is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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Queens Give Me a Break.
So this has been my fall break. I didn�t go anywhere, or do anything. I worked most of the week. And it was frustrating work, writing and collating dozens of job applications, writing a paper on Sartre (my philosophical nemesis of sorts, though the paper has ended up being much more interesting than I could have predicted when I began it. But that�s probably mostly because I ended up finding a way of comparing Sartre, Levinas, and Nietzsche on temporality). Get this: I didn�t even get the cleaning done I had so hoped to get done. I am still sitting in a pile-of-crap house. Argh.
However, I did sleep the HELL out of some long long nights, which was satisfying, and I did wake up as slowly as I wanted to every day, and then I�d so some yoga, and then cook some food, and maybe take a shower around noon or 2 or, whenev. And then on Friday I woke up and decided I had to do something breaky at least once during my fall break, especially since I didn�t get to go see all my beloved peeps in San Francisco as I would have liked. So I went to see Marie Antionette. It was OK. Mostly nothing happened. That is of course interesting given the events of her life. The film was Sofia Coppola going at it in her moody quasi-music-video way, but not as movingly as she did in Lost in Translation. Methinks, after that film, The Virgin Suicides, and this latest, that Ms. Coppola may be suffering from a poor-me kind of imposed loneliness. Whether it is self-imposed, fame-imposed, or world-imposed hardly matters because she is so comfortably inhabiting it that it�s like she one day put on a coat that turned into her skin, and now no one can tell when she�s naked except her.
As I was watching the film, which was very very slow (on purpose, and I didn�t really mind), I had plenty of time to ask myself whether the film was worth watching (that�s never a good sign, I guess, except that my answer wasn�t entirely a �no, it�s not worth watching� answer, so I�m at least ambivalent about it). I had hopes that Coppola would find something interesting and innovative to say about the life and fate of Marie Antoinette. And she did succeed in showing her in a sympathetic light, as a 14-year-old girl shipped off from Austria to marry a prince who would be the king of France, forced into back-stabbing French court society and burdened with the need to bear a child so that Austria�s relation to France could be secured, etc. And it did a good job showing the excess of the French monarchy just prior to that part where their heads get chopped off (the film ends before that happens, however, and for that I am thankful.). But, really, if you're going to use music from the 1980s as a backdrop to French court excess, why not draw the conclusion we all have in mind already: that these are two generations who lost their souls to excess and then paid for their lack of concern for the larger world? (If you really want to see a film that is about the French Revolution in an oblique way and thereby avoids all the mob-blood while still getting the point across, don�t see Marie Antionette, see Peter Weiss� Marat/Sade instead.) But anyway, you did not expect politics from Sofia Coppola, did you? Of course not.
So after Marie Antoinette in Plymouth Landing I went to Target in Conshohocken and got some stuff. Then I went home, excited to do a bit of reading and then cook some dinner and watch TV. Except when I got home there was no electricity. Trees are falling down around here all the time. It is astounding. Pennsy trees are very clumsy! And they always take power lines out with them. Why can�t we be like California suburbs with all the wires running underground? Anyway, it looked like it was going to take a good long while to figure out the latest snafu, and meanwhile my apartment was very very dark. So what could I do but go back to the movies. This time I saw The Queen in King of Prussia. This is doubly good, since I saw The Queen (of England) right after Marie Antoinette (Queen of France) and I also saw The Queen in King of Prussia, PA.
It made a good double header, since this story was also about having responsibilities you never got to choose to take on, and also about being out of touch with your subjects, but this movie wasn�t about pre-revolutionary France, it was about late 1990�s England. It�s the story of how the Queen reacted to Princess Diana�s death, and how she and Tony Blair came to work together to rebuild the monarchy�s reputation after the public decided the Queen had been heartless. Basically the Queen decided that Diana�s death was a family matter and that her main concern was her grandchildren, plus Diana was divorced from the family so the funeral was in the hands of the Spencers. But the public wanted a public funeral. And the Queen could not recognize this as being a very British thing to do, being that British people are reserved and dignified and don�t cry in public. Anyway, it is all very well done and interesting and at times even moving in an understated way. No spoilers. But both films succeed in showing, in very different ways, how what the public thinks about those who have to rule them is often very distorted. Not that the rulers themselves don�t fall prey to their own distortions of themselves and the public. And really, beyond that, there�s not much we can say to compare the current Queen of England to Marie Antionette. What was surprising about seeing both of the films in one day was how similar the themes of the two films were on some levels, despite all the very pronounced differences of style, content, aim, ethos, and casting.
But do you know what I�m really excited about? 1) Borat. 2) Curse of the Golden Flower! Yimou Zhang (House of Flying Daggers! Hero! etc.) is soon releasing a new movie, starting Chow Yun-Fat and Gong Li! Oh, what a glorious day that will be.
12:50 a.m. - October 23, 2006
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