Hi Andrew, I enjoy your overview of the festival. Marie Antoinette sounds like a mess. For a successful anachronistic view of a period character see the recent BBC series of Casonnova, very fine. As for Flanders, mounted cavalry charges were certainly still happening in WW1, for interest check out the Australian film 40,000 horsemen.

Cheers

David Edler

...I'm hoping that "Marie Antoinette" is better than it sounds from Andrew O'Hehir's report. An 18th century period picture set to 21st century rock/pop? Er, I'm not so sure I like that trick. Is there any plot or story to the film? The trailer looked so promising, too. Just hope it doesn't disappoint too much when it finally hits the US theaters, re-edited or not.

I've previewed A Scanner Darkly at my university, and I think I can say definitively it's not a real competitor for any accolades. The film is certainly very visually intriguing, but the disjointed, trippy, film-student feel gets grating before we're a fourth of the way in. As for the dialogue, I don't know if it was taken directly from the Philip K. Dick novel, but I very much doubt that it was. The one monologue that uses the title phrase has such different diction from everything else in the film, it seems clear to me that the (mostly inane) dialogue was only vaguely inspired by the book. The twist ending somehow manages to be both over-explained (think the psychologist at the end of Psycho) and logistically ridiculous.

In short, to be honest, the film exhausted me, and not in a good way. I really wanted to like it, as I'm a Linklater fan, as well as a fan of Winona Ryder, Robert Downey Jr., and all the rest. But I don't think it's going to sweep anyone at Cannes off their feet.

All her movies have stunk (just because she puts Bill Murray in it doesn't protect her from the truth: she's horrible!)

Everybody went NUTS when Julian Lennon DARED to SING SONGS: "Oh, he's just capitalising on his father's fame".

(He's 40 times better than his father, but never mind.) But somehow Sophia is allowed right into the ring with her dad, no questions asked. Well, I think it's time for HER to find a new way to capitalise on her father's fame-- a way that doesn't involve robbing moviegoers of 7 bucks.

I hear they have a winery that produces overpriced vintage, maybe she could look into that....

This is a little off topic, but...

Julian Lennon 40 times better than John Lennon?

I'm sorry, that's just too, too funny.

For an exorbitant 240 million dollars Coppola loses her translation of Marie-Antoinette out of sheer indifference to this victim of the ancient royal practice of sex traffic. Arriving from the court of Vienna to that of Versailles because of a forced marriage Marie-Antoinette knows at 14 that her womb is heavily invested by strong political interests. As the next

seven years pass without conceiving, every menstruation becomes her ghastly reminder of the spectre of eviction.

Coppola makes nothing of this, more fascinated by the odd idea of differences between the ways of the court in Vienna and Versailles. Far more chilling are the similarities.

The big love of this loveless life, Swedish count von Fersen,is translated by Coppola as some insipid youth. He was the very opposite: a handsome mighty package of testosterone electrifying as a rock star oozing of venereal disease among his groupies.

And by the way that golden Versailles had no sanitation. It was a well established part of the perfumed rigours

to faire pipi let alone defecate in staircases and behind the curtains. An act of protest? Not very likely.