Happy Bastille Day!

by Cláudio Alves

On this day, 233 years ago, revolutionaries stormed the Bastille, seizing control of the medieval fortress turned political prison, a symbol of royal authority over the people. The event is often thought of as the inciting incident of the French Revolution. This time of radical societal change, which lasted until 1799, represents one of the most critical points in human history, the endpoint to the early modern period. To mark the occasion, since 1790, France has celebrated the Fête de la Fédération, a national holiday commonly known as Bastille Day. As a self-described French Revolution nerd who's been obsessing over the subject since middle school, it's a pleasure to combine that passion with another immortal love of mine - cinema. What better way for a cinephile to celebrate the date?

So, without further ado, let's explore how filmmakers have looked at this chapter in history. There are countless approaches, of course, but I shall focus on ten examples, including THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AS...

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99¢ Deals: Lady Bird, Body Heat, Farewell My Queen, etc...

It's a Public Service Announcement.

← It's also False Advertising. Lady Bird as "Movie of the Week"? Try "Movie of the Year"! Lady Bird is currently 99¢ on iTunes. And we thought you should know in case by some mad and totally embarrassing chance you have not yet seen 2017's best movie.

We should probably check in on iTunes deals more often. They're better quality images than Amazon or Netflix after all. The "movie of the week" changes...uh... weekly (you might have deduced that) but we're not sure how short the deal period is on their other 99¢ deals and there's quite a lot of goodies right now if you want to program your own mini-fest. Here are a few things that caught my eye from their rental bargain bin...

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The Manipulative Monarch of "Farewell, My Queen"

We're celebrating Marie Antoinette for a few more days this week. Here's abstew - Editor

The legendary figure of Marie Antoinette has been the subject of gossip and infamy for over 200 years now. Although most scholars agree that all we may think we know about the excessive queen is mostly a misunderstanding. Even the most well-known phrase attributed to her, "Let them eat cake!", has been debunked as never actually been spoken by her. Even in her own time, there were pamphlets spread around France accusing her of infidelities with both men and women. At her trial, she was accused of staging orgies at the Palace of Versailles and even committing incest with her own son. Playing off of these rumors, French director Benoît Jacquot's 2012 film about Marie Antoinette, Farewell, My Queen, based on the novel by Chantal Thomas, invents a lesbian relationship between the Queen and a duchess at court...

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Best of the Year: Nathaniel's Top Ten

Previously: The Honorable Mentions

Often during the calendar-straddling list-making frenzy of "top ten season" a scene or a line of dialogue or even a whole film will refuse to dislodge itself from any internal conversation you may have with oneself about the year. That moment for me this year was Kylie Minogue's cameo late in Holy Motors when she arrives in a trenchcoat, like some lost Casablanca love, to sing:

Who were we. When we were. Who we were back then?

It'd be ineloquent bathos, too crudely and redundantly stated, if it weren't sung. But this heightened musical longing for a lost identity, lifts and soars with pathos instead. The year's best films kept reinforcing this most interior of questions as they wrestled with their past selves towards an uncertain future.

Nathaniel's Top Ten of 2012
From all movies screened that received US theatrical releases...

ZERO DARK THIRTY (Kathryn Bigelow)
Sony/Columbia. December 21st 

[SPOILERS FOLLOW] My favorite exchange in Mark Boal's dense script occurs between a government official and a CIA operative. "What the fuck does that mean?" "It's a tautology". I laughed at the wordplay in the film but wasn't expecting the widespread tautological eruptions that followed the film's premiere as everyone bent themselves into self-affirming pretzels to debate its portrayal of torture in the film's opening scenes as if there were only one way to look at the damn movie... as if torture were the only thing worth discussing about the film! To Zero Dark Thirty's credit, though I too was discomfited by its suggestion that torture yielded useful intel, there's nary a comfortable or pandering moment in the film. Like The Hurt Locker before it, ZDT attempts something like an apolitical stance though how successful that is (or ever can be) will be left to each viewer to decide. In my mind, Bigelow doesn't suggest that you're meant to enjoy torture or even embrace the mission's success, exactly...

more on Zero Dark and 9 more triumphs after the jump...

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Year in Review: The Best LGBT Characters

Over at my weekly (okay, bi-weekly) column at Towleroad, I put up my annual review of the best queer characters of the film year. The year's most acclaimed gay narrative feature was obviously Keep the Lights On but since I didn't personally respond to that one I had to look elsewhere for my favorite gay characters. Likewise, many will wish for more love for that dandy Cloud Atlas couple of Sixsmith and Forbrisher.

But I made room for films as diverse as On the Road, ParaNorman, and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. The most controversial bit of the top ten will probably be the section I like to call "The 'Are They Or Aren't They?' Box Set" which begins like so..

With the ever increasing number of gay-identified characters it's less of a parlor game to imagine the characters who might well be queer than it used to be but it's still fun: Tomboy does not always equal lesbian but regardless of her orientation  "Princess Merida" in Brave really shakes up the heteronormative Disney fairytale world merely by being utterly uninterested and even opposed to that Someday When Her Prince Might Come; The chorus of townsfolk who continually sound off on "Bernie" in Bernie argue about whether he's cruising for men on the sly or sleeping with rich widow Shirley Maclaine but both sound pretty gay to me...

...READ THE REST @ TOWLEROAD

Previously on 'Year in Review' 
James Bond Mania -Bond Girl Reader Ranking. (+ Silva)
The Year in of Snow White the apple muching fairest of them all was everywhere
Overrated Amy Adams, superheroes, film critics, and more
Worst of 2012 Cloud Atlas, The Amazing Spider-Man, and more
Summer Crushes Pt. 1 and Summer Crushes Pt. 2

Best of the Blog from...
January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October and November