jackboot

I read some remarks by Sofia Copola, regarding Marie Antoinette and her impetus for wanting to make this film. Finally got around to seeing it. Oy, what a stinker.

"My biggest fear was making a 'Masterpiece Theatre' kind of movie. I didn't want to make a dry, historical period movie with the distant, cold tableau of shots. It was very important to me to tell the story in my own way. In the same way as I wanted LOST IN TRANSLATION to feel like you had just spent a couple of hours in Tokyo, I wanted this film to let the audience feel what it might be like to be in Versailles during that time and to really get lost in that world." In this one stated goal of Ms. Copola's, I never had a ghost of a chance to feel like was anywhere near that world, the world of Versailles at that time. I was prevented from any possibility of entering that deliciously inviting world by a production that missed the mark in just about every possible way.

The gawd-awful contemporary popular rock music really makes it hard to feel anything relating to the 18c period. The songs were all VERY recognizable songs that commanded my attention, relegating the visual component of the film into a music video. Composers of film scores throughout the ages, and up to the present, use the very powerful tool of music to guide the audience's feelings and emotional response to the images on film. Ms. Copola has subjugated her role as director to making servile accompaniments to workmanlike rock music.

The costumes and hair were looking awfully shoddy. I mean to say that they looked nice, but they came nowhere near what is depicted of Marie Antoinette and other ladies of the court of Versailles in paintings and even other films. The high water mark for costumes, certainly for 18c French Royalty will have to remain with the 1938 version of Marie Antoinette, directed by Woody Van Dyke.

The casting was disappointing. If this film is supposed to ape the populist appeal of The Knight's Tale, then, it should be a lite enough effort with a young enough cast and a cursory and superficial gesture at costuming and settings to satisfy the 12 - 18 year old demographic whom will flock to this picture. Kirsten Dunst just does not look like anything other than a vivacious teenager. Marie Antoinette became queen at age nineteen, but she continued to sit as queen until her untimely death, just before her thirty-eighth birthday. Jason Schwartzman as a French noble who would be king? That's a stretch that is too hard to fathom.

The script was the final insult with dialogue written as though it were excerpted from any garden variety contemporary sit-com, with bad grammar, extremely casual and dumbed-down lexicon and sarcastic wisecracking. There was no hope for my being able to suspend disbelief even for a moment and buying into Sofia Copola's jejune effort at making a historical biopic with that kind of bad writing.

This film is a complete failure, but if it piques the imagination of young people enough to inspire them to learn a little more about the history of this time period and some of the principal characters in the story (which is FASCINATING! it's well worth the time and energy!!), then, it's not a completely wasted effort. But, as a film to be judged upon its own merits, this lame outing clearly demonstrates why contemporary American cinema is to be largely dismissed as garbage.

See the 1938 version of Marie Antoinette starring Norma Shearer, it too is flawed, but it will at least give you a more realistic depiction of life then and there.

I don't know how anyone could rave about this film. I thought it was excruciatingly long, slow and very, very boring. I gave it two stars out of ten.

I must say that Dexter Gordon is one of my least favorite players of his generation and what fame he was able to garner probably comes more to do with his having outlived the rest of his contemporaries than it does with his musical accomplishments, but to focus so much attention on him and to have to listen to him hoarsely whisper or mumble his lines for over two hours was torture. And here was yet another example of "Ray" or "Walk the Line" syndrome - a biopic about a one-time talent who had become a derelict begging for drinks. Why are we supposed to find this kind of behavior interesting or entertaining? I was not touched and found it impossible to care about what happened to his character.

I thought the music was very disappointing, and mostly because of Dexter Gordon. It seemed like he was holding everyone else back. He was appearing alongside a bunch of other guys, all known hotshots, who all looked like they came to play and Gordon could barely squawk out a few notes. In general, all the music was too slow, it barely held together and it was pretty much lifeless and dull. I was so disappointed, especially after the build-up this film got. I don't see how anyone with even the most cursory and superficial interest in jazz can call the music in this film "great jazz".

I don't know what kind of a fetish or obsession this director had with jazz, but I thought all of the discussion on screen about the music sounded completely sophomoric and pretentious. It also bugged me greatly to hear Dexter Gordon's character speaking of the evolution of advanced harmony and some of the players who helped usher it forward with new technical and theoretical innovations and placing himself in the time line alongside the likes of Basie, Charlie Parker, etc. Of course, this was not Dexter Gordon talking, but his character, but it was irksome for me to hear Gordon, who is a second class jazz man, talk like he was the Son of God or something.

The story line was tedious, what little plot that there was. Why this Francis character would ever get so worked up over the Dale Turner character didn't wash for me. Okay, if this was about the real-life relations between Bud Powell and Francis Paudras, I could see why he'd basically give his life over to help the guy, but from what was shown in this film, it landed like a lead turkey. I fault the director and also the whomever it was that made the terrible casting decision to use Dexter Gordon who, at 63, was way too old for the part. Powell would have been 34, Lester Young would have been 50 in 1959. Gordon seemed too physically challenged and barely able to speak so that it was painful to have to sit through his performance. Watching Gordon was like watching an old dog trying to get up the stairs.

In a perverse irony, seeing Martin Scorcese on screen as the oily manager of Dale Turner was strangely humorous.

For a film that is supposed to be anthemic and give a definitive view into the jazz world, 'Round Midnight misses the beat.