FAREWELL, MY QUEEN When ornate wiggery attracts.
  • FAREWELL, MY QUEEN When ornate wiggery attracts.

Lots of cinema stuff opening today, and we liked 75% of what we saw of it.

Jen Graves has lovely things to say about Farewell, My Queen:

Marie Antoinette's critics, toward the end of her life, didn't just call her rich and clueless—they hissed that she was an Austrian lesbian slut. In particular, they accused her of carrying on with Gabrielle, the Duchess of Polignac. So French author Chantal Thomas wrote her historical novel, Farewell, My Queen, as a portrait that amounts to a retort (retortrait!). The book came out in 2002, and it detailed the four days that began with the storming of the Bastille, telling the story from the perspective of a young female servant smitten with the queen, while the queen is deeply in love with Gabrielle. Ten years hence, the novel has been adapted into a movie, and it's a big-screen depiction in which lesbianism is the rule, nothing out of the ordinary—a satisfying twist on a virulent form of real-life persecution that still persists.

I sing the praises of Easy Money:

The lure of sudden riches can make brothers of the most disparate men, a fact that's explored from a variety of angles in the Swedish crime thriller Easy Money. Jorge (Matias Padin Varela) is a Chilean prison escapee with rare knowledge of the cocaine business and a plan for the big score that'll set him up for life on the other side of the world. Mrado (Dragomir Mrsic) is a hit man with the Serbian mafia, sent to dispatch Jorge but harboring secret dreams of his own. And JW (Joel Kinnaman, star of AMC's The Killing) is an economics student leading a double life, presenting himself as a wealthy young socialite and funding the charade with a grubby job as a cabbie. Presented with an opportunity to make his moneyed pose a reality, JW accepts, and the twisty dance of Easy Money begins.

Charles Mudede swoons (in a characteristically roundabout way) for Sacrifice:

In the early 1990s, the Chinese directors Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige dominated the art houses in the West with films like Raise the Red Lantern and Farewell, My Concubine. The institutions that made these important films were seen as being the complete opposite of the industry and corporations that made films in Hong Kong. Chinese films had depth and refinement; Hong Kong films were shallow and crass. Chinese films were slow; Hong Kong films were fast. Chinese films were made for the mind; Hong Kong films were made only for the market. The directors who best represented the Chinese approach were Zhang and Chen; the directors who best represented the Hong Kong mode were John Woo and Tsui Hark. Then two things happened: One, Hong Kong was reunited with China in 1997, and, two, China became the second most important capitalist nation on earth. This transformation of China meant a transformation of its film industry.

And both Ned Lannamann and Paul Constant (each of whom, it must be said, possesses an award-worthy name) were unimpressed with The Watch, the star-studded humongo-comedy so bad we panned it twice. Here's Ned's eloquent 300-word explication, with Paul's briefer review featured below.

The Watch is supposed to be an action comedy. It’s about a group of schlubby men (Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, Jonah Hill, and Richard Ayoade, none of whom do anything interesting) who form a neighborhood watch organization, and then fight off an alien invasion. It’s a lazy, boring, predictable movie, and I didn’t even laugh once.

A comedy so lame it ain't even worthy of a zing. Ouch.

Full cinema-going info here.