A historical Bomb!

Rating: 3/10 (25 February 2007)

There is an old joke about bad casting in historical movies. They said if they ever cast Jerry Lewis to play Abe Lincoln, the audience would be ready to shoot him by the time he got to Ford's Theatre. Well, if Kirstin Dunst's Marie Antoinette ever got the to Guilotine, I suspect the audience would have been ready to pull the string. I can only assume Sophia "My Daddy is a big-time director and producer" Coppola realized this, and didn't take the movie to that logical conclusion.
It is possible to do good movies about this time period. Amadeus and The Madness of King George come immediately to mind. This is not one of those films.
Let's start with the music. Yes, Music is usually a secondary consideration for movies like this, but this producer decided to score this movie with a contemporary rock score, which made absolutely no sense at all. Some of the music was truly awful. Why not use a period score for this movie? This was the Age of Mozart, after all, and they couldn't find good period music to score this film with?
Second, here you have a movie which is about a pretty important period in history, and about people who were very key in that history, and they seem more like bystanders than participants.
Instead, what we get is something that looks like "E Channel, 18th Century Paris", where inordinate amounts of time are shown as to what the nobility of Paris ate, wore, and the customs of the court. I felt full after the 20th pastry, thank you!
Not enough bad things can be said about the casting, which included a horribly miscast Ms. Dunst, and Rip Torn as Louis XV.
Just a mess of a movie. I hear even the French booed, and they think Jerry Lewis is funny!