Review: Marie Antoinette

Marie Antoinette opens with her life-changing 1768 journey starting from a palace in Vienna, where she was still Austrian royalty, across Europe in a horse-drawn carriage to France. She is to “form an alliance” with the French heir to the throne. As I watched these opening scenes, it seemed set for a fascinating couple of hours of that often potent combination of historical basis and artistic interpretation. And Kirsten Dunst as the beautiful young queen-to-be seemed to me casting that was a lot more than passable.

Many of (director) Sofia Coppola’s trademark touches that developed in The Virgin Suicides and Lost In Translation are immediately on view here: long single-takes that focus on seemingly innocuous non-events, with a lack of dialogue that sometimes turns into an awkward silence. Her protagonist is being shuttled across to a foreign land all by herself to marry a man she has never seen before. She then has to fit in to and learn to live all of the elaborate, often tedious rituals that apparently came with the territory of French royalty in the eighteenth century. The uncomfortable silences are exactly what she needs. Monarch or not, as a young woman and then a foreigner in the royal scheme of things, the skill she needed to use the most was holding her tongue.

The film is set almost entirely in France’s royal palace. The opulence and pagaentry of the time and place is re-created with lavish attention (it was rewarded with an Oscar for Costume Design last year). This often included a quartet or an orchestra as entertainment for the royal Highnesses. But curiously, these lilting, delightful Baroque pieces are juxtaposed with sudden bursts of loud, MTV-era pop music. This is interesting the first time, but became gimmicky and jarring very quickly.

Coppola combines her penchant for long deliberate shots with a drab, characterless portrayal of her subjects and their lives. An obscene amount of time is devoted to depicting how king Louis the sixteenth is cold as ice when it comes to consummating their marriage, and Marie’s frustrating inability (borne, of course, in stony silence) to do anything about it. Night after night after night, we’re shown the two minutes before the King and Queen go to sleep; scenes in which nothing, literally and otherwise, happens. And scenes of the queen getting into the day’s clothes every morning, and scenes of them at breakfast, at lunch, at dinner, eating silently, eyes firmly focused on the intricately embellished porcelain in front of them. And minutes upon minutes of random hangers-on around the Palace’s grounds gossiping about the Royal household.

The attempt is made to portray Antoinette as vulnerable and in over her head, never quite sure what to do, and not able to express it. But she comes off, instead, as being almost listless. It’s not that depictions of mundane, everyday scenes cannot come together to create a larger, more significant image; it’s just that in Marie Antoinette, it never happens.


The Economic Times: Madras Plus: 24th May 2007

Review: Spiderman 3

Spiderman 3 finds Peter Parker comfortably co-existing with his more illustrious alter-ego – he now has a police radio in his bedroom that tells him when he’s needed to don his suit and go out and save the world. His fellow citizens adore Spiderman, and his girlfriend is at peace with his dual identity.

But, as these things must go, a hammer is thrown into the works. Multiple hammers, you realize, with increasing concern for plot clarity. Flint Marko, an escaped convict, walks into a particle accelerator – bad move even for a guy on the run from the cops, one would think – and becomes, in a beautifully cinematographed scene of his physical transmogrification, Sandman, a new villain for Spidey to contend with. As preferred freelance photographer at The Daily Bugle, Parker now has competition in the form of Eddie Brock (played by Topher Grace from That 70s Show). Brock also, at some point in the movie’s interminable middle section, ends up at the wrong place at the wrong time, and occasionally turns into the evil Venom from that point on.

Parker, in the meanwhile, is becoming a little too smug and show-offy in his role as the city’s crime-fighting hero. When he does the upside-down kiss with a female fan – with sweet Mary Jane Watson watching on – you know he’s in big trouble. A love triangle erupts – Harry Osborn, Parker’s best friend and the son of that Green Goblin played so brilliantly a few years ago by Willem Dafoe, is the third in this menage. The ‘New Goblin’ is played by James Franco (who actually had moments in the movie when he eerily resembled Dafoe. Dafoe here is still effective as a portrait up on the wall staring down at his son Harry). What saves this part of the movie for me has mostly to do with Kirsten Dunst – there are shots of her here that I will remember long after I’ve forgotten the movie itself.

As we’ve now come to expect, Tobey Maguire has the same slightly-lost kind of demeanour about his Peter Parker that perfectly, and naturally, counterpoints his Spiderman. But his own changing feelings as a super-hero, probably at the thematic heart of Spiderman 3, deserved better scripting and screenplay than it got here. In an attempt to flesh out a complete story, the plot gets a little – or more than a little – obfuscating along the way.

J Jonah Jameson, the cranky editor of The Daily Bugle, was one of those little highlights in parts one and two, the kind of character whose five minutes of screen time you look forward to. Here, though, in an effort to strengthen his caricature, he’s disappointingly overplayed (and frankly given rather unfunny lines).

The final scene is a grand tag-team battle that takes place on live television, with a sufficiently emotional, searching-for-words newscaster right at the scene. I liked how the scene worked in this reflection of the times we live in. It was a nice touch. Spiderman 3 could’ve used a few more of them.



The Economic Times: Madras Plus - May 11, 2007.

Crash And Ride

I started to learn to play the drums last year. As fascinated as I was, these classes often turned out to be an exercise in tedium. Almost insanely repetition- and calculation-oriented, I discovered, in all my instrument-playing naïveté, that to sound out that handsome roll around the drum kit on the last bar to accompany that final burst of the electric and go down in a climactic flurry of crashing cymbals and roaring audiences, I would first have to construct (and this really defines the word painstaking) each note into a block that would then have to fit, unerringly, into a four-beat pattern. Dreams of free-form improvising that would help me find hitherto-unknown facets of my musical creativity took a backseat when I found that I needed to bludgeon my brain, and my hands and legs, into repeating one-and-two-and-three-and-four (and from my third lesson onwards, one-e-and-a-two-e-and-a-three-e-and-a-four-e-and-a, but on the advice of my shrink I’m not even going there!) ad infinitum.

What also started to happen almost immediately was that I began to really, really pay attention to the drums in the music I was listening to. Up until that point, I was more actively interested in the colours that guitars gave a song. Now, I was looking out for the basic four-beat drum pattern of the song, how the variations on that pattern were played, how and when the drummer went into a roll, and how and when he came back into the fold. Sounds like a messy business, I know, but very soon, certain things emerged that I hadn’t seen, couldn’t see, before. The vague “noise” that I’d heard before underneath that crying guitar riff were now delicate feather-touches played on the ride cymbal of the drum kit. I now saw that the reason I “like what’s happening” with the rhythm in a particular song was because of how dynamically the drummer varied his notes against the notes of the bass guitar. How, in a funk song, a slapped bass guitar note can have a searing, unexpected result on the ear, against a drum pattern that is always rushed and sounds a little dissonant, a little off. You conjure up an image of the drummer who seems like he’s going to fall over his hands and legs in the process. And I listened, fascinated, to the ebbs and flows and the subtle interplay that resulted between the drummer and the bassist. This became an added ‘layer’ to my listening experience: a layer that, much like an interesting, nuanced sub-plot in a good movie, grabbed me and thrilled me upon discovery.

Sometimes, the drums seemed to be playing a game with me. A crisp snare note is placed at a point where I completely don’t expect it, at a point rhythmically that it’s not supposed to be at, taking me completely unawares. Just as I was forgiving the drum kit for playing that dirty trick on me, it swings to the other end and plays silence (I think it was Miles Davis who said “It’s not the notes you play, it’s the ones you don’t.”) right when you’re waiting for that note that would give closure – or continuity - to a musical passage. This has felt like the equivalent, in stereo, of running hard and straight on a dark road only to find, all of a sudden, that there’s a cliff in its place and you’re right at the edge, just about managing to not fall off.

I’ve found nuances in the crash cymbal -- that brass plate used excessively to rabble-rouse at the end of songs -- that I didn’t know existed. I learned of the variations that can be achieved in its sound depending on where, how hard and with what part of the stick I struck it. How much of its sound do you want to “release”? How long do you want the sound to sustain itself? Not that I ever learned to do this in the flow of playing, but I thought it was very, very cool when a drummer would strike the crash cymbal hard only to move forward lightning quick and silence it with his hand - the part of the sound of the crash that doesn’t get played, that’s like a caged tigress looking for a way out. And how well it can be used as a bridge, as a connecting phrase between one part of a song and the next. The sound of the crash cymbal has always reminded me of one of those wallet-busting firecrackers that are used at celebrations: the one that goes high up into the night sky and bursts into a thousand glittering droplets of colour and light. A perfect hit of the crash cymbal has always brought this image into my head; it’s just that now, I can see each of those individual droplets a little more clearly.

Pictures of Amsterdam and The Royale With Cheese

I've put up a couple of more picture albums, one of Amsterdam and one of a visit to the Museum of Musical Instruments in Brussels.

I'll have a link on the sidebar for the pictures from now. ==>>

                             VINCENT
                  You know what they call a Quarter
                  Pounder with Cheese in Paris?

                             JULES
                  They don't call it a Quarter
                  Pounder with Cheese?

                             VINCENT
                  No, they got the metric system
                  there, they wouldn't know what the
                  fuck a Quarter Pounder is.

                             JULES
                  What'd they call it?

                             VINCENT
                  Royale With Cheese.

                             JULES
                  Royale With Cheese.


After the part about the Hash Bars in Amsterdam comes the part about
The Royale With Cheese in Paris. I HAD to have one, if only for the millions
of curious readers of this blog who ask me what the URL means. (I know,
I should have got a picture of the menu too). If all that took was one lunchtime
of enduring the crowds and assembly-line food at McDonalds, so it had to be!