Trois Couleurs: Bleu (Three Colors Blue)

April 9.

Trois Couleurs is one of those trilogies that has been recommended to me over and over and has been in my Netflix queue for years. I wanted to see it, three great French movies that everyone loves, but I never found the motivation. So when my friend mentioned he had ordered the trilogy last year and finally got it, I guess Amazon didn’t have the motivation to send it, I said OK, let me borrow it. I’m sure he wasn’t going to charge me late fees, but I didn’t feel it was right to hold onto it for months, so finally this weekend I watched part one: Bleu.

So after all this time it’s nice to be able to say Bleu, starring Juliette Binoche as the widow of a famous composer, really lived up to the hype. It was amazing and beautiful and disturbing and sad.

Bleu starts with the car accident that kills Binoche’s husband and daughter and follows her as she tries to live after the tragedy. Bleu is a bit mysterious with unanswered questions and a linear storyline but it seems to be more about the emotion.

I’ve already returned Bleu and have parts two and three. I am excited to see where this trilogy, which is general in theme, (trilogy of films dealing with contemporary French society concerns), goes.

Rating: Love

The Chateau

January 29.

Wow, bad movies really are painful.

The Chateau is a comedy about two American brothers (Yes, Paul Rudd and Romany Malco play brothers, and no not like brothas, they are brothers. (Malco is adopted.) A joke which they use about 1,000 times.) who inherit a chateau, along with its staff, in France.

They think they are going to get there, sell it, and pocket the cash but zaniness ensues. It's really not worth getting into what happens or why, honestly, it's not. There's thousands of great movies and there's no reason to watch this ridiculousness.

Rating: Hate

The Affair of the Necklace

January 29.

No, no, no, no, no. No.

Hilary Swank may have won an Oscar, but she's awful, awful, as a down-on-her-luck aristocrat in pre-revolutionary France. Awful.

I found this movie because I watched a documentary about Marie Antoinette and thought this true story of a necklace scheme, which is credited for starting the French Revolution, was fascinating. But The Affair of the Necklace did not translate. The bad script and bad acting did not bring the story to life or shed a new light on the doomed queen of France.

The whole movie was flat. Swank is not sexy and not even a little French. I still think the story of the extravagant necklace, which the queen might have been trying to buy secretly, as not to incite the people of France who were starving to death, is interesting. Especially since the queen claimed she never agreed to buy the necklace but because the citizens believed the story, or wanted to believe it, it put them over the top and started the French Revolution, which left the queen and her husband headless, and the monarchy dead forever.

But why with such great material, why are so many movies so bad?

Rating: Hate

Marie Antoinette

January 28.

As a lot of you know, I am obsessed with the British Royals and France. So when I came across this PBS documentary about the last queen of France, Marie Antoinette, I couldn’t resist.

The queen, who famously did or did not tell the starving people of France to eat cake, is such an interesting historical character I can’t believe there aren’t more movies about her. Of course there’s the Sofia Coppola film, and although that movie is pretty and deals with the lavish lifestyle the queen had it doesn’t get to the parts that I was excited to learn about in this documentary.

It explains the affair with the necklace, which was turned into a bad movie a few years ago and was the turning point for the French revolution. It appeared that the queen was sneaking around buying a ridiculously expensive necklace while her people were starving. Whether that’s true or not, no one really knows.

Another aspect of her life the movie looks at is the years after she was taken from Versailles until she was beheaded. I guess I always thought she was killed the same night, but that’s not the case.

This documentary makes me wish there were some great movies about the queen and the French Royals. I guess I’ll just have to find a good book.

Rating: Like