Proving that everything on my DV-R doesn't suck, after "Venom" I watched this 2000 film.
"Quills" isn't so much about the Marquis De Sade (although Geoffrey Rush appears to have a helluva good time playing the irrepressible sinner) as the effect the marquis' madness had on the people around him.
Kate Winslet, one of my favorites, is lovely and luminous as Madeleine, the asylum laundress who is the marquis' co-conspirator/object of lust. Trapped in her mundane existence, it takes tales as wild as the marquis' to transport her away. Joaquin Phoenix (this movie was filled with my favs!) is the gentle priest who might just damn himself in his quest to save souls. And Michael Caine does a grim, thankless (but necessary) turn as the reformer sent to clean up the asylum, whose twisted relationship with a young girl ends up mirroring one of de Sade's stories.
It's funny -- people have been trying to suppress sex for hundreds of years. It's still popular. Go figure. ;-)
Add in questions of free speech, mental illness, creativity (and the desperation that can arise from creativity thwarted), corporal punishment, religion, sexuality and politics (and did I mention the necrophilia?) and you have a juicy, funny, sad and thought-provoking movie.
Beloved reader, I leave you now with a tale penned by the Abbe du Coulmier, a man who found freedom in the most unlikeliest of places: at the bottom of an inkwell, on the tip of a quill. However, be forewarned, it's plot is blood-soaked, it's characters depraved, and it's themes... unwholesome at best. But in order to know virtue, we must acquaint ourselves with vice. Only then can we know the full measure of man. So come... I Dare you... Turn the page...
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