Down bad. I saw that you were taking it out on yourself with your cat.

they don't want us posting about the playoffs

My husband has been writing about each Bugs Bunny short with an academic eye towards history, form and comedy. This is the newest one. Check it out <3

a still of plated deserts from MARIE ANTOINETTE. Sofia Coppola invents instagram

Sofia Coppola’s film about France’s final queen Marie Antoinette bloomed with controversy before the film even went into production. Rumours that proved to be true circulated in online film spaces that she was going to take an anarchic anachronistic approach to the period costume-drama. Her Marie Antoinette would be a deconstruction of period pieces and the mannered style therein—and cast the gluttonous queen in the guise of her career-long examination of the teenage girl as an outsider figure whose behaviour could be explained through Coppola’s tendency to self-identify with the aesthetic surfaces and caged emotions of these characters. It became more obvious that this would not be a studied and faithful adaptation when news broke that she was scripting from Antonia Fraser’s newly revisionist biography of Marie Antoinette as her source material, instead of the more detailed and factual accounts of the monarch from Stefan Zweig’s analytic biography. To make matters more profane, Coppola shot her fantasia of the beheaded glamour queen at her former kingdom—the Palace of Versailles—and she intended to debut her film at Cannes for a French audience.

She seemed to be courting controversy, and scandal followed the film after the divisive premiere. The film was booed, which is not exceptional for Cannes, but some in the French critical establishment took the film to task for the way it presented the facts of its revisionist history. Agnès Poirier, the critic at the French Newspaper Libération, wrote, “The film is shocking because it is empty, devoid of a point of view, because the person who has made it has no curiosity for the woman she is portraying and the time that her tragic life is set in. The film director seems as unconcerned by her subject as Marie-Antoinette was indifferent to the plight of her people and the world she lived in.”. Poirier’s frustrations were somewhat tempered by his admiration of the colorful mise-en-scene, and it must be said that not everyone in the French intelligentsia were critical of Coppola’s vision; Jean-Michel Frodon, the editor-in-chief at Cahiers du Cinema found much to admire about Coppola’s film and made an argument for the film with an auteurist take on the material.

Marie Antoinette was always going to garner a sharply critical response within France, because the nature of Antoinette’s monarchy, and the French revolution that followed, is too explosive for a tepid response. Indifference might have been the worst of all possible fates: in Coppola’s own words, “it would have been worse if they hadn’t reacted at all.”. It is true that Coppola’s Marie Antoinette presents itself as a hollow endeavor, but its cloistered world of ritual, feminine finery, and glamour at the expense of the noble peasant life of blood and dirt and responsibility and anguish is entirely the point. Marie Antoinette is told in a way that is extremely pleasurable in its surfaces of beauty, and in its elaborate and meticulous and jaw-dropping set-design, but there is criticism within the form itself. Alongside those aspirational qualities that Coppola self-identifies with as a daughter of filmmaking royalty, there is also condemnation and interrogation. Marie Antoinette asks viewers what is at stake when a white woman aspires to this type of lifestyle, and Coppola’s film wonders if there is something rotten when femininity is linked to such exhibitionist displays. However, the film’s brilliance lay in how there is still a seductive pull, and a longing for majesty within her images that persists, even with that critical valve of tension and criticism bubbling underneath the elaborate wigs, and the decadent costumes. With Marie Antoinette, Sofia Coppola has her cake and eats it too.

I wrote about Sofia Coppola's MARIE ATOINETTE for my reader's choice series. I dove into how the superficial qualities are actually the entire point of the endeavor and how it's the most complicated film she's ever made. Really proud of how this one turned out.

www.patreon.com/posts/patron...

My husband has been writing about each Bugs Bunny short with an academic eye towards history, form and comedy. This is the newest one. Check it out <3

I am not even joking. Pure joy

Ray Dennis Steckler's The Lemon Grove Kids Meet the Monsters

I *love* Beyond the Sea so much. There's the Brad Dourif and Don S. Davis of it all, but its melancholy is so haunted and beautiful.

Listen To My Body Tonight: How Prince's Transgressive Spirit Broke Boundaries In the nearly four decades of music Prince made, propriety and prejudice were regularly vanquished by good humor and elegant lust.

Still and always unrivaled. www.npr.org/sections/the...

Can't wait to talk to you about these movies next time we hang out

certainly worth a rewatch! and thank you so much! That's always nice to hear

she's the best

A ★★★★★ review of Marie Antoinette (2006) Sofia Coppola’s film about France’s final queen Marie Antoinette bloomed with controversy before the film even went into production. Rumours that proved to be true circulated in online film spaces tha...

I'll be looking at SOUTHLAND TALES on Monday or Tuesday next week.

You can also read a sample of this essay over here:
letterboxd.com/catelyn/film...

a still of plated deserts from MARIE ANTOINETTE. Sofia Coppola invents instagram

Sofia Coppola’s film about France’s final queen Marie Antoinette bloomed with controversy before the film even went into production. Rumours that proved to be true circulated in online film spaces that she was going to take an anarchic anachronistic approach to the period costume-drama. Her Marie Antoinette would be a deconstruction of period pieces and the mannered style therein—and cast the gluttonous queen in the guise of her career-long examination of the teenage girl as an outsider figure whose behaviour could be explained through Coppola’s tendency to self-identify with the aesthetic surfaces and caged emotions of these characters. It became more obvious that this would not be a studied and faithful adaptation when news broke that she was scripting from Antonia Fraser’s newly revisionist biography of Marie Antoinette as her source material, instead of the more detailed and factual accounts of the monarch from Stefan Zweig’s analytic biography. To make matters more profane, Coppola shot her fantasia of the beheaded glamour queen at her former kingdom—the Palace of Versailles—and she intended to debut her film at Cannes for a French audience.

She seemed to be courting controversy, and scandal followed the film after the divisive premiere. The film was booed, which is not exceptional for Cannes, but some in the French critical establishment took the film to task for the way it presented the facts of its revisionist history. Agnès Poirier, the critic at the French Newspaper Libération, wrote, “The film is shocking because it is empty, devoid of a point of view, because the person who has made it has no curiosity for the woman she is portraying and the time that her tragic life is set in. The film director seems as unconcerned by her subject as Marie-Antoinette was indifferent to the plight of her people and the world she lived in.”. Poirier’s frustrations were somewhat tempered by his admiration of the colorful mise-en-scene, and it must be said that not everyone in the French intelligentsia were critical of Coppola’s vision; Jean-Michel Frodon, the editor-in-chief at Cahiers du Cinema found much to admire about Coppola’s film and made an argument for the film with an auteurist take on the material.

Marie Antoinette was always going to garner a sharply critical response within France, because the nature of Antoinette’s monarchy, and the French revolution that followed, is too explosive for a tepid response. Indifference might have been the worst of all possible fates: in Coppola’s own words, “it would have been worse if they hadn’t reacted at all.”. It is true that Coppola’s Marie Antoinette presents itself as a hollow endeavor, but its cloistered world of ritual, feminine finery, and glamour at the expense of the noble peasant life of blood and dirt and responsibility and anguish is entirely the point. Marie Antoinette is told in a way that is extremely pleasurable in its surfaces of beauty, and in its elaborate and meticulous and jaw-dropping set-design, but there is criticism within the form itself. Alongside those aspirational qualities that Coppola self-identifies with as a daughter of filmmaking royalty, there is also condemnation and interrogation. Marie Antoinette asks viewers what is at stake when a white woman aspires to this type of lifestyle, and Coppola’s film wonders if there is something rotten when femininity is linked to such exhibitionist displays. However, the film’s brilliance lay in how there is still a seductive pull, and a longing for majesty within her images that persists, even with that critical valve of tension and criticism bubbling underneath the elaborate wigs, and the decadent costumes. With Marie Antoinette, Sofia Coppola has her cake and eats it too.

I wrote about Sofia Coppola's MARIE ATOINETTE for my reader's choice series. I dove into how the superficial qualities are actually the entire point of the endeavor and how it's the most complicated film she's ever made. Really proud of how this one turned out.

www.patreon.com/posts/patron...

and the following two sequel films are even better!

💙 Meiko Kaji 💙

It certainly tracks. So many gigantic life changes in that span for me

I am listening to Channel Orange again

Cannot believe I am forever emotionally fixated on music from 2011-2015

heck yeah! Happy anniversary!!!

Last time I'm sharing this one. Meet me at THE BONE TEMPLE

I have adopted "may the road rise up to meet your wheels" into my vocabulary since Twin Peaks The Return.

“The film that you are about to see has to do with a better understanding of our fellow man. We have gathered the information as intelligently and as honestly as within our power and potential. And would like to portray to you as intellectually as our medium will permit in the findings of our research.” Dr. Louis C. Pessolano, M.D., introducing She-Man: A Story of Fixation She-Man: A Story of Fixation (1967) has reappeared recently, largely due to the interest of cinephiles, including Danish auteur Nicolas Winding Refn, who helped in its being restored. In 1967, then unknown Canadian director Bob Clark (A Christmas Story and Black Christmas) took on the task of making a B-movie full of famous American female impersonators in the notoriously swampy, humid Florida summer as his feature-film debut.

Reading Corpses, Fools, and Monsters co-authored by @willowcatelyn.bsky.social and stumbled upon this fascinating bit of trivia

The Beavis and Butthead award for Scene of the Year. It's perfect

Did you see her in CLEMENCY? It's a case study in her abilities to go to really deep and complicated and sometimes negative places. It's a showcase for her and she carries the film with her performance.

It's probably Judy Davis or Huppert or Alfre Woodard

This is an extremely niche post but: Baylor Scheierman looks like he makes a living playing H-O-R-S-E on a rigged hoop at a carnival.

My reader's choice essay on MARIE ANTOINETTE should be published on Tuesday.

Willow entering the criterion collection…this is correct.

an image from 28 YEARS LATER: THE BONE TEMPLE of cult leader Sir Lloyd Jimmy gesticulating with this hands as his child droogs lurch behind him. The background is lit up with flaming towers of bone

I probably underrated Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later when I wrote about it last year. My review was positive, but in the time since, I have frequently thought about its innovative hyper-realistic iPhone cinematography, and its lyrical qualities colliding with its apocalyptic tenor. The image of a narrow, partially submerged passageway linking the island of Lindisfare to the rest of the infected in the U.K. stands as one of the finer political images in all of horror this century in the way it evokes a post-Brexit, pandemic cabin fever of isolationism and degradation of the species. In Boyle’s film, he uses culture, tradition and the new folk mythos of the late 20th century to endow familiar touchstones of modern culture within a transformed and newly medieval context. In 28 Days Later (2002), the world that those characters inhabit—their shops, their music, their clothing, their televisions, their radios—still resemble the reality that viewers were familiar with when they were coming to the film in 2002, but in 28 Years Later, the makeshift communities that remain are only a whisper of what once was. What we see in Boyle’s film bears an eerie resemblance to the predictions of climatologists who have suggested the necessity of us getting to know our neighbours as soon as possible, because smaller hubs of communities with relationships from person-to-person with each individual being responsible for a key task will be necessary for survival. In this respect, Boyle’s zombie film feels prudent, necessary and uncomfortably modern to our latent anxieties of a looming planetary threat. 28 Years Later is in the tradition of George A. Romero’s intelligent zombie pictures that used very straight-forward metaphors to analyze the ills of civilization, while the inevitable doom of each and every character crept closer. But Boyle’s film also differentiated itself with moments of elegy for what might be lost in the midst of all the necrosis, the hatred and the violence....

I caught up with 28 YEARS LATER: THE BONE TEMPLE for my horror column and it is a very fine horror sequel.

www.patreon.com/posts/monste...

The Wacky Wabbit (1942) & Any Bonds Today? (1942) Bob Clampett’s first solo directed Bugs Bunny cartoon opens with a title card: “‘The Wacky Wabbit’ Featuring Bugs Bunny” with Bugs’ name in size equal to the fil…

Throughout 2025 I wrote 10 articles chronicling Bugs Bunny's earliest appearances in Looney Tunes & Merrie Melodies. After a lengthy break I am back with #11. In this one, I look at a pair of WWII-era Bob Clampett cartoons as he tackles the character on his own for the first time.