{"id":32,"date":"2006-10-15T01:19:27","date_gmt":"2006-10-14T15:19:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/keep\/?p=32"},"modified":"2006-12-17T21:56:19","modified_gmt":"2006-12-17T10:56:19","slug":"trailers-threat-level-beta","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/?p=32","title":{"rendered":"Trailers: Threat Level Beta"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>At <i><a href=\"https:\/\/batrock.net\/keep\/?p=31\">An Inconvenient Truth<\/a><\/i> last night, I was subjected to some more trailers that I wasn&#8217;t quite expecting, from movies I had only heard of in passing.<\/p>\n<p>The first was <i>The Holiday<\/I> (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=pFCRV4pAUiM\">YouTube trailer<\/a>), which I had thought was a book before it was a movie. Apparently not. Anyway, it&#8217;s a romantic comedy about switching Britain for America and vice versa, with Cameron Diaz saying &#8220;England is so quaint! Look at its old world appeal!&#8221; (carefully ignoring the tackiness of modern English culture) and Kate Winslet saying &#8220;America is so &#8230; American!&#8221; (I don&#8217;t know how to characterise America in this film).<br \/>\nCameron Diaz meets Jude Law, and Kate Winslet meets &#8230; Jack Black? Jack Black is my hero, so if I can get the requisite girls in line, I might go and see this movie.<br \/>\nAs a general rule, you can tell the calibre of film that Black is in by the state of his facial hair.<\/p>\n<p>The other, more eyecatching, and possibly more noteworthy film, was <i>Marie Antoinette<\/i>:<\/p>\n<p><center><object width=\"425\" height=\"350\"><param name=\"movie\" value=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/v\/BuByY-DnGYo\"><\/param><param name=\"wmode\" value=\"transparent\"><\/param><\/object><\/center><\/p>\n<p>Bubblegum pink titles? Contemporary music? People speaking with their &#8220;natural accents&#8221;? This is what we call &#8220;post modernism&#8221; or similar. I have an interest in the French Revolution fuelled largely by the anime <i>Rose of Versailles<\/i>, which is a wildly romantic and fairly balanced account of the times of France from Marie Antoinette&#8217;s rise to her fall. It was the sort of thing that I could keep people constantly updated on as I came up with new examples of decadence.<\/p>\n<p><i>Marie Antoinette<\/I> is, by many (positive) accounts, more of a trifle; A fluffy confection of a film that revises Marie Antoinette&#8217;s image. I like the idea that she felt the whole of Versailles was silly, because it <i>was<\/I>, but the problem in my mind is that in time she came to believe in the silliness and drove France into a ditch of famine, poverty, and, eventually, cycles of bloodshed.<\/p>\n<p>I won&#8217;t mind seeing a sympathetic Marie Antoinette, as the Antoinette of <i>Rose of Versailles<\/I> travelled between extremes of shrewishness and tears. I suppose it <i>may<\/i> be just like Doctor Who or James Bond: the actor you saw first <i>is<\/i> the character. Which incarnation of Antoinette will be the one that sticks?<br \/>\nConsidering the different tones taken by these films, I may be able to accept both accounts on their own merits. Whatever the case, I&#8217;m intrigued: the trailer has done its work.<\/p>\n<p><b>Post script, ironically written before I finished writing the rest:<\/B><br \/>\nDamnit, I just read <a href=\"http:\/\/rogerebert.suntimes.com\/apps\/pbcs.dll\/article?AID=\/20060525\/FILMFESTIVALS01\/60525001\">what Roger Ebert had to say about the film&#8217;s reception about Cannes<\/a> and now I know how it ends. Sure, I know this history reasonably well, but you can never know when a historical recount ends until it stops being told. That article is interesting until the last paragraph, so don&#8217;t feel bad about reading it.<br \/>\nIt&#8217;s also notable that Ebert got the same impression based on a hypothetical that I did from the ending of <i>Rose of Versailles<\/i>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At An Inconvenient Truth last night, I was subjected to some more trailers that I wasn&#8217;t quite expecting, from movies I had only heard of in passing. The first was The Holiday (YouTube trailer), which I had thought was a book before it was a movie. Apparently not. Anyway, it&#8217;s a romantic comedy about switching Britain for America and vice versa, with Cameron Diaz saying &#8220;England is so quaint! Look at its old world appeal!&#8221; (carefully ignoring the tackiness of modern English culture) and Kate Winslet saying &#8220;America is so &#8230; American!&#8221; (I don&#8217;t know how to characterise America in <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film","category-trailers"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1HLZ6-w","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}