been polarized. This sort of thing seems to happen a lot to big-budget, star-studded movies that look like Hollywood but feel like art-punk. The movie was inspired by Antonia Fraser's biography "Marie Antoinette: The Journey," a compassionate and thorough account (or so I understand) of the monarch's life. But Coppola is less interested in setting the historical record straight than in making an emotional connection to a misunderstood young girl whose coming-of-age took place under conditions familiar to a pampered zoo animal.
The youngest daughter of Holy Roman Emperor Francis I and Maria Theresa, archduchess of Austria, a 14-year-old Marie Antoinette was shipped off to Versailles to marry the dauphin of France, thereby securing a fragile Franco-Austrian peace. Her mother (played by an imposing Marianne Faithfull) warns that the French court is not like the Austrian, and she's not kidding.
From the moment the soon-to-be dauphine steps onto French soil, she finds herself trapped in a funhouse of bizarre protocol. From the ritual handing-off ceremony where her new chaperone, the Comtesse de Noailles (Judy Davis), rids her of every last scrap of her Austrian past — including her clothes and her puppy — almost to the day she and her husband, Louis XVI, get packed off to Paris by an angry mob, Marie Antoinette's life was at once cloistered and open to the public. The massive spectacle of her quickie wedding to the future king (played by Jason Schwartzman) is rivaled only by her well-attended wedding night, which is kicked off by a bed-consecration ceremony to which le tout Versailles apparently has ringside seats. This, unfortunately for Marie, is about as freaky as it gets. The marriage remains unconsummated for seven years — a fact of which everyone, her mother included, is mortifyingly well apprised.
So begins a lonely, lost Marie Antoinette's transformation from dutiful, pliable daughter to party girl and eventual tabloid whipping post. (Pamphlets printed on illegal presses in Paris routinely portrayed her as anation-bankrupting hussy.) Trapped and powerless, she soldiers through the marriage and succumbs to the bizarre rituals and internecine rivalries of the court until the sudden death of the lusty and dynamic Louis XV (Rip Torn) grants the teenage couple the run of the country, at which point the queen begins to close ranks.
What with the best-friend entourage (Mary Nighy as the Princesse Lamballe and Rose Byrne as the Duchesse de Polignac), the vindictive rival (Asia Argento as the infamous Du Barry), the gossipy hangers-on (Molly Shannon and Shirley Henderson as Aunt Victoire and Aunt Sophie), the limitless credit, shopping addiction, round-the-clock partying, reckless gambling and public dissection of her love life, Marie Antoinette was the original teenage celebutante princess. And who better to empathize — and feel at home in the milieu — than Coppola? A style icon and member of Hollywood royalty herself, she slips easily into Marie Antoinette's beautiful, unbelievably whimsical shoes (which were designed for the movie by Manolo Blahnik), hooking into the soundtrack of her teenage years to impart the experience. Incidentally, and really quite beautifully, that particular period in pop corresponds with the transition from post-punk to New Wave to New Romanticism; that is to say, from yawping social criticism to desolation to ironic baroque decadence.
Coppola has a soft spot for characters who live their lives at once cut off from and exposed to the world. And she captures the gilded-cage experience, in all its romantic decadence, like nobody else. The movie is at its strongest when it focuses on Marie Antoinette's private, sensual world, which — as she drifts into her much-mocked Rousseau-inspired pastoral phase, in which she attempts, in her inimitably artificial way, to connect with her natural self — becomes ever more abstract and cut off from reality. Dunst's sleepy, detached quality is perfectly suited to the character. What Marie Antoinette wants is to lose herself in a dream.
Coppola empathizes with the queen's private suffering as well as with her detachment but recognizes this detachment as dangerous. At the beginning of the movie, Marie Antoinette is 14. At the end she's 34. The country is deeply in debt, bankrupted by excess and a foreign war (the American Revolution) it can't afford. Meanwhile, the queen has been trying to find herself through shopping.
This feels not so much like a warning as a melancholy and resigned realization — which is interesting for a movie that aligns itself so closely with punk rebellion. Toward the end, I found myself waiting for clues to the coming eruption of reality. But when it finally comes, it feels cursory. Hermetically sealed inside Marie Antoinette's world, you don't see it coming, and you don't know what to make of it when it arrives. The hungry mob shows up waving pitchforks, and you half wonder if perhaps they might like a piece of cake.
______________________________________________________
Another critic Different style. Different point of view.
Have you ever wondered what Paris Hilton would be like as the Queen of France? ‘Marie Antoinette’ dares to bore us with this question.
Sofia Coppola’s third film was booed at Cannes and, for the second time regarding Marie Antoinette, the French were right.
‘Marie Antoinette’ starts out with the promise of skewering life in the royal court. In 1758, Austria and France formed a treaty by marrying the teenaged Marie Antoinette to the equally young and inexperienced Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman).
The fact that the integrity of this treaty rests on Marie getting pregnant is ludicrous because it’s true. Coppola has good fun at the expense of all the pomp, circumstance and nonsensical tradition.
Consider the opening moments where a dressing tent is pitched on the borders of the two countries. Young Marie enters from the Austrian side, is made to shed all of her possessions and replace them with their French made equivalents. Only then is she fit to come out the other side, truly a Frenchwoman now.
Even eating with her boy-husband or being dressed in the morning by her royal sisters in order of their rank & privilege is well played for all its ridiculousness.Then something annoying happens. ‘Marie Antoinette’ loses all sense of story and commentary and devolves into a teenage girl’s diary… “My Summer At Versailles”.
It’s one gossip tale after another. Marie’s all night slumber parties. Her shopping sprees. Hot boys. Hey, isn’t Marie married to the King of France? Don’t get your hopes up. The tantalizing tidbits of Marie’s affair, like most gossip, go absolutely nowhere.
Somewhere close to the 2 hour mark, Coppola remembers there’s some history to address. The peasants are revolting. The shallow queen develops a sense of duty out of nowhere and decides to stand by her king. Why? Who cares? Towards the end of ‘Marie Antoinette’, you’ll be praying for the guillotine.
Now someone from the ‘Marie Antoinette’ camp will probably counter my critique by saying, “But that’s the point, Frank. Marie Antoinette is supposed to seem selfish and shallow. That’s why she sparked the French Revolution.” This defense would work if Coppola didn’t seem so tickled by Marie’s flights of excess.
Kirsten Dunst’s performance is equally enamored with itself. Dunst only manages one look of coyness throughout her starring vehicle. Her “I’m so totally fabulous” smirk, like the constant nothingness happening in the script, gets old very quickly.
As for the supporting players, the hodge podge of casting is more fascinating than any one performance. Where else can you see Rip Torn, Judy Davis, Molly Shannon, Asia Argento and Steve Coogan all in the same film?
Much has been made of the use of modern music in ‘Marie Antoinette’. Coppola wants to paint Marie as a free spirit in a gilded cage. The rock tunes are the sounds of her rebellion. It’s a simple yet uninspired conceit that could have gone someplace interesting. Don’t expect it to (unless you think Bow Wow Wow’s “I Like Candy” is some kind of anthem).
‘Marie Antoinette’ could be a significant misstep for Coppola, especially if it means the vapid socialite of her youth has returned.
You see, there are two Sofia Coppolas. There’s the poor little debutante clad in Prada giggling with girlfriends at Nobu. There’s also the Sofia who continued the family legacy of fine filmmaking with ‘Lost In Translation’ and ‘The Virgin Suicides.’
The former Sofia is the one who co-wrote ‘Life Without Zoe.’ That was the dull middle section of her dad’s ‘New York Stories.’You know, the one with a precocious 12 year old rich girl attending posh kid’s parties in Manhattan? It’s okay if you don’t remember. ‘Marie Antoinette’ will probably fade from memory just as easily.
-----
Another Critic - A Doomed Queen, Waiting for a Story
It's all about the cake. In the first shot of Sofia Coppola's new movie, Kirsten Dunst looks straight at the camera and dips her finger into some frosting. There's the famous "let them eat..." line, and Coppola's queen gets to deny it first and say it, too. Early on, the Austrian-born Marie Antoinette is likened to apple strudel, later on a courtier can be heard to remark: "she looks like a piece of cake." It's the perfect metaphor for this superficial, messy confection of a movie.
Sofia Coppola's follow-up to Lost in Translation once again features an adorable young woman in strange surroundings, and there is karaoke--except this time it's baroque (baroquaoke?). Unfortunately, there's nothing nearly as sweet and personal as the relationship between Scarlett Johannson and Bill Murray that anchored Lost in Translation. The same ubercool hipster soundtrack is in effect, but since the synth pop alternates with period music, it only creates more distance to the characters.
Marie Antoinette was filmed on location, and on first glance, its surface is certainly appealing. In lavish outfits, Kirsten Dunst ambles through Versailles, engages in some mild intrigue, throws parties, tries on shoes, and feeds her lap dogs, waiting, like us, for some sort of story.
That story is provided, for a while, by Marie Antoinette's quest to conceive an heir. Much rides on this because it will cement the Franco-Austrian alliance her arranged marriage to Louis XVI created. But the film never quite explains why Louis (Jason Schwartzman) won't deflower his bride. In absurd bedroom scenes that will seem especially prudish once John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus is released, the king half-heartedly climbs on top of his queen only to roll off again with a sigh. Finally, all it takes to resolve this narrative arc is a good talking to by Marie Antoinette's brother (Danny Huston), and this is when the film begins to flounder in earnest.
Jason Schwartzman's role, in particular, doesn't add up. He plays the bedraggled, disinterested monarch as a farcical buffoon, until, in the final minutes of the movie, we're suddenly asked to feel for him. Nothing Louis or Marie Antoinette do or say seems to have any connection to the way they meet their end--history is a forgone conclusion that has little to do with anybody's actions. Coppola goes through the motions of the biopic: coronation, check, mother's death, check, death of child, check, storming of the Bastille, check--until there's nowhere left to go but the guillotine.
There are some amusing moments along the way, but Marie Antoinette is caught up within the bubble of decadence it describes. There's plenty of cake and champagne, but there is precious little news about aristocracy, wealth, history, celebrity, pleasure, revolution, or anything else. When the people of France finally come for her, they arrive as noise, and finally we see an undistinguished mob wielding pitchforks and torches. Marie Antoinette leaves Versailles the way she arrived: oblivious.
----
Based on Antonia Fraser's book about the ill-fated Archduchess of Austria and later Queen of France, 'Marie Antoinette' tells the story of the most misunderstood and abused woman in history, from her birth in Imperial Austria to her later life in France.
Sofia Coppola's "Marie Antoinette" opens with a shot of the last queen of France reclining on a chaise while a maid tends to her feet, surrounded by a parapet of pastries. On the soundtrack, the 1980s post-punk band Gang of Four belts out its class-baiting, anti-consumerist anthem, "Natural's Not in It." ("The problem of leisure / what to do for pleasure," it goes.) A confection herself, Marie Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst) selects a pastel-colored macaroon from a tray and takes a nibble. The whole time she's gazing saucily at the camera as if to ask if we'd like to make something of it. Maybe we would.
It's funny, when it's put to you this way, how much of the lore surrounding Marie Antoinette is dessert-related. Combine the cream-puff fashion and design sense, the infamous (and apocryphal) cake quip and the sweet retaliatory indulgence of her demise, and you get a clever, visually gorgeous theme that's both emblematic of an unfathomable life and somehow weirdly familiar.
"Marie Antoinette" gives a wide berth to the conventions of period dramas, especially their time-capsule remove, and instead tries to mainline the singular personal experience of the arch-villainess of French history (and freedom history, for that matter). The result is a startlingly original and beautiful pop reverie that comes very close to being transcendent.
Since the movie's premiere at Cannes, where legend has it was met with a chorus of boos (who was in the audience, Robespierre?), the reaction to the movie has been polarized. This sort of thing seems to happen a lot to big-budget, star-studded movies that look like Hollywood but feel like art-punk. The movie was inspired by Antonia Fraser's biography "Marie Antoinette: The Journey," a compassionate and thorough account (or so I understand) of the monarch's life. But Coppola is less interested in setting the historical record straight than in making an emotional connection to a misunderstood young girl whose coming-of-age took place under conditions familiar to a pampered zoo animal.
The youngest daughter of Holy Roman Emperor Francis I and Maria Theresa, archduchess of Austria, a 14-year-old Marie Antoinette was shipped off to Versailles to marry the dauphin of France, thereby securing a fragile Franco-Austrian peace. Her mother (played by an imposing Marianne Faithfull) warns that the French court is not like the Austrian, and she's not kidding.
From the moment the soon-to-be dauphine steps onto French soil, she finds herself trapped in a funhouse of bizarre protocol. From the ritual handing-off ceremony where her new chaperone, the Comtesse de Noailles (Judy Davis), rids her of every last scrap of her Austrian past — including her clothes and her puppy — almost to the day she and her husband, Louis XVI, get packed off to Paris by an angry mob, Marie Antoinette's life was at once cloistered and open to the public. The massive spectacle of her quickie wedding to the future king (played by Jason Schwartzman) is rivaled only by her well-attended wedding night, which is kicked off by a bed-consecration ceremony to which le tout Versailles apparently has ringside seats. This, unfortunately for Marie, is about as freaky as it gets. The marriage remains unconsummated for seven years — a fact of which everyone, her mother included, is mortifyingly well apprised.
So begins a lonely, lost Marie Antoinette's transformation from dutiful, pliable daughter to party girl and eventual tabloid whipping post. (Pamphlets printed on illegal presses in Paris routinely portrayed her as anation-bankrupting hussy.) Trapped and powerless, she soldiers through the marriage and succumbs to the bizarre rituals and internecine rivalries of the court until the sudden death of the lusty and dynamic Louis XV (Rip Torn) grants the teenage couple the run of the country, at which point the queen begins to close ranks.
What with the best-friend entourage (Mary Nighy as the Princesse Lamballe and Rose Byrne as the Duchesse de Polignac), the vindictive rival (Asia Argento as the infamous Du Barry), the gossipy hangers-on (Molly Shannon and Shirley Henderson as Aunt Victoire and Aunt Sophie), the limitless credit, shopping addiction, round-the-clock partying, reckless gambling and public dissection of her love life, Marie Antoinette was the original teenage celebutante princess. And who better to empathize — and feel at home in the milieu — than Coppola? A style icon and member of Hollywood royalty herself, she slips easily into Marie Antoinette's beautiful, unbelievably whimsical shoes (which were designed for the movie by Manolo Blahnik), hooking into the soundtrack of her teenage years to impart the experience. Incidentally, and really quite beautifully, that particular period in pop corresponds with the transition from post-punk to New Wave to New Romanticism; that is to say, from yawping social criticism to desolation to ironic baroque decadence.
Coppola has a soft spot for characters who live their lives at once cut off from and exposed to the world. And she captures the gilded-cage experience, in all its romantic decadence, like nobody else. The movie is at its strongest when it focuses on Marie Antoinette's private, sensual world, which — as she drifts into her much-mocked Rousseau-inspired pastoral phase, in which she attempts, in her inimitably artificial way, to connect with her natural self — becomes ever more abstract and cut off from reality. Dunst's sleepy, detached quality is perfectly suited to the character. What Marie Antoinette wants is to lose herself in a dream.
Coppola empathizes with the queen's private suffering as well as with her detachment but recognizes this detachment as dangerous. At the beginning of the movie, Marie Antoinette is 14. At the end she's 34. The country is deeply in debt, bankrupted by excess and a foreign war (the American Revolution) it can't afford. Meanwhile, the queen has been trying to find herself through shopping.
This feels not so much like a warning as a melancholy and resigned realization — which is interesting for a movie that aligns itself so closely with punk rebellion. Toward the end, I found myself waiting for clues to the coming eruption of reality. But when it finally comes, it feels cursory. Hermetically sealed inside Marie Antoinette's world, you don't see it coming, and you don't know what to make of it when it arrives. The hungry mob shows up waving pitchforks, and you half wonder if perhaps they might like a piece of cake.
______________________________________________________
Another critic Different style. Different point of view.
Have you ever wondered what Paris Hilton would be like as the Queen of France? ‘Marie Antoinette’ dares to bore us with this question.
Sofia Coppola’s third film was booed at Cannes and, for the second time regarding Marie Antoinette, the French were right.
‘Marie Antoinette’ starts out with the promise of skewering life in the royal court. In 1758, Austria and France formed a treaty by marrying the teenaged Marie Antoinette to the equally young and inexperienced Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman).
The fact that the integrity of this treaty rests on Marie getting pregnant is ludicrous because it’s true. Coppola has good fun at the expense of all the pomp, circumstance and nonsensical tradition.
Consider the opening moments where a dressing tent is pitched on the borders of the two countries. Young Marie enters from the Austrian side, is made to shed all of her possessions and replace them with their French made equivalents. Only then is she fit to come out the other side, truly a Frenchwoman now.
Even eating with her boy-husband or being dressed in the morning by her royal sisters in order of their rank & privilege is well played for all its ridiculousness.Then something annoying happens. ‘Marie Antoinette’ loses all sense of story and commentary and devolves into a teenage girl’s diary… “My Summer At Versailles”.
It’s one gossip tale after another. Marie’s all night slumber parties. Her shopping sprees. Hot boys. Hey, isn’t Marie married to the King of France? Don’t get your hopes up. The tantalizing tidbits of Marie’s affair, like most gossip, go absolutely nowhere.
Somewhere close to the 2 hour mark, Coppola remembers there’s some history to address. The peasants are revolting. The shallow queen develops a sense of duty out of nowhere and decides to stand by her king. Why? Who cares? Towards the end of ‘Marie Antoinette’, you’ll be praying for the guillotine.
Now someone from the ‘Marie Antoinette’ camp will probably counter my critique by saying, “But that’s the point, Frank. Marie Antoinette is supposed to seem selfish and shallow. That’s why she sparked the French Revolution.” This defense would work if Coppola didn’t seem so tickled by Marie’s flights of excess.
Kirsten Dunst’s performance is equally enamored with itself. Dunst only manages one look of coyness throughout her starring vehicle. Her “I’m so totally fabulous” smirk, like the constant nothingness happening in the script, gets old very quickly.
As for the supporting players, the hodge podge of casting is more fascinating than any one performance. Where else can you see Rip Torn, Judy Davis, Molly Shannon, Asia Argento and Steve Coogan all in the same film?
Much has been made of the use of modern music in ‘Marie Antoinette’. Coppola wants to paint Marie as a free spirit in a gilded cage. The rock tunes are the sounds of her rebellion. It’s a simple yet uninspired conceit that could have gone someplace interesting. Don’t expect it to (unless you think Bow Wow Wow’s “I Like Candy” is some kind of anthem).
‘Marie Antoinette’ could be a significant misstep for Coppola, especially if it means the vapid socialite of her youth has returned.
You see, there are two Sofia Coppolas. There’s the poor little debutante clad in Prada giggling with girlfriends at Nobu. There’s also the Sofia who continued the family legacy of fine filmmaking with ‘Lost In Translation’ and ‘The Virgin Suicides.’
The former Sofia is the one who co-wrote ‘Life Without Zoe.’ That was the dull middle section of her dad’s ‘New York Stories.’You know, the one with a precocious 12 year old rich girl attending posh kid’s parties in Manhattan? It’s okay if you don’t remember. ‘Marie Antoinette’ will probably fade from memory just as easily.
-----
Another Critic - A Doomed Queen, Waiting for a Story
It's all about the cake. In the first shot of Sofia Coppola's new movie, Kirsten Dunst looks straight at the camera and dips her finger into some frosting. There's the famous "let them eat..." line, and Coppola's queen gets to deny it first and say it, too. Early on, the Austrian-born Marie Antoinette is likened to apple strudel, later on a courtier can be heard to remark: "she looks like a piece of cake." It's the perfect metaphor for this superficial, messy confection of a movie.
Sofia Coppola's follow-up to Lost in Translation once again features an adorable young woman in strange surroundings, and there is karaoke--except this time it's baroque (baroquaoke?). Unfortunately, there's nothing nearly as sweet and personal as the relationship between Scarlett Johannson and Bill Murray that anchored Lost in Translation. The same ubercool hipster soundtrack is in effect, but since the synth pop alternates with period music, it only creates more distance to the characters.
Marie Antoinette was filmed on location, and on first glance, its surface is certainly appealing. In lavish outfits, Kirsten Dunst ambles through Versailles, engages in some mild intrigue, throws parties, tries on shoes, and feeds her lap dogs, waiting, like us, for some sort of story.
That story is provided, for a while, by Marie Antoinette's quest to conceive an heir. Much rides on this because it will cement the Franco-Austrian alliance her arranged marriage to Louis XVI created. But the film never quite explains why Louis (Jason Schwartzman) won't deflower his bride. In absurd bedroom scenes that will seem especially prudish once John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus is released, the king half-heartedly climbs on top of his queen only to roll off again with a sigh. Finally, all it takes to resolve this narrative arc is a good talking to by Marie Antoinette's brother (Danny Huston), and this is when the film begins to flounder in earnest.
Jason Schwartzman's role, in particular, doesn't add up. He plays the bedraggled, disinterested monarch as a farcical buffoon, until, in the final minutes of the movie, we're suddenly asked to feel for him. Nothing Louis or Marie Antoinette do or say seems to have any connection to the way they meet their end--history is a forgone conclusion that has little to do with anybody's actions. Coppola goes through the motions of the biopic: coronation, check, mother's death, check, death of child, check, storming of the Bastille, check--until there's nowhere left to go but the guillotine.
There are some amusing moments along the way, but Marie Antoinette is caught up within the bubble of decadence it describes. There's plenty of cake and champagne, but there is precious little news about aristocracy, wealth, history, celebrity, pleasure, revolution, or anything else. When the people of France finally come for her, they arrive as noise, and finally we see an undistinguished mob wielding pitchforks and torches. Marie Antoinette leaves Versailles the way she arrived: oblivious.
----
Based on Antonia Fraser's book about the ill-fated Archduchess of Austria and later Queen of France, 'Marie Antoinette' tells the story of the most misunderstood and abused woman in history, from her birth in Imperial Austria to her later life in France.
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