Tea at Trianon: "Golden Compass" Not Doing Well

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, December 9, 2007

"Golden Compass" Not Doing Well

The Golden Compass is not doing well at the box office. Interesting. (Via Pewsitter)

Here is The Washington Post review. It is not too favorable.

Nothing is wrong with "The Golden Compass" that some of Sister Mary Ignatius's good Catholic discipline wouldn't clear up. She should rap the movie across its fierce little knuckles for violations not against church protocol but against storytellers' dogma: too many characters too fast; too much emphasis on design and effects and not enough on emotion; too many hoary Brit old pros. (It seems like the whole dang theatrical peerage is on hand!) And, worst of all, the wrong Dakota.

[....]

It's very silly, and it never seems remotely real, with that dead sense of computer-generated imagery everywhere, those dramatic but clearly phony lighting schemes. And it just gets sillier and sillier when the witches and cowboys and lions and tigers and bears come aboard, oh my.