bunnyjadwiga

Kristin Karen Larsdatter posted a link to a review of Safia Coppolla's movie Marie Antoinette.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/24/AR2006052402821.html
And I read the review and thought, hey, that might be cool, even though I have very little patience with that time period.

Why? Well, another dirty little secret: I find I prefer movies that attempt to capture the feeling, not the details, of certain historical stuff. I HATED Elizabeth, though the costuming was good-- but I'm not a costumer; I couldn't imagine Elizabeth being that stupid. Headstrong-- yes. Worried, yes. Even uncertain, in private. But in public, Elizabeth was only uncertain as an act... Our Miss B. would be more Elizabeth than the young queen Elizabeth in that movie.

But on the other hand, when I see something that riffs on the idea, like The Knight's Tale I'm free to see if it captures the moment. (By the way, there apparently was at least one female armorer mentioned in period literature; I'd have to check my copy of Gies' Women of the Middle Ages to get the details, but the documentation is there.) I really liked that movie. In fact, it's the only thing that's ever managed to convey to me the romance of a) jousting and b) being fought for in a tourney. [Not that I don't like watching the fighting in the SCA sometimes. I just don't see it as all that romantic, no matter what knight's wives tell me. Character defect in me, I guess.] But when I watched The Knight's Tale I saw the ideas that I had concieved of a tourney knight when reading Georges Duby's book on William The Marshall and Barber & Barker's books come to life. The costumes sucked, of course. But I'm no costumer.

At which point my brain wanders off into the idea of a movie based on Eleanor of Acquitaine in modern guise.

Contrariwise, the tendency to romantic versions of the story of national heroes/heroines makes me think of a romantic epic based on Jadwiga and Jagiello. (They would have to have the bath scene in there, and of course the business with her taking an axe to the door...)

Silly of course, but fun...

Everyone in the government, and most of the Republican party, are whining that 'this is not the time for finger-pointing' in terms of New Orleans. I agree; the level of necessary discipline to get these people to do their work is well into the grabbing-by-the-earlobe and emphasizing-lecture-with-smacks-across-the bum level of dealing with cleanup truants. This isn't about politics: it's about basic stupidity, incompetence and unwillingness to deal with problems, admittedly problems my spawned-by-feminism soul imputes to most white males but not exclusive to them by any means.

Last night's public radio cruising blended a lecture on The Well Read Life into the New Orleans news, and there I found the key to one of my biggest peeves.

One of the excuses feckless FEMA, Louisiana, New Orleans and other government yappers have put out is that 'a disaster of this magnitude could never have been expected/imagined/envisioned.'
Clearly, these civil servants aren't up on their reading. Literature and history is full of disasters of this magnitude, or similar ones.
( Well read rant )