THE PRESTIGE and MARIE ANTOINETTE double feature

This week was one of those ones that start coming up toward the end of the year where there’s just too many movies you want to see all coming out on the same day. And me being an obsessive motherfucker I try to tackle them all at once. We got three reliable directors all hitting the same day here. #1 priority for me was Clint’s FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS, but I already saw that at an early screening. So that left Chris Nolan’s THE PRESTIGE and Sofia Coppola’s MARIE ANTOINETTE. So I watched them both in a row, liked both, also fell asleep during both. (You gotta go to sleep the night before one of these double-headers, it turns out.)

To be honest I wasn’t even gonna review MARIE because, let’s face it, I am not a girl. This is not only a girl movie but a long, arty, low on plot girl movie. I think some of you cinemasters are gonna love the shit out of it but alot of my readers would probaly never be able to sit through it. Still, I’ve read so many reviews that clearly didn’t fucking GET this movie that I decided I had to comment.

Ms. Coppola’s take on Marie Antoinette is not your typical stuffy historical drama costume movie. She tries to emphasize that Marie was a teenager (14) when she became French royalty, so this movie is about giggly teen girls hanging out like they’re having a slumber party or something. If you saw the trailer you know that some (but not all) of the movie is set to ’80s synthesizer pop music that white people used to listen to due to the brain damage caused by the popularity of cocaine at the time. Also, since the movie is in English anyway and nobody’s speaking French, she decided to dump the artificiality of everybody faking French accents, so you got Rip Torn and people in there talking how they normally would. But wearing wigs. Other than that though they’re trying to be fairly accurate to the times and like most of these types of pictures they get some beautiful imagery that seems inspired by old paintings. (more…)