Like the misunderstood queen the movie is based on, Marie Antoinette, the movie, has gotten a bad rap. It was met with boos at the Cannes Film Festival, blasted by critics and historians for not being an exacting look at the life of the teenaged queen. It may not get the details 100 % right, but if you want accuracy watch the History Channel. Sophia Coppola’s follow-up to the wildly popular Lost in Translation is more of a tone poem, a dreamy biography more concerned with feelings than facts.
As with her two previous films, The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation, Coppola once again shows her skill in capturing the youthful perspective of odd circumstances. Just as the Lisbon sisters of Suicides felt alienated by their suburban surroundings and family, and Lost in Translation’s Scarlette Johansson suffered the isolation of an unhappy marriage and strange country, the youthful queen of Marie Antoinette must deal with isolation and rejection, Versailles style.
Brought from her native Austria at age 14 as kind of a “womb for hire” Marie Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst) was thrust into a loveless marriage with Louis XVI, the boy king who had no interest in her, and the court of Versailles, a gossipy and cruel place so vicious they make the London tabloid press look like Miss Manners. As Antoinette attempts to acclimate herself to life in the court she embraces the decadence, spending lavishly while her subjects starved. Even her hair reflects her excess. As the film goes on her hair grows from a subdued hairdo to an outrageous bouffant that would make even Kim Jong Il green with envy.
Coppola’s film is luscious. Shot on the world’s most expensive film set—she was the first director given permission to shoot at Versailles—the movie is uncommonly beautiful. More controversially she chose British pop music as the key songs on the soundtrack. Now this is no A Knight’s Tale, a medieval tale where the new wave music seemed out of place and strange. Coppola’s use of New Order and The Cure fit the mood of the piece perfectly. In one stunning scene Marie Antoinette is doing some at home shopping—merchants would bring their most beautiful and expensive baubles to Versailles for her perusal—and as the camera glides over the pink and blue shoes, Bow Wow Wow’s I Want Candy pulsates on the soundtrack. Music and scene mesh perfectly as the ornate shoes look more like bon bons than footwear and Dunst’s youthful enthusiasm is apparent.
Marie Antoinette isn’t strictly a biopic, or history lesson on the French Revolution. Instead it is a beautiful portrait of spoiled youth and the toxic culture of decadence that did her in.
I don’t think that I have ever done a flip-flip on a movie as cataclysmic as the shift in my opinion on Elizabethtown. As much as I respect and admire Cameron Crowe I just didn’t get Elizabethtown when I saw it at the Toronto International Film Festival this year. That cut of the movie was too long, too self-indulgent and frankly, boring. I changed my mind, however, when I saw the Slim Fast version of the movie that has been cut by about half-an-hour.
Crowe has trimmed the fat off the story about a young man—played by Orlando Bloom—who has just designed a shoe that was supposed to revolutionize the industry, but instead is a disaster, losing close to a billion dollars. At the same time he must deal with the death of his father, his extended family in Elizabethtown Kentucky and a perky flight attendant he meets on the way to his father’s memorial service. This time less really is more. The ruthless editing saved the movie, turning it into an enjoyable darkly comic romance.
Crowe has always had a deft hand at directing women—think Rene Zellweger in Jerry Maguire, Cameron Diaz in Vanilla Sky or Kate Hudson in Almost Famous and in Elizabethtown he shines the light on Kirsten Dunst. She is frequently good in films, but she really steals this movie as the cute and kooky stewardess who helps keep Bloom’s head screwed on during his bereavement. She has several unforgettable moments—when she tells Bloom to stop trying to break up with her; her giggly reaction when Bloom asks her a personal question on the telephone. Without her performance the trip to Elizabethtown wouldn’t be nearly as much fun.
Spider-Man 3 contains elements that every fan-boy has been hoping for, and several they haven’t. It takes the best and worst elements from the first two outings, combining them into one over-long movie that relies too heavily on CGI magic and not enough on pacing and story.
The new film picks up where the last one wrapped up. All is right in the world of Peter Parker. His heroic exploits as Spider-Man are being trumpeted in the press and his soon-to-be-fiancé MJ (Kirsten Dunst) has landed a starring role in a Broadway play. Soon, though, things turn sour. MJ has trouble dealing with Spider-Man’s newfound fame; his old friend (and son of the Green Goblin) Harry (James Franco) tries to kill him; he must battle a new foe, a molecularly challenged escaped convict known as the Sandman (Thomas Hayden Church) while, on a more mortal plane, fighting to keep his job. On top of this a black, gooey creature from outer space has attached itself to his DNA, changing him from super hero to super heel.
Director Sam Raimi has created a tangled web; a slick but sluggish movie that brings the wow factor with several impressive action sequences, but fails when it focuses on the characters. Raimi pads the 2 ½ hour movie with long shots of MJ and Peter staring soulfully at one another with dewy eyes. He loves those shots like Pete Doherty loves cocaine, but they slow the movie’s momentum to a crawl.
The section of the movie that deals with Peter Parker’s dark side almost feels like it was dropped in from another, rather silly, film. Spurned by MJ, unemployed and profoundly bitter, Parker—like Superman and Batman before him—explores the flip side of his do-gooder personality. This amounts to flicking his hair across his forehead in a way that makes him look more like Garth Brooks’ faux rock singer Chris Gaines than a badass and ogling at women, a la John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. Playing his transformation into a cad for laughs diminishes the importance of Parker’s examination of his dark side.
Fans can look forward to state-of-the-art action sequences—one in which an office building is destroyed by an out-of-control crane is spectacular—but may find some other aspects of the story—MJ’s two musical numbers, Parker’s ridiculous bad boy nightclub behavior and Aunt May’ (Rosemary Harris) matronly presence—harder to swallow.
To decipher what’s wrong with Spider-Man 3 all we have to do is look back at movie history. Sequels with the number 3 in the title rarely hold up, particularly when their predecessors are highly regarded.
Godfather 1 and 2. Yes please. Number 3? Not so much.
Batman, Batman Returns and Batman Forever? Yes, yes and no thanks.
X-Men 3? I hope it is their last stand.
In movie terms the third time often isn’t a charm. By the third time around expectations are often impossibly high, so filmmakers feel the need to kick it up a notch. In most cases it doesn’t work—less really is more—and you end up with something like Spider-Man 3, a movie that feels bloated by too many subplots, too many villains and too many characters.
Any movie brazen enough to put the word “amazing” in the title really should go the extra mile to ensure that the movie is, in act, amazing. Otherwise filmmakers run the risk of opening themselves up to reviews that begin like this: “Amazing Spider-Man,” more like “So-So Spider-Man.” There’s nothing that much wrong with the reboot of the Sam Raimi series, but it doesn’t have the oomph I would have expected from a talented director—the ironically named Marc Webb—hitting the reset button.
Like first Raimi film—which was released just ten years ago—“The Amazing Spider-Man” is an origin film. Peter Parker (“The Social Network’s” Andrew Garfield) is a misfit teen who develops superhuman powers after being bitten by a radioactive spider. His spidey-senses tingle when danger is about and, as the song goes, he can “do whatever a spider can.” His new powers put him in the path of his scientist father’s old partner Dr. Curt Connors (Rhys Ifans), an amputee doctor experimenting with cross genetic engineering to find a way to regrow his arm, and into the arms of Gwen Stacey (Emma Stone), the cute daughter of a hardboiled police captain (Denis Leary).
There are differences between Raimi’s take on the story and the new film. He no longer organically shoots webs, they now come out of a mechanical webslinger. There’s a new romantic interest—Gwen replaces Mary-Jane Watson (played by Kirsten Dunst in the older movies) as Parker’s paramour– a new villain—Curt Connors appeared in the other movies as Peter’s professor—who morphs from human to giant lizard determined to infect everyone with lizard juice and J. Jonah Jameson, the Daily Bugle’s Editor-in-Chief is absent.
The biggest change, however, comes in the character. Spider-Man Mach 1, Tobey McGuire, played the webbed wonder’s human counter-part as a sweet, but awkward and bullied loner. Garfield takes a different approach. His Parker is rebellious, angst-ridden who taunts his enemies with wisecracks and gleefully yells, “I’m swingin’ here!” as he zigzags trough the air supported by his newfangled super webs.
It’s an interesting, fresh take on Parker, which Garfield, despite being eleven years older than his character, pulls off with aplomb. He’s made the character his own, balancing Parker’s nervous energy with Spider-Man’s cockiness.
Emma Stone’s Gwen and Martin Sheen and Sally Field as Peter’s Uncle Ben and Aunt May bring some necessary heart to the story, but this is a summer blockbuster, so the emphasis is on the other stuff; nine-foot long lizards and fight scenes, but despite the large scope of the film it seems on a smaller scale than Raimi’s movies. Or at last as small a scale as a movie about a giant reptile and a radioactive superhero can be.
The visionary rethink that Christopher Nolan brought to Batman isn’t here. It does have the best Stan Lee cameo to date, beautiful photography and more humor than the previous films, but coming just five years after the last Raimi film it doesn’t feel as “amazing” as it should.
