Marie Antoinette: A Review Sunday, Nov 5 2006 

movies thisgaudygildedstage 8:01 pm

Weekend posts are clearly going to be about entertainment.

Today PJ and I saw Sophia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, a dazzlingly beautiful tribute to Versailles, eighteenth-century French fashion (especially shoes), and cake. Kirsten Dunst is quite good in it, as is Jason Swartzmann. I also thought that the modernized soundtrack worked well.

On the downside, the film’s obsession with these visual and aural elements ultimately seem to substitute for any particular point of view. We are given a sympathetic vision of Marie Antoinette but one can’t help but wonder why. Why give us this portrait now? Likewise, the film doesn’t seem as interested in historical events as it does in showing us Marie Antoinette’s good humor, fondness for cake, and loneliness. The less informed audience members (like me) find it difficult to follow the film’s leaps through time. On the one hand, the actors show little sign of aging. On the other hand, the film covers some 20 years in Marie Antoinette’s life.

On the whole, this is an entertaining, if somewhat empty tribute to the style, protocols, and excesses of the Bourbon court. It is a feast for the eyes, but I would have liked it better if it had also aspired to move or educate me.

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El Mar (2000): A Review Saturday, Nov 4 2006 

movies thisgaudygildedstage 9:46 pm

Tonight we watched a Spanish film we rented from netflix, El Mar. Excuse my French, but I just have to say that this film is fucked up — and not in a good way.

The movie starts during the Spanish Civil War. Three children, two boys and a girl, witness a series of violent acts, which leaves them emotionally scarred. We meet up with them again a decade later. One of the boys has become a prostitute, one has become a religious zealot who uses the rituals of his faith to sublimate his desire for the male prostitute, and the girl has become a nun. (She too seems to be in love with the slutty one.)

The cinematography is excellent. And the religious zealot/gay boy is kind of cute. But apart from those two qualities, this movie is just fucked up. At first I thought it might be using tuberculosis as a metaphor for AIDS or something, which might have been interesting. But I don’t think that’s what it was really doing. Then I thought that it might be a critique of Catholicism’s sexual repressiveness. But that didn’t seem right either. By the film’s penultimate scene, a climactic confrontation between the two young men, I just didn’t care anymore what it was trying to do.

And I won’t even discuss the gratuitous and rather graphic violence against a cat, which is almost impossible to watch if you like animals at all. The film passes this violence off as little more than a plot point; the perpetrator is immediately forgiven and the act is dismissed as just one more example of his violent anger, but this anger doesn’t seem meant to turn the audience against him. Instead, the film doesn’t seem to know what we’re supposed to think about most of what happens in it.

One critic maintains that

The message is clear: Children learn the ways of the world early. They take the horrors they see in childhood with them into adulthood and express them in their own new horrific ways. It’s a depressing concept, but it makes for interesting stories.

Horrific, yes. Depressing, maybe. Interesting, not really. I’ll take sweet German coming out films over horrific Spanish ones any day!

Again, here’s the trailer:

 

Summer Storm (2004): A Review Friday, Nov 3 2006 

movies thisgaudygildedstage 11:45 pm

PJ and I wanted to see Marie Antoinette this evening, but the sound wasn’t working correctly in the theater, and so everyone was told to come back another time. So, we ended up getting a refund and coming home to watch one of the movies we have from netflix, a German film entitled Summer Storm.

In many ways, this movie is a very typical, paint by numbers high school coming out film, but I thought that it was kind of touching, even if simplistic. It’s about the captain of a Bavarian crew team, named Tobi, who is in love with his best friend. The two go off to summer camp with their team, where Tobi and his teammates interact with another team comprised of gay boys. This of course brings everything out in the open: his teammates’ homophobia, his sexuality, and his unrequited love for his friend.

Tobi’s sexual awakening is rather sweet, but I’m a sucker for coming out movies so I’m probably being a little too easy on it. It’s kind of a combination of Get Real, Nico and Dani, and one scene from Y tu mama tambien, all movies that I really like. The conflicts are resolved a little too quickly and ultimately it doesn’t really do anything new or even very special with its subject matter, but overall I can’t help but like it. Maybe I just wish I had been part of a German crew team when I was 17 or so and had fallen in with another high school team of queer boys!

Here’s the trailer, which is appropriately cheesy:

 

“We Other Victorians” Thursday, Nov 2 2006 

academia thisgaudygildedstage 11:07 pm

Tonight was the first meeting of my department’s new 19th-century reading group. My current project will extend into the 19th century, so I’ve decided to use this group as an opportunity to reconnect with the period. I am reminded that, as an undergraduate, I specialized in 19th-century European history in my course work, and I took a few 19th-century lit courses as a graduate student. Last year, I chaired a search committee to hire a Victorianist. So, I look forward to this reconnection.

The meeting went very well. We read an essay about periodization and whether there really was a “Victorian period.” The conversation was a lot of fun, and I think we all look forward to our next meeting in January.

One of the things that struck me about the article was that many of the phenomena the writer discusses actually “began” (if debates about or issues of class, gender, empire, sexuality, science, state power, etc. can ever really be said to “begin” in any particular period) in the 18th century.

During the search last year, I frequently joked with my colleagues about the idea of the long 18th century, the idea that the 18th century extends from about 1649 or 1660 to about 1820 or 1832, depending on who’s making the argument. Now I wonder if the 18th century shouldn’t be even longer — perhaps to the 1850s!

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Gentility and the Comic Theatre Wednesday, Nov 1 2006 

books thisgaudygildedstage 6:15 pm

I’ve just finished reading Mark Dawson’s Gentility and the Comic Theatre of Late Stuart London (Cambridge, 2005), an excellent study of how gentility was staged in comic drama between 1660 and 1725, with particular emphasis on the post-1688 years.

I’m reviewing this book for a journal, so I’ll leave all the normal review stuff for that. But I thought that this would be a good space in which to reflect a little on how Dawson’s book has spurred me to think about a couple of professional issues.

To be honest, I’ve always been a little bored by English drama between 1688 and 1725. My own research has focused on the period between 1660 and 1685, the best 25-year-period in English literature, imo, and I have a fondness for many of the plays written in the late eighteenth century, works like She Stoops to Conquer and A School for Scandal. (I once saw a great production of the former at the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, CT. It was hilarious and very well produced.) But the period in between has held little interest for me, with the exception of John Gay’s A Beggar’s Opera, which is a masterpiece. About a year-and-a-half ago, I taught Susan Centlivre’s 1718 comedy A Bold Stroke for a Wife in both my undergraduate and graduate courses, but it left me thinking that sometimes there’s a reason why some literary works are forgotten or neglected by history.

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