47 thoughts on “SNARK WEEK: I Just Had to Watch The King’s Daughter

  1. Between this and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, Benjamin Walker has made some… interesting choices when it comes to appearing in historical mashup films (though on the flipside he has The Notorious Bettie Page and Flags of Our Fathers so I can’t judge him too harshly).

  2. Oh my lord…..that was…..a sight. Bless you for sitting through that and I’ll send some eye bleach asap!

  3. Not a single costume within decades of the seventeenth century – the closest we get is some weird and very random mid-18th century bits. My eyes are bleeding. Please make it go away.

    (Kaylee’s dress is far prettier, BTW. And I have always seen it as a comic effect in the episode.)

    1. Did you ever dream you’d be thinking fondly of Kaylee’s fluffy pink monstrosity? It’s an awful dress but Kaylee looks beautiful in it because she loves it so.

  4. Holy cow. I can’t remember the last time I saw so much inaccurate costuming – from so many periods! – crammed into one movie. Were they trying to go for a free-wheeling ‘we’re so rad, we’re going mash up fashion history!’ Vibe maybe? (I think I’m giving them too much credit)

    1. They didn’t spend too much on horses & carriages, they spent too much on the wrong horses & carriages.

      The carriage appears to be mid-to-late 19th Century. The horses are all Fresians, a Dutch breed that at the time would have only been heavy carriage horses…in the Netherlands, not France.

      Black was not a favored color of elite horses at the time – light grey/white were the most desirable and more light-boned nimble animals preferred over the light-draft Fresians of the time. They should have used Lippizans or Iberian breeds (Lusitanos & Andalusians) if they wanted authenticity.

  5. Love it! That was so enjoyable that I think I need to take up smoking again.

    Also, I think that Corset-Clad Bimbos should so totally be the name of our Go-Gos/Courney Love/Bangles mash-up tribute band.

    WHO’S WITH ME?!?

  6. My favorite bad movie podcast, “The Flop House,” did an episode on this. They don’t usually spend much time talking about costumes, but these outfits were so egregious that they couldn’t ignore them.
    I’m curious about the timeline of Fan Bingbing’s house arrest and the production of this film. It apparently had a huge amount of investment from Chinese film producers. Could she have had a bigger role that was cut down post-production because she was in trouble with the government?

    1. The movie’s original planned release date was April 10, 2015, per our first Snark Week post about it. I think Fan Bingbing’s problems didn’t start until at least 2018.

      Accd. to Wikipedia & IMDB, this movie’s problems started just weeks before that initial date w/special effects not being done. Then it sat on the shelf, getting passed from one distributor to another ever since.

      1. I remember reading an article about her that must have been before the movie was supposed to come out the first time. It was in the NYTimes, I think, about how by number of people watching her films, she could be considered the world’s biggest star. This film was mentioned as being her potential English language breakthrough. The article was what inspired me to find a copy of the book, ‘The Moon and the Sun.’
        I don’t remember if the year the book is set in is specified (though Mme de Maintenon is firmly entrenched), but it’s funny to see Brosnan the Fourteenth worried about mortality in 1684 when he’s going to reign 30 more years.

  7. OMG this is hilarious. I almost want to watch it just to laugh. This was definitely influenced by Reign.

  8. It finally dawned on me what things like this and the Sissi-related mess I commented on earlier today remind me of: the makeup and dresses and even the body language reads like “America’s Next Top Model” did a photoshoot at Versailles and the theme is modern couture French royalty.

  9. I first learned of this movie on this blog…and I watched it sometime last year. OMG!!! There are no words. It was JUST what I expected it to be and also NOT AT ALL what I expected. There’s just SO MUCH CRAZY in this movie–costumes, plot, acting, dancing, CGI, everything is TOTALLY BONKERS. I don’t know what I was going thru when I watched it, but I was delighted and couldn’t turn away. The whole time I thought, “Oh no they didn’t!” Like. Every. Second.

  10. Hang on, might this be where Meghan Markle got the inspiration for her very own shitty curtsy in their Netflix series?

  11. I think that if they got pieces right, it was from sheer random chance. If they had gone to a Spirit of Halloween store and searched for 17th century costumes it would have turned out better than this.

  12. This production is pure horror! I tried to survive half an hour. But it’s all so bad except the ship and the locations. Maybe all money was spend for these and Pierce Brosnan. If the whole thing would not boring on top of bad costumes and equipment…

  13. We get Pierce Brosnan in a frock flick and all he got to wear was THIS?!? (Pierce, either you were done So Very Dirty or you took one look at the Most Christian’s proper outfits and chickened out).

    ALSO, VERSAILLES is looking you all dead in the eye and crowing “You thought WE were bad, mon vieux? Well you have snarked us and now you must SUFFER!”

    Actually that’s more of a Henry VIII line: Louis the Fourteenth would probably just smirk, if he could even hear you over “the sound of how Awesome I am”.

  14. Also, I’m looking forward to see this blog’s reactions to MARIE ANTOINETTE when the various experts get a chance to run their beady eyes over the styles – my untutored impression has been that it’s quite pretty, though not enormously rigorous in terms of fashion (On the other hand Mr James Purefoy is inarguably “the handsomest man at his own court”, the future Louis XVI and Madam Antoine are suitably cursed with the sex drive of a pair of zoo pandas AND they have a pug*).

    *Sadly there’s at least one serious shortfall in this House of Bourbon: while THE SERPENT QUEEN is giving us the Fat Louis action we deserve, this show’s Provence is barely large enough for Monte Carlo!

    1. Please note that I refer to Louis de Bourbon of THE SERPENT QUEEN as “Fat Louis” with affection, since the character (with his interesting mixture of aristo greed and common sense) is one of my favourites, especially since he looks a lot more like a period aristo than quite a lot of the cast.

  15. There is a really cool 1920s-style beaded headdress on that one extra. It has no real reason to be there, of course, but at least it’s nice…

  16. Kaylee’s dress looks better than any of these.
    Why do people act like a curtsey is a major gymnastic performance? Put one foot behind the other and bend your knees. If wearing a long full skirt you can spread it but spreading your arms is not necessary.

    1. I think curtsying is like skirt hiking — symptoms of ppl wholly unaccustomed to wearing long skirts, so they overreact wildly. Hopefully next Snark Week, Kendra will treat us to a gallery of shitty curtsies!

  17. I remember hearing about this when it came out, but mainly in context of it having been in development/release hell for years (long enough for two of the stars to get married and have kids between wrapping filming and the release date). I hadn’t realized how bad the costuming was, or seen enough images to notice.

    As noted here, it seems like they spent a lot of money on location filming etc. with not enough left over for costumes. I’m reminded of the Dungeons & Dragons movie, where they showed huge CGI exteriors and filmed some scenes in impressive real historical buildings in Prague, but then other scenes were just in small, cheaply dressed locations and a lot of the costumes looked like something out of a bad LARP or Halloween costume shop.

  18. I am so so glad others noticed. I hoped Bernadette Banner would talk Abt it but she didn’t. And did you see that lady with the full goth makeup??

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