Movies (spoilers for The Three Musketeers, The Skin I Inhabit and Midnight in Paris)

I've been having a movie week, also known as my-ticket-booklet-is-about-to-expire week.

The Three Musketeers was in fact quite enjoyable, in spite of raping the plot, the history and the laws of physics in spectacular and unspeakable ways. For one thing, it's the first movie I'd ever seen that has a teenage d'Artagnan, like in the book, played by an actual teenage actor.

I've wondered about this before. The book's d'Artagnan is a teenager, and does a lot of stupid things that teenagers do, especially while being out of school, away from adult supervision, and hanging around with deadly weapons. In the movies he tends to be played by men in their thirties, and not in a Luke Skywalker-like boyish-looking-man-playing-a-teenager way, but in a way that implies that the character is an adult, which makes the viewer really wonder about his IQ.

Another delightful thing about the movie was that the royal couple were not in their 50s, as they often are in the movies, but fairly close to their historical age of 24. Explains a lot about their behavior, I guess, although most people have more sense at that age.

Speaking about the book: the plot made me wonder quite a lot about the queen. When I first read it at the age of 8 or 9 it was not clear to me a) why the queen would get into that much trouble for giving some stupid piece of jewelry to that Buckingham guy, and b) considering that she knew that disappearance of said piece of jewelry would cause trouble when discovered, why didn't she give him something less unique, like roses and chocolate. Actually I still haven't figured those out, maybe I ought to reread the book.

In any case - the movie was fun, although in a way that made me wonder about the recreational drugs used by cast and crew.

About The Skin I Inhabit: I always wonder why I like watching Almodovar's movies. I mean, the characters tend to be insane and their motivations incomprehensible. This time, however, Almodovar surprised me by having a character who appeared to be absolutely sane apart from the heavy use of hard drugs.

Midnight in Paris was very enjoyable in "whee, I love Paris" way, because, well, I do. Apart from that, I find it really annoying when the Deep Understanding to which the protagonist comes at the end of the movie is obvious to the viewer from the very beginning. I mean, for fuck's sake, if you were walking around Paris and suddenly found yourself in the year 1920, how long would it take you to figure out that those guys don't have antibiotics and modern dentistry? Not to mention that there is a fairly big war coming up in 19 years? And that the Internet is nice to have?