Marie Antoinette

I never thought it would come to this, but yesterday I actually watched Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette. To clarify something for those of you who don't know any better or have been confused by positive media reactions to Sofia Coppola's films, THEY ARE NOT GOOD. Even Lost in Translation; not good. In fact, really, really bad. If you think you liked the movie, I hate to tell you this but it was actually just the soundtrack that you liked, and possibly some vague sense that Tokyo, Scarlett Johanssen, and Bill Murray are things that you should think are cool and that therefor the combination of those things, set to the chill sounds of My Bloody Valentine = a good movie. Such is not the case. In fact, that proclaimed "love letter to Japan" was just another weak, theoretically incoherent, inane movie about an attractive privileged white girl and how hard it is to be one, and in fact is insulting to the Japanese and completely marginalizes important issues like misogyny in Japan, among other things. But I digress. Marie Antoinette was, (surprise!) a weak, theoretically incoherent, inane movie about an attractive privileged white chick and how hard it is to be one. Sofia Coppola's main flaw as a film maker, besides a lack of talent, is a lack of perspective. Like many spoiled people, she only has one perspective, and it happens to be her own. All of her characters are representations of herself, and in making Marie Antoinette, she makes a pretty clear statement. She thinks she's royalty, and deserves our pity. Aside from my attack on the character of the director, which is directly related to the lack of value in her films, she's barely even trying in this one. The births and deaths of the children of the title character are represented by a 20 second montage of taking down and putting up family portraits; while at least an hour of the film is dedicated to shots of Kirsten Dunst's snaggle-toothed cackle as she gambles and, for some reason, runs a lot. Good to know what Sofia Coppola's priorities are. The dialogue is poorly written, with inconsistencies in style from scene to scene and between characters. Austrian characters speak English with a British accent(?) except for Kirsten Dunst, and her daughter is inexplicably the only character who speaks French. The only real attempt at making this a period piece and not a piece of card-board with the words "I am Sofia Coppola I have good taste in music and I want to be the queen of France I am so misunderstood identify with me!" written on it are the costumes and set design, which I will admit were kind of nice. But used to no good end. In conclusion, Sofia Coppola: shut the hell up.

Available from wherever total crap is distributed.