Tea at Trianon: The Boys in the Boat (2023)

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

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

The Boys in the Boat (2023)

I can hardly believe that a globalist like George Clooney directed such a fine film as The Boys in the Boat. It is like a movie from the 1930s, patriotic and wholesome. Nothing crude or lewd, no bad language. A true story. Definitely for the whole family. From John Zmirak at The Stream:

First of all, the movie directed by George Clooney but starring no big names was gripping, wholesome, and exciting. The acting was uniformly excellent, and the visuals were beautiful. It was set in the 1930s, so everyone dressed dapper — even the hobos in the soup kitchen line looked neat compared to 2024 senators such as John Fetterman.
And that makes an important point: This movie about the build-up to the 1936 Olympics is set at the depth of the Great Depression, when four years of the New Deal had done almost nothing to solve the crisis. Everyone in the story who’s even employed is desperate to keep his job, with the wolf at the door.

It’s against that background that we meet Joe Rantz, a young undergrad at the University of Washington. He’s studying engineering. Joe is not just the first member of his family to go to college (not that uncommon in that era). He’s also practically orphaned, after his mother died and his father abandoned the family to seek work in some other state. He can’t scrape together tuition, and faces not just dropping out of school but the prospect of being homeless. Desperate to find some income, he sees that a job is offered to any student who makes the rowing (“crew”) team. So he enrolls in that sport.

What he faces is a grinding regime of daily physical training — which luckily he was prepared for by a lifetime of manual labor. The UW team is a perennial underdog, striving to beat its much richer rivals at the University of California. But this year the stakes are far higher: the leading college team in the U.S. will go to the Olympics to compete in Munich against the likes of Hitler’s own German team.

Along the way he meets Joyce, a lovely young woman whom it turns out he once was in love with in grammar school. By some strange chance or Providence, she remembers him — in fact, she has saved his boyish love notes. Ashamed of his desperate poverty and broken family background, he tells her various stories to throw her off the scent, and for a while ignores her increasingly blatant hints that she’s interested in him. (Read more.)