Anonymous

This movie was a gigantic insult to the lives, work, and legacy of William Shakespeare, the Globe Theatre, and all their friends and compatriots -- but since it's a feature-length Oxfordian screed, we knew that going in. Oxfordians gonna oxford. Anyway, the first 2/3 of it were also boring as hell and relia kept falling asleep on my shoulder.

The last 1/3 -- surprise! It -- ... improved! relia definitely woke up!

Actually, I dunno what else I can say about this. I'm pretty sure I can't write anything about Anonymous that could be as funny as the movie was unintentionally. But only the last 1/3. The only thing funny about the first part was how I texted one of my college friends to complain about how bored I was and he texted me back with, "You're on your own, bro. I'm wearing a tuxedo and watching Kiss Kiss Bang Bang."

Surprise!

( okay I can't actually not comment )

The Walking Dead 2.04; Marie Antoinette

The Walking Dead 2.04 - Cherokee Rose: This show is my favorite at the moment. Highlights of this episode were Glenn and, uh, recent developments in Glenn's life (:D) (:DDDDD) and the titular scene with Daryl and his "Cherokee rose" story. I can't underscore enough how rare it is to see an actively heroic portrayal of a young Asian man, or Asian man altogether, on Western TV, and while I'd love for him to get more screentime I'm happy for Glenn's presence in this cast. Even putting aside the copious Fu Manchu racism, I am dead tired of fictional Asian men who exist primarily as mysterious antiheroic demigods to interact with white men and women (Inception) or blocking figures for Asian women who want to be Westernized (The Joy Luck Club; Lost; fucking everything). Yeah, we get it, TV. We're evil. You're threatened by us. We know. We know. Pretty much in the marrow of our bones and every time we see an Asian face crop up in a movie and cringe wondering how hard the slap's going to be this time we know.

Anyway, Daryl keeps on being my favorite and gets some of the most compelling material, though Shane's still kind of like a beautiful composition you can't get out of your head played in a jarring nerve-jangling minor key. Dale and T-Dog's bonding is pretty much always A+ too and T-Dog could do with more screentime of his own.

~

Marie Antoinette: Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette was one of the free on-demand movies today so we decided to watch it. Given I know Coppola mostly as the cancer that killed Godfather III /b/ and the creator of Orientalist-stereotyping masterpiece Lost in Translation, I didn't really get my hopes up, but --

-- man, okay, here's the thing, Coppola does some of the worst attempts at artsy filmmaking I've seen outside of freshman film students' term projects. Just like a parrot trying to sing the syllables of "Let the Bodies Hit the Floor" on YouTube, it's like she watched a film by, I don't know, someone with any filmmaking talent and tried to limply copy what they did without realizing why they did it. She's like an artist who does nothing but trace from DeviantArt stock and animu illustration and slap on Photoshop brushes. Her movies are full of these long, overdone, music-video-esque shots of random things -- pretty scenery, costumes, people doing various activities -- that don't serve any purpose but to fill up space and provide Flickr-esque screenshots, they don't provide any thematic or storytelling information, they're just there. If you chopped out all the random montages of things in Marie Antoinette and pared the film down to things actually happening and people actually saying things, the whole thing would be about 20 minutes long. Along with a bunch of hammered-in shots intended to make the viewer feel like Versailles is a foreign and surreal world, which is a cheap trick for any period film. It's like she had 1 page of content on her English paper and padded the rest out with fluff words. I don't know how this movie got made.

Even if it'd been any good as a movie, though, Marie Antoinette still would've been royalist-sympathizing cloying nostalgic historical revisionist Rococo-porn crap. It's what it set out to be. Does the world really need another Scarlet Pimpernel? Have we not cried enough tears for the poor, sad fate of the poor, sad aristocrats who were so tragically murdered? Where are the sexy period pieces about the millions of people they starved, brutalized, enslaved, raped, and murdered? Sic semper tyrannis, for fuck's sake, it's one thing to portray unfortunate Louis XVI as a hapless, well-intentioned human being far in over his awkward young head with his ancestors' mistakes (which Jason Schwarzman did a pretty good job with, considering the material), it's another to add to the general canon of English-language media portraying the French Revolution as a brutal force of nature and the Russian Revolution as a terrible tragedy and everything else telling us that royalty is romantic and popular revolution is bloodthirsty communism. I've had enough to tell me that Marie Antoinette felt pain like anyone else. I think it's pretty much impossible not to know that. I've never had Hollywood try to convince me that the people who overthrew the monarchy did too -- just the continual text and subtext that the Bourbon and Romanov families were tragic, romantic victims and that Maximilien Robespierre and the Bolsheviks were cruel upstarts who eventually got what was coming to them, and that starving people everywhere should do like good little subjects and wait for moderate, gradual change. Like one year of Terror cancels out centuries and centuries of terror.

Hell with that, you know what? Louis Bourbon and Maria Antonia were the 1%. I never see historical films about the 99% outside of HBO, where you're supposed to gawk at all the grittiness. Maybe it's because not enough of them were debutantes. I think Hollywood has cried enough tears for the Bourbon family. Let someone shed some for the people of fucking France for a change. And not just France.