When I was a child I assumed that mimicking Lumière’s French accent meant I was speaking French. I’ve since learned better yet am once again unsure.

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...

На Дне, Babe! (Mashup of Good Luck, Babe! & На Дне) YouTube video by Cascadiya

post-punk darkwave doomed yuri

One for me is Peter Jurasik as Londo from Babylon 5.

I remember on one of the commentary tracks hearing that to warm up for an episode shoot, Peter would pace around his trailer a few times bellowing "My dear Mister Garibaldi" and then that's it, it would all snap into place and he'd be Londo.

And so much has happened since that post is ancient. The Kosovar empire has gone down in flames, Spain and Germany have had brief summers of European ascendancy unravel, Norway is climbing across the continent’s top but globally Brazil and Chad are the superpowers. bsky.app/profile/worl...

Funniest thing in Turn-A Gundam so far is a bunch of dudes from Louisiana finding some Zaku Ils and thinking that they're the tightest shit in the world.

Person holding an antique flare gun "it's old. But it still bark!! 💥"

Yeah seems the yin and yang of the estate wanting to correct the record but also being legally prevented from doing so due to settlements to addressing the subject in film.

everyone with real American manliness and a basic knowledge of military history knows that serious war efforts have never been derailed by such trifling matters as "communicable diseases"

weak aurua - my posts arent getting any likes cause my tweets are bad strong aura - i'm marge simpson i didn't make this one though but it's so damn good

Katharine Hepburn portrait, one in a series to promote RKO-Radio's hit list of 1937-38. From Motion Picture Herald, 1937.

Morning!

Guy who thinks the lesson from Infinity Pool is: don’t make friends on vacation

ST:III Search for Spock - Fleet transport ship, Klingon Warship, and Klingon Fighter by Russel 1983

Riker armed with Data's arm as he hands over a attack on Data's right to life

You've got to hand it to Riker

ANCIENT GREEK PRO WRESTLING PROMOTER: ok so you're going to be what's known as a "heel"
ACHILLES: fuck you

A starship design

A starship design

A drop shuttle design

An orbital space station design

Some of my digital sketches of spaceship and space station designs I've done for my Mothership TTRPG campaign. Drawn in Ibis Paint X on a Samsung Galaxy tab 10FE tablet.

Reading Christie, Fleming and some other problematic British writers of this era is quite interesting as they are very well travelled so you end up with these fascinating travelogues with the most weirdly xenophobic tour guides.

Online abuse of politicians is a profitable business Senator Eileen Flynn's comments on far-right use of the tricolour have made her a lightning rod for online abuse - because viral hatred is highly profitable

In the space of a few weeks in 2025, Simon Harris required armed gardaí at his family home due to multiple bomb threats, while former taoiseach Leo Varadkar was subjected to a homophobic tirade by a self-styled citizen journalist who filmed the confrontation for social media. A man is due before the courts in July in connection with an alleged assault on Mary Lou McDonald and two canvassers the day before the presidential election last year. The incident was filmed and went viral online. So, last week when a video of Senator Eileen Flynn speaking about racism and nationalist propaganda went viral, a predictable and inevitable online pile on began, with posts attacking Flynn's "patriotism" or perceived

Much of the abuse directed at Ms Flynn came from Irish accounts run by people who benefit from algorithmically amplification (so called blue tick accounts), and content monetisation. Monetisation is now a commonplace feature on social media platforms like X/Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok, that allows the company to "share" revenue. The more attention (likes, shares, comments etc) a post gets, the more revenue a user earns. Influencers also often have accounts on three or four platforms and post dozens of times a day, and can also benefit from tips, and paid subscribers so it is difficult to gauge how much they earn, but a single viral post on X can generate over €300 for an influencer, so this can become a quite lucrative activity for not a lot of work. Power

The abuse directed at Ms Flynn did not only come from Irish accounts; international social media influencers whose attention was already on Ireland since the fuel protests latched onto it too. Defiant Ls, an account run by a Macedonian influencer who promotes Maga content shared the video, as did the account LibsofTikTok, with the caption, 'Irish Senator Eileen Flynn says that she is "terrified" to see her nation's flag and thinks it's "disgraceful" to fly it', received more than 250,000 views and over 1,300 comments, mostly abusive. LibsOfTikTok has nearly five million fans and the account is run by Chaya Raichik, a right wing influencer who has previously targeted schools, hospitals and libraries across the United States. Victims of her attention have gone to be inundated with threats of violence.

I have a piece in the Examiner today on how content monetisation is fuelling a new wave of online harassment

Irish influencers with monetised accounts are mimicking the behaviour of people like Chaya Raichik, the owner of LibsOfTikTok, who has turned online abuse & harassment into a business model.

no star will ever again have what dicaprio had in 97. specifically no current star will ever be such a magnetic force that they inspire their own "hey leonardo (she likes me for me)", one of the worst songs ever recorded.

Season 2 of Sabrina the Teenage Witch was a major upgrade for the series, and part of why I liked it so much is Martin Mull played a good antagonist as Principal Kraft. Iconic mustache.

Poster for Lee Cronin’s The Mummy. A nearly black and white photo of a closeup of a young face, eyes closed, the photo looking a little scratchy and aged.

Now seated for that new horror film by an Irish director.

Dax going from an eye level of a 6 foot tall woman as Jadzia to a 5'4 woman as Ezri must have been hella disorienting

We are looking at a painting of St Liphardus - a 6th-century lawyer, hermit and abbot in Meung-sur-Loire near Orléans, France. He is wearing bishops clothing including a surplus and mitre and is holding a crook. On a lead is a small knee high green and blue dragon.

We’re very sorry sir but you cannot bring your emotional support dragon in here.

they accidentally sent me to korean youtube im not coming back

I think it’s rude that whenever the Predator shows up and super kills a hundred people using space weapons someone always has to be the guy to call him an ugly motherfucker because there’s plenty to criticize without getting into that

advertising technology in the 1990s: look at this “website” you can “surf”. it has an image of a cat on it

advertising technology in the 2020s: you must adopt this now or die. we are going to completely kill you if you don’t download this app immediately

Going to see The Mummy tonight. Which is a little risky as I'm not sure if it's the one directed by Karl Fruend, Stephen Sommers or Alex Kurtzman. You'd think the marketing would do something to clarify.

The Empire Strikes Back Theatrical Trailer (Restored) - 1979 YouTube video by The ReDiscovered Future

I either had forgotten or was never aware that Harrison Ford narrated a trailer for THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK. This is the most pretend-excited he has ever been.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=nccm...

Isaac Asimov was a bad man and wasn’t a perfect author but I don’t think it’s a valid criticism to say “the Three Laws of Robotics wouldn’t work”. Yes that’s the point