My thoughts about movies and TV shows I've been watching

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Wednesday, November 5, 2014

The best (or worst) example ever of cinema high camp: Queen Margot

I can't quite tell if the French film Queen Margo is so bad it's good or if it's just plain bad. Probably the latter. Is there a grander example anywhere, however, of high camp? This weird film makes Peckinpaugh look like a Disney cartoon and Pasolini look like an ABC family made-for-TV. Ostensibly, it's a film about the massacre of the Hugeuonots in 18th-cerntury (?) France, under Catherine de Medici as the regent as her idiot son, Charles the IX?, ostensibly ruled - and Catherine's marrying off youngest child, the eponymous Margot, to a Hugueonot to bring about peace between the Catholics and Protestants - but really to bring the H's into Paris to celebrate the wedding and then to kill them all. Got it? It's literally impossible to follow the plot of this movie, so don't worry - that's not the point anyway. The point seems to be to show many scenes of brutal slaughter and of grubby and extremely unlikely sexual encounters. Hey, if you want to do a film in which a bunch of guys carrying swords get to run around about about 500 naked dead bodies - do a film about the massacre of the Hugeaunots, dress it up in historical garb. The acting is ridiculously over the top, esp Catherine, with her hair pulled back in a bun so tight her face looks distorted, like a botched face lift. The movie probably cost a fortune - the production values are actually excellent - probably won some Oscar or Cannes nods for costume design - but has so much money and talent ever been spent to serve such base purposes? I watched an hour plus of this 2.5 hour monstrosity - more than enough.

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