Written and directed by Sofia Coppola

Starring: Kirsten Dunst, Jason Schwartzman, Judy Davis and Steve Coogan

122 minutes

A lightweight attempt on the part of Sofia Coppola to let the sets and costumes tell a story while simultaneously trying to make French history digestible for the “TRL” generation. It’s an embarrassment to the family name in addition to being one of the dullest historical epics of recent vintage.

Like any loyal “TRL” viewer, Sofia’s Valley Queen likes to shop for shoes, eat candy, sport big hair, spend money, get high, utilize dogs as fashion accessories and party ’til the wee hours. In other words, she’d be equally at home in Versailles as she would at the Paris Hilton.

Basically, the only thing expected from the 19-year-old queen Marie Antoinette is a male heir. Sadly, her king appears more interested in the stable boys than his husbandly duties in the royal boudoir. It takes forever for the couple to finally conceive; well into the second act, Louis still hasn’t spilled the royal seed. The last two reels give us a Reader’s Digest condensed glimpse into the last 18 or so years of her life. (We are spared her beheading at age 38.) James Dean’s Shinola aging process in Giant is more believable.

At half the length of Barry Lyndon, this packs 10 times the tedium. Stanley Kubrick and Ryan O’Neal took a lot of heat for the latter’s anemic portrayal of Thackeray’s Irish rogue, but it’s Hitchcock and Stewart compared to how Coppola directs Kirsten Dunst.

Ms. Dunst has already proven to have a flair for comedy (Drop Dead Gorgeous, Dick and Small Soldiers), in addition to her star turn as Marion Davies in Peter Bogdanovich’s overlooked period piece The Cat’s Meow. It would be unfair to heap all of the blame on her doorstep. You try giving a performance composed almost entirely of reaction shots.

In a film loaded with them, the major disappointment is Jason Schwartzman’s Louis XVI. Forget Jack Black and Will Ferrell. From Rushmore to Slackers to Shopgirl, Schwartzman best embodies the current comedic breed of anxious and unpredictable nerd. Lost under a powdered wig and period accoutrements, 90 percent of the time his line readings are barely audible, as he appears to have been stung by a hammer. Come to think of it, most of the sparse, colorless dialogue is delivered in whispers.

If the film is crammed with anachronisms, at least Sofia comes by them honestly. Remember Michael Corleone’s haircut in The Godfather Part III? Do we really need the Kevin Shields remix of Bow Wow Wow’s “I Want Candy” underscoring Marie and her pals pigging out on various confections? The least they could have done was use the Strangelove’s version.

Shocking as it may be, the French government actually granted special permission to film in the Palace of Versailles. Didn’t they get a translation of the script? People are sure to be impressed with the sets, but do not confuse pretty pictures with screen direction. Considering the location, there’s no such thing as a bad camera angle.

Off with Sofia Coppola’s head for daring to waste the public’s time with this bubblegum biopic.

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Directed by Henry Selick

Written by Caroline Thompson, Tim Burton and Michael McDowell

76 minutes

Rod Serling didn’t known it at the time, but when he spoke about finding another dimension by turning a key and unlocking the door of imagination he was directly addressing the current state of film exhibition.

I have seen the future of movies and it is 3-D. I hope.

The depth-expanding novelty process, which has been around since the 1920s, saw it’s greatest rise in popularity during the ’50s when it was dusted off as a means to combat the onslaught of television. With the exception of Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder, no other stereoscopic film bothered to utilize depth as a means of storytelling. Everybody just wanted to test the limits of those uncomfortable cardboard glasses.

Cost and public indifference brought a quick end to the vogue. Originally, it took two interlocked projectors rigged with polarized lenses that were offset by approximately three inches to bring 3-D to the screen. Theaters had to be refitted with expensive silver screens and doubling the prints meant doubling the shipping costs.

Barely on life support in the ’60s, 3-D experienced a minor revival over the next two decades. By then, polarized lenses had all but vanquished their blue and red predecessors. The new single-strip process looked better than ever and, positioned at the dawn of sequelitis, found steady employment in third-part installments of horror films (Jaws 3-D, Friday the 13th Part III and Amityville 3-D).

Ultimately, 70mm killed 3-D as well as Cinerama. Audiences didn’t have to endure tri-panel seams, nose-creasing glasses or higher ticket prices. Oddly enough, the sharper image resolution wasn’t what gave the film stock its celebrity; it was the fuller range of stereophonic sound.

Too costly to shoot in the wide-gauge process, for a period Hollywood was ordering 70mm blow-ups on every fifth picture slated for release. As much as I adore Gremlins 2, even I was stunned to see it in the grandeur of 70mm. With the advent of digital sound, 70mm was put on the disabled list.

Not until IMAX combined 70mm and stereoscopic cinematography had the potential for worldwide acceptance shown such promise. Glasses were now replaced by helmets equipped with polarized visors and tiny speakers that sat behind your ears, assuring optimum stereophonic separation.

The IMAX thrill quickly came and went, until now. The brainiacs at Industrial Light & Magic devised a way in which any 2-D film can be digitally catapulted into the third-dimension. It is expensive and time consuming, but the results are staggering.

The original 2-D negative is scanned into a computer and digitally spruced up. Coming up with the second strip was a laborious process, as Nightmare producer Don Hahn explained in an interview with www.animationartist.com: “If you want to see the original version, you just look with your left eye. But then we have to create a whole right eye version … and that’s done by rebuilding the whole movie as a digital picture. In other words, if you have a shot of Jack Skellington, you have to build Jack, and you have to build the background behind him, his house and the snow, or whatever is behind him in a digital world. And then we project a movie on to that digital geometry and then move the digital camera over to the right and rephotograph that for the right eye version.”

You still have to wear glasses, but Disney has thankfully devised lightweight and comfortable – if not aggressively unfashionable – lenses.

With its surplus of musical numbers and paucity of plot, I confess to not being a fan of the original goth-approved Nightmare. In 3-D, it’s a revelation.

The studio promises at least one film a year will be converted to 3-D. I vote for a deep-focus enhancement of Bambi’s multiplane camera pyrotechnics. If not a Disney feature, why not one that influenced Uncle Walt, like Triumph of the Will?

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