Oh, yes, it's the saddest weekend of the year, when we have to turn back the clocks and night falls sooo early. Though blessedly a bit later here in Southern California than in more northern latitudes. So what to do on this darkest of October weekends?
First, try to see MARIE ANTOINETTE. I must confess up front that I am a Kirsten Dunst and Sofia Coppola 'shipper, so I was inclined to like this. But I went with a friend who is extremely knowledgeable about the whole French thing, and she enjoyed it, too. Despite the well-known, very dark ending to poor little Austrian Marie's fairy tale...
the movie doesn't focus on that -- or even take us that far. Instead we start with the 14-friggin-year-old being packed up in Vienna (she had to leave her dog! sniff) and sent to marry the French king's grandson to seal an alliance between the two nations/empires (the two biggest cake and pastry-eating empires, ever, I suspect). The new Dauphine is tossed into a foreign, and by any measure useless, effete, and wacky, Court that gives new meaning to that old Agnewism "nattering nabobs of negativism." As the new Queen of France, Marie tries to navigate the protocols and cattiness as best a 15-friggin-year-old can. Her husband, Louis XVI, isn't much help; he's essentially a nerd-king who'd be much happier making locks and clocks than ruling over Versailles; today, he'd be a software genius. As history shows, they make do. A surprisingly sweet romance develops. They finally bear children. She is by most accounts a warm and loving mother who never could quite figure out how the Royals really are supposed to act, and then she gets killed in a car accident in Paris. NO! That was Princess Diana, but there are definite parallels. Sadly for Marie, the French public was in a far more restive mood and her PR team was not as on-target as Diana's. When the natives got restless around Bastille Day, they went for Marie's head first; for better or worse, they eventually went for everyone else's as well.
Coppola's movie is a swirl of impressions: beautiful images, dizzying ballroom scenes and shots of Versailles, and a confection of gorgeous, mostly pastel-colored dresses. Versailles itself? Well, I'm more of a John Pawson fan, so I have to say the decor kind of makes my head want to explode. But it's still amazing. The actors all use their own 'accents' -- creating a posthistorical world of French-speaking babies, English-accented maids and BFFs, a Swedish count with an accent from I don't know where, and a Queen with that flat-A accent that characterizes Southern California. It sounds weird, but it works. Coppola's use of modern music (mixed in with the more expected period tunes) helps to communicate the feeling of being young (by the time Marie's 18th birthday is celebrated, she seems like she's a hundred and two) and thrust into a patently absurd situation - albeit one with great responsibility. You leave the movie thinking Marie and Louis did their best, under the circumstances, but neither was really equipped for the job. Neither they nor their herd of courtiers understood what was happening outside their gilded walls, and they and France paid for that in priceless blood. As they say, plus ca change... today's news is the 1-year anniversary of the car-burning outbreak in France's immigrant suburbs. Have the rulers of France learned a thing since 1789?
Other stuff to do: go to the Post Office (yes, the real Post Office) and buy the stamps that show the quilts created by the ladies of Gee's Bend. I saw the exhibit of these quilts at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and they are beautiful pieces of abstract art, sewn by enormously poor women from scraps of old blue jeans and whatever they had laying around. If the early darkness (and dark news) makes you despair of the human spirit, these will show you that that spirit triumphs and - amazingly - creates art, even in the sparest of circumstances.
On your TV, get ready to get hooked by NBC's [only good show, yes I said it] HEROES, on Monday nights at 9 pm. I think you can see old eps on NBC.com. It's what LOST started out as: a metaphysical mystery, but with a sense of humor. A random batch of humans find they've evolved to have various superhuman abilities. They cope in various ways. The catch is that they all have to find one another and work together to stave off a Very Bad Thing that the one who can see the future has foretold. You've got to love a show whose mantra is, "Save the cheerleader, save the world." And they mean it!!
Yeah, I could tell you again about Battlestar Galactica, but you can read about it today in the New York Times. As usual, they're late to the party, but the article is pretty good.