{"id":5688,"date":"2007-05-14T14:06:16","date_gmt":"2007-05-14T18:06:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/ceerock\/2007\/05\/14\/sofia-and-kirsten\/"},"modified":"2007-05-14T14:06:16","modified_gmt":"2007-05-14T18:06:16","slug":"sofia-and-kirsten","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ceerock\/2007\/05\/14\/sofia-and-kirsten\/","title":{"rendered":"Sofia and Kirsten"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Great critique of Sofia Coppola in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.brightlightsfilm.com\/56\/fashion.htm\">Bright Lights<\/a>:<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;There\u2019s no doubt that Coppola creates a very rarefied mood, in which unusual music is matched with a specific era of design. Even the last shot, with the palace thrown into disarray, is an album cover. But is this the work of a director with vision, or a good stylist? Coppola has made a career out of mix-ups that sound interesting conceptually \u2014 Japan and ennui, royalty and pop \u2014 but is there anything beyond the excitement of the initial disconnect? She invents themes which seem intriguing on a production level, but these are rarely followed through, and in my opinion, don\u2019t add up to a film. <strong>Marie Antoinette<\/strong> is a less frustrating film than <strong>Lost in Translation<\/strong> (2003), in that frivolity is its actual subject, but both movies are odes to pop set against blurry backgrounds. Each film has a mysterious or unexpected setting, with a precedent in music videos. However, in <strong>Lost in Translation<\/strong>, Coppola isn\u2019t much interested in Japan, other than as a stylist\u2019s backdrop. The Japanese exist only to inspire deadpan reaction shots from Bill Murray \u2014 but as Murray showed in <strong>Groundhog Day<\/strong> (1993), one doesn\u2019t need to go to Japan to get a sea of unresponsive faces. Japan merely provides a color scheme, and an opportunity to take neon stills, in the way that a blue-screen Tokyo might be used in a fashion shoot. Like the Versailles of <strong>Marie Antoinette<\/strong>, its ceremonies are viewed ironically, by a privileged figure. &#8230;<strong>Marie Antoinette<\/strong> makes us long for the smashed palace at the end: something to break through its stylish sensibility. What the film needed was a performance which exposed self-involvement, while letting us feel immersed and attracted by it.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The article also lauds Kirsten Dunst, and I may have to revise somewhat <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/ceerock\/2007\/04\/26\/dunst-the-dunce\/\">my opinion of her as an idiot<\/a>:<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Dunst felt Gwyneth Paltrow\u2019s interpretation of Sylvia Plath was incorrect. According to her, <strong>Sylvia<\/strong> (2003) failed because Plath was \u201ca girl who wanted to hurt. She wanted to feel terrible\u2026I felt like, in [Paltrow&#8217;s performance], it was more like, \u2018I&#8217;m the victim!\u2019 It should have been more that she liked to create all this shit in her head. She was crazier.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>via <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/ceerock\">Greencine<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Great critique of Sofia Coppola in Bright Lights: &#8220;There\u2019s no doubt that Coppola creates a very rarefied mood, in which unusual music is matched with a specific era of design. Even the last shot, with the palace thrown into disarray, is an album cover. But is this the work of a director with vision, or [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5688","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-just-movies"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p58QoK-1tK","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ceerock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5688","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ceerock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ceerock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ceerock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/92"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ceerock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5688"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ceerock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5688\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ceerock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ceerock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ceerock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}