Tea at Trianon: Pope Leo and the Illiteracy of Modern Movies

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

Saturday, November 22, 2025

Pope Leo and the Illiteracy of Modern Movies

From Mark Judge at Chronicles:

One of the best books of film criticism I’ve read in years is Cocktails with George and Martha by Philip Gefter. It examines Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the 1966 movie starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. The story, based on the 1962 award-winning play, dramatizes a married couple who have grown bitter and exhausted with each other. George and Martha, bickering, backbiting, verbally torturing each other, then ultimately understanding that, for all they have suffered, they still love each other.

According to Gefter, it was “an entertaining alchemy of talent, vision, tension, drama, ego, rigor and drama that brought Virginia Woolf to the big screen.” He goes on: “No matter how tempered, decorous, or respectful the daily comportment of any couple, their underlying feelings of attachment dwell in a private, unpredictable universe subject to its own solar flares of displeasure, shooting meteors of pain, and exploding stars of rage.” The film “remains today an existential provocation that serves up a range of fundamental truths about marital attachments … necessarily lurking, safely hidden, beneath the rituals of everyday life.” (Read more.)