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Napoleon - Is this a joke, Ridley Scott?
Napoleon - Is this a joke, Ridley Scott?
https://theamericansun.substack.com/p/i ... dley-scott
Is this a joke, Ridley Scott?
Wherein the Joker is mommy-dommed by a mid thot
I struggled for a long time in figuring out what “angle” to take with this review. Going in, the only things I had heard were “it’s shot in grey and they got Austerlitz wrong”, and something about “toxic masculinity”. Okay, I can deal with this, I thought, naively. It’s not my first rodeo, it’s good for a laugh at least. Stupid!
Nothing could prepare me for “Napoleon”, possibly the worst movie I have ever seen. Actually, all in - the worst movie I have ever seen. The kind of movie so bad that pinning down the mere order of severity of the crimes against humanity requires repeated exposure, which in turn magnifies the horror. Do I have PTSD? Do I get workers’ comp for this?
Are people seriously complaining about the color palette? Do they also have critiques of the wallpaper at Auschwitz? It’s true the problems here are recursive, wheels inside of wheels, like a cuckoo clock made of coiled excrement, but they do have a start and an end point, and the near-greyscale color grading is near the back.
The reason it’s grey is because Ridley Scott thinks it’s really cool when a cannon ball or a bullet goes whizzzz-plork through some poor conscript or horse’s chest, and bright red blood shows up better against icy grey than a more accurate, bold color scheme. You need this high contrast when you are one million years old and have cataracts and still want to see the arterial spray. Still, this is not a crime - blood-on-grey is used in a bunch of fine movies.
But if those battle scenes exist because you are theoretically telling the story of a great general, and really like the whizzzz-plork stuff, then I have no idea why the spine of the movie is Josephine. It is possible David Scarpa, the screenwriter, is responsible. We need a Nuremberg style show trial to get to the bottom of this. But properly speaking, if we were to have truth in advertising, the title should be Napoleon and Josephine. We discover this after a twenty minute prologue establishing that Napoleon exists and is a general in revolutionary France - not a great general, mind you, because we actually do not get any indication that he is anything more than merely competent. He goes to a dinner party and the movie takes a hard turn towards the bizarre.
Joaquin Phoenix’s Napoleon is just Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker. He speaks in a monotone or shouts in frustration or cries like a little boy. He can’t make eye contact. He silently stares. He exudes no charm or charisma whatsoever. How does this man exert so much personal magnetism that even after what should have been his final defeat, his mere re-arrival during the Hundred Days was sufficient to immediately cause the French army to rally to him? We never find out. He has exactly one character element - he is inexplicably in love with Josephine.
I say “inexplicably” because Josephine lacks any objectively attractive qualities (although Vanessa Kirby does a great job with what she’s given). Widowed mother of two children who admits she banged the entire jail staff when she was imprisoned during the Terror to avoid being executed like her husband - okay, a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do, and our mores have advanced since the eighteenth century. But she is on top of that, and let me directly quote the movie here, “a slut” (you need to say this in Jokermode at an important political meeting, in between soft monotones).
You know, Napoleon might have seen this coming when Josephine literally spreads her legs and tells him “if you look down you’ll see a surprise”. This is something a skilled poker player would refer to as a “tell”. Perhaps also when he sees her flirting with another man, whom she later bangs, at their wedding dinner. But canonically, he is deeply in love with her nonetheless, despite being furious at her known infidelities.
And this isn’t just some kind of beard relationship where he needs a wife for political purposes and it’s the publicity that offends him (although it doesn’t help that on multiple occasions he learns from a newspaper that he has been cuckolded). He actually needs her, specifically, to love him exclusively, for some reason.
The rule of thumb is that in any given Napoleon / Josephine scene, you hypothesize the worst 4chan greentext copypasta you can imagine, and lo, it appears on screen. Napoleon is on the cusp of bursting out into the “mommy milky” verse at any given moment, and I give 50/50 odds it exists in the director’s cut. Joaquin and Vanessa Kirby may have freestyled the middle third of the movie, because can you really imagine greenlighting a script that reads:
[NAPOLEON enters]
NAPOLEON: “mmmm num num num num”
[NAPOLEON awkwardly stomps foot]
[SERVANTS leave room]
[NAPOLEON violently humps JOSEPHINE with their fourteen collective layers of clothes on]
I guess the idea here is we’re “showing not telling” how in love Napoleon is (the reverse being far from clear), but combined with a twisted dual monologue where he makes Josephine apologize for her infidelities, after which she turns the tables and makes Napoleon affirm “you are nothing without me… without me and your mother”, we are not showing “deeply in love”, we are showing “deeply troubled”. The aforementioned humiliation visibly distresses and yet arouses Napoleon. What the hell, Ridley Scott.
Let me say that I am in the abstract fine with psychosexual drama like this. If you set this same movie in a contemporary fictional context, presumably you could interpret as a pseudo Strangelovian statement about how our leaders are the worst of men, how their sexual proclivities are used for corruption rather than for ensuring their literal and metaphorical posterity, how their personal foibles end up not just being quirks but actually make them unfit to rule.
But Napoleon, I am told, actually existed. He had certain core qualities you can’t really avoid, like he is really extremely good at warfare. We get “battle scenes”, such as they are (whizzzz-splork), but there’s no indication that he held Europe in terror for nearly twenty years, and only was stopped when his former Top Guy explained, look, you basically can’t beat him, the best you can hope for is to attrit his lieutenants and supplies until he’s whittled down enough to be smashed by sheer mass. We get intermittent set pieces where he mumbles through plot points, eg, “the Joker threatens the French Directorate”, or “the Joker goes Jokermode on rioters and gives them a whiff of grapeshot”. How did he win? Was it incredible that he would win, under such circumstances? Why does any educated man still know what “18 Brumaire” refers to? Why are we still making movies about him? Ridley Scott’s answer is that it just kinda happened, and ultimately he did it all for the nookie.
(Tangent: the reason you can’t just put together, like, a million guys and smash Napoleon to begin with is that you physically cannot feed or even really assemble that many men given the logistics networks available at the time. Napoleon was excellent at maneuver and logistics, not just “battles”, which is why he was so scary to fight when news and orders only travel as fast as a horse, you have to send an army on foot to chase him, that army can’t be appreciably bigger than what he has available because they would be starving before they get there, and if it’s the same size and he chooses to engage he’s probably going to win.)
You don’t need a blow-by-blow of his military career or the geopolitics or what have you, a “personal” movie is fine (in a parallel universe where Ridley Scott was still a good director, he made a Napoleon / Bernadotte movie - talk about twists of interpersonal drama). But without at least some of these core elements to link to the actual character you don’t actually have a movie “about Napoleon” with an actual narrative, just a collection of tasteful CGI-interpolated cannon fire and weird sex stuff. The latter drives the entire plot, from 20 minutes in, to the last moment. Napoleon escapes from Elba, in this absurd telling, because his whore ex-wife cucked him, yet again, with the Tsar of Russia. We’re putting the band back together to go get our girl! He is very sad to find, once he gets to Paris, that she died of pneumonia just before he got there. In reality he discovered that she had died before he ever left Elba, but it’s important that your sole guiding star drive all the action.
Perhaps the most grossly insulting part of the whole production is that if you were going to make a fundamentally psychosexual Napoleon / Josephine movie, you have material, and Ridley Scott misuses it or just leaves rubies floating in the muck. Napoleon was not the sadsack incel he is portrayed as - he was French! He acted like it! He banged Josephine’s lady-in-waiting in an incident that caused their most notable blowup - one could infer over resentment due to Josephine’s inability to have an heir, and her resentment of his resentment. This is more compelling stuff. There is an idea that one can be in love, but that that love takes a backseat to ambition - and this is true for both of them. There is the idea that Josephine is also exercising her ambition to be with high-status men, in a way as ultimately self-destructive as Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. You could attribute her behavior to her PTSD hangover from the Terror, in the same way that Napoleon himself is, in a sense, a hangover from revolutionary ultraviolence. One could even parallel the biological deterioration - Josephine ages and is unable to bear children, and at a critical moment at Waterloo, some sources indicate the aging Napoleon physically can’t bear to sit in the saddle to survey the battle. Instead we get insipid mommy complex bullshit.
Is it just because Scott is English? Is it that banal? We are subjected to mostly fictitious scenes where Napoleon leeringly tries to solicit a 15 year old from the Tsar, or where his mother liquors him up and graphically describes how she has procured a girl “undressed and ready to receive” to prove his fertility, because the English guy wants to dab on Napoleon? How old is Ridley Scott? Did he grow up reading caricatures in the British press… circa 1808?
The whole thing is rather gross and there is no redeeming spark. I decline to elaborate on the rest of the plot, the pacing, the tonal discrepancies, the color issue, the battle scenes, or any of the other problems, because the core of the movie is rotten. If you want a Napoleonic drama, watch Waterloo. If you want to watch “Cuck husband will invade ANYWHERE for domme gf”, fuck right off to Pornhub.
Is this a joke, Ridley Scott?
Wherein the Joker is mommy-dommed by a mid thot
I struggled for a long time in figuring out what “angle” to take with this review. Going in, the only things I had heard were “it’s shot in grey and they got Austerlitz wrong”, and something about “toxic masculinity”. Okay, I can deal with this, I thought, naively. It’s not my first rodeo, it’s good for a laugh at least. Stupid!
Nothing could prepare me for “Napoleon”, possibly the worst movie I have ever seen. Actually, all in - the worst movie I have ever seen. The kind of movie so bad that pinning down the mere order of severity of the crimes against humanity requires repeated exposure, which in turn magnifies the horror. Do I have PTSD? Do I get workers’ comp for this?
Are people seriously complaining about the color palette? Do they also have critiques of the wallpaper at Auschwitz? It’s true the problems here are recursive, wheels inside of wheels, like a cuckoo clock made of coiled excrement, but they do have a start and an end point, and the near-greyscale color grading is near the back.
The reason it’s grey is because Ridley Scott thinks it’s really cool when a cannon ball or a bullet goes whizzzz-plork through some poor conscript or horse’s chest, and bright red blood shows up better against icy grey than a more accurate, bold color scheme. You need this high contrast when you are one million years old and have cataracts and still want to see the arterial spray. Still, this is not a crime - blood-on-grey is used in a bunch of fine movies.
But if those battle scenes exist because you are theoretically telling the story of a great general, and really like the whizzzz-plork stuff, then I have no idea why the spine of the movie is Josephine. It is possible David Scarpa, the screenwriter, is responsible. We need a Nuremberg style show trial to get to the bottom of this. But properly speaking, if we were to have truth in advertising, the title should be Napoleon and Josephine. We discover this after a twenty minute prologue establishing that Napoleon exists and is a general in revolutionary France - not a great general, mind you, because we actually do not get any indication that he is anything more than merely competent. He goes to a dinner party and the movie takes a hard turn towards the bizarre.
Joaquin Phoenix’s Napoleon is just Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker. He speaks in a monotone or shouts in frustration or cries like a little boy. He can’t make eye contact. He silently stares. He exudes no charm or charisma whatsoever. How does this man exert so much personal magnetism that even after what should have been his final defeat, his mere re-arrival during the Hundred Days was sufficient to immediately cause the French army to rally to him? We never find out. He has exactly one character element - he is inexplicably in love with Josephine.
I say “inexplicably” because Josephine lacks any objectively attractive qualities (although Vanessa Kirby does a great job with what she’s given). Widowed mother of two children who admits she banged the entire jail staff when she was imprisoned during the Terror to avoid being executed like her husband - okay, a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do, and our mores have advanced since the eighteenth century. But she is on top of that, and let me directly quote the movie here, “a slut” (you need to say this in Jokermode at an important political meeting, in between soft monotones).
You know, Napoleon might have seen this coming when Josephine literally spreads her legs and tells him “if you look down you’ll see a surprise”. This is something a skilled poker player would refer to as a “tell”. Perhaps also when he sees her flirting with another man, whom she later bangs, at their wedding dinner. But canonically, he is deeply in love with her nonetheless, despite being furious at her known infidelities.
And this isn’t just some kind of beard relationship where he needs a wife for political purposes and it’s the publicity that offends him (although it doesn’t help that on multiple occasions he learns from a newspaper that he has been cuckolded). He actually needs her, specifically, to love him exclusively, for some reason.
The rule of thumb is that in any given Napoleon / Josephine scene, you hypothesize the worst 4chan greentext copypasta you can imagine, and lo, it appears on screen. Napoleon is on the cusp of bursting out into the “mommy milky” verse at any given moment, and I give 50/50 odds it exists in the director’s cut. Joaquin and Vanessa Kirby may have freestyled the middle third of the movie, because can you really imagine greenlighting a script that reads:
[NAPOLEON enters]
NAPOLEON: “mmmm num num num num”
[NAPOLEON awkwardly stomps foot]
[SERVANTS leave room]
[NAPOLEON violently humps JOSEPHINE with their fourteen collective layers of clothes on]
I guess the idea here is we’re “showing not telling” how in love Napoleon is (the reverse being far from clear), but combined with a twisted dual monologue where he makes Josephine apologize for her infidelities, after which she turns the tables and makes Napoleon affirm “you are nothing without me… without me and your mother”, we are not showing “deeply in love”, we are showing “deeply troubled”. The aforementioned humiliation visibly distresses and yet arouses Napoleon. What the hell, Ridley Scott.
Let me say that I am in the abstract fine with psychosexual drama like this. If you set this same movie in a contemporary fictional context, presumably you could interpret as a pseudo Strangelovian statement about how our leaders are the worst of men, how their sexual proclivities are used for corruption rather than for ensuring their literal and metaphorical posterity, how their personal foibles end up not just being quirks but actually make them unfit to rule.
But Napoleon, I am told, actually existed. He had certain core qualities you can’t really avoid, like he is really extremely good at warfare. We get “battle scenes”, such as they are (whizzzz-splork), but there’s no indication that he held Europe in terror for nearly twenty years, and only was stopped when his former Top Guy explained, look, you basically can’t beat him, the best you can hope for is to attrit his lieutenants and supplies until he’s whittled down enough to be smashed by sheer mass. We get intermittent set pieces where he mumbles through plot points, eg, “the Joker threatens the French Directorate”, or “the Joker goes Jokermode on rioters and gives them a whiff of grapeshot”. How did he win? Was it incredible that he would win, under such circumstances? Why does any educated man still know what “18 Brumaire” refers to? Why are we still making movies about him? Ridley Scott’s answer is that it just kinda happened, and ultimately he did it all for the nookie.
(Tangent: the reason you can’t just put together, like, a million guys and smash Napoleon to begin with is that you physically cannot feed or even really assemble that many men given the logistics networks available at the time. Napoleon was excellent at maneuver and logistics, not just “battles”, which is why he was so scary to fight when news and orders only travel as fast as a horse, you have to send an army on foot to chase him, that army can’t be appreciably bigger than what he has available because they would be starving before they get there, and if it’s the same size and he chooses to engage he’s probably going to win.)
You don’t need a blow-by-blow of his military career or the geopolitics or what have you, a “personal” movie is fine (in a parallel universe where Ridley Scott was still a good director, he made a Napoleon / Bernadotte movie - talk about twists of interpersonal drama). But without at least some of these core elements to link to the actual character you don’t actually have a movie “about Napoleon” with an actual narrative, just a collection of tasteful CGI-interpolated cannon fire and weird sex stuff. The latter drives the entire plot, from 20 minutes in, to the last moment. Napoleon escapes from Elba, in this absurd telling, because his whore ex-wife cucked him, yet again, with the Tsar of Russia. We’re putting the band back together to go get our girl! He is very sad to find, once he gets to Paris, that she died of pneumonia just before he got there. In reality he discovered that she had died before he ever left Elba, but it’s important that your sole guiding star drive all the action.
Perhaps the most grossly insulting part of the whole production is that if you were going to make a fundamentally psychosexual Napoleon / Josephine movie, you have material, and Ridley Scott misuses it or just leaves rubies floating in the muck. Napoleon was not the sadsack incel he is portrayed as - he was French! He acted like it! He banged Josephine’s lady-in-waiting in an incident that caused their most notable blowup - one could infer over resentment due to Josephine’s inability to have an heir, and her resentment of his resentment. This is more compelling stuff. There is an idea that one can be in love, but that that love takes a backseat to ambition - and this is true for both of them. There is the idea that Josephine is also exercising her ambition to be with high-status men, in a way as ultimately self-destructive as Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. You could attribute her behavior to her PTSD hangover from the Terror, in the same way that Napoleon himself is, in a sense, a hangover from revolutionary ultraviolence. One could even parallel the biological deterioration - Josephine ages and is unable to bear children, and at a critical moment at Waterloo, some sources indicate the aging Napoleon physically can’t bear to sit in the saddle to survey the battle. Instead we get insipid mommy complex bullshit.
Is it just because Scott is English? Is it that banal? We are subjected to mostly fictitious scenes where Napoleon leeringly tries to solicit a 15 year old from the Tsar, or where his mother liquors him up and graphically describes how she has procured a girl “undressed and ready to receive” to prove his fertility, because the English guy wants to dab on Napoleon? How old is Ridley Scott? Did he grow up reading caricatures in the British press… circa 1808?
The whole thing is rather gross and there is no redeeming spark. I decline to elaborate on the rest of the plot, the pacing, the tonal discrepancies, the color issue, the battle scenes, or any of the other problems, because the core of the movie is rotten. If you want a Napoleonic drama, watch Waterloo. If you want to watch “Cuck husband will invade ANYWHERE for domme gf”, fuck right off to Pornhub.
- rusty_shackleford
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what's with all the holohoax metaphors
anyway my warning sign for this movie was that they made Napoleon look like an eldery homeless man.
anyway my warning sign for this movie was that they made Napoleon look like an eldery homeless man.
At least they didnt hide in the trailer that half the movie is about Josephine so I had no hopes and moved on. Also a historian said maybe 23mins of the 2,5 hours is even some what true and not made up.
I'll never understand why people still waste time even watching these shows. They're always garbage now.
Were people really expecting a good historical movie about a white man from the guy that went "akshually the Crusades were bad, m'kay"?
I know I'm stating the obvious, but this is simply more demoralization propaganda. As Sanshiro said, Scott being British likely played a part in what the movie turned into, shitting on the Frech being one of the few displays of nationalism the Jews allow Anglos to engage in, but in general the movie was always meant to humiliate and ridicule Napoleon in particular and the French in general. Ridley's name was attached to the travesty because he's the Kingdom of Heaven guy, and enough goys would get hoodwinked into watching it, expecting a historical epic.
I know I'm stating the obvious, but this is simply more demoralization propaganda. As Sanshiro said, Scott being British likely played a part in what the movie turned into, shitting on the Frech being one of the few displays of nationalism the Jews allow Anglos to engage in, but in general the movie was always meant to humiliate and ridicule Napoleon in particular and the French in general. Ridley's name was attached to the travesty because he's the Kingdom of Heaven guy, and enough goys would get hoodwinked into watching it, expecting a historical epic.
Last edited by gerey on December 6th, 2023, 15:33, edited 1 time in total.
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Gygax refused to watch that movie because it ahistorically portrayed the Christians negatively & Saracens positively.
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Didn't read any of that, but I assumed the movie would be bad because all movies are bad and I was probably right.
Exactly. This is why I simply refuse to watch modern shows or movies. Once I started to recognize and see that I was indeed being demoralized years ago, these things became physically hard to watch.gerey wrote: ↑ December 6th, 2023, 15:32I know I'm stating the obvious, but this is simply more demoralization propaganda.
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Movies and media have been heavily gyno centric for almost a century now. You have to go back to the 30s and 40s to see actually badass men where women throw themselves at them. The men don't care because they are too badass and focused on their mission. I blame James bond for this, he's constantly distracted by some slut instead of doing his job, it was proably parody at the time that everyone took seriously.
James Bond is pretty consistent with its contemporary adventure/detective stories.Nooneatall wrote: ↑ December 6th, 2023, 17:09Movies and media have been heavily gyno centric for almost a century now. You have to go back to the 30s and 40s to see actually badass men where women throw themselves at them. The men don't care because they are too badass and focused on their mission. I blame James bond for this, he's constantly distracted by some slut instead of doing his job, it was proably parody at the time that everyone took seriously.
If you were the author, @segata-sanshiro, I thank you for the great review and for suffering through that garbage to tell the tale. It sounds as if your disappointment is on par with mine, circa 2012, when I watched Prometheus.
Last edited by Hauberk on December 6th, 2023, 17:52, edited 1 time in total.
Not my review but I found it amusing enough to post hereHauberk wrote: ↑ December 6th, 2023, 17:52If you were the author, @segata-sanshiro, I thank you for the great review and for suffering through that garbage to tell the tale. It sounds as if your disappointment is on par with mine, circa 2012, when I watched Prometheus.
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This angloid trash has been should have "demythologized" a figure more his own class, like the late queen-bitch.
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If anyone is actually interested in Napoleon, I would highly recomend the book Napoleon: A Life by Andrew Roberts. I came out the other end of reading it convinced I would have probably enlisted in the French imperial army and probably died at 20 for that man, but I wouldn't expect a Hollywood crypto jew to comprehend much less depict anything related to him tastefully.
I heard the 2002 miniseries is supposed to be good. Didn't watch it myself because of Christian Clavier. He's a good actor, but each time I see him all I can think of is his character from Les Visiteurs.
Why watch modern slop napoleon movies when the best one was made almost 100 years ago.
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Not a fan of how a lot of actors looked in very early movies tbh.
Movies of the 20's and 30's had real artSiMtRy wrote: ↑ December 8th, 2023, 01:30Why watch modern slop napoleon movies when the best one was made almost 100 years ago.
Napoleon has been a hero of mine for a long time so this one was an obligation watch for me. Everything leading up to the release of the film made it clear it was going to be a nightmare but it still managed to top my basement level expectations. Ridley Scott should be publicly executed and I never want to see an anglo touch a historical project for another 100 years.
I imagine this has to be what learning about Napoleon in an anglo public school is like. Just rushing through headline tier topics with the occasional bald faced lie from generations of propaganda passed down now presented with apathy instead of malice.
I don't know who this movie is for. Pivotal parts of Napoleon's life are completely absent (even parts that sound straight out of a movie) meanwhile completely made up bullshit is everywhere all over the movie.
It can't be for a historically accurate biopic about the life of Napoleon Bonaparte it skips to 1789 (technically although it shows Napoleon once in a place he wasn't at and then jumps forward in time) from the start and broad strokes his life through the rest of the movie. It can't be about Napoleon and Josephine because it omits loads from their relationship, fabricates stuff, and totally fumbles any sort of chemistry whilst making them BOTH severely unlikable. Josephine is portrayed as a 21rst century BPD schizo slut who goes back and forth between being an irredeemable whore to a poor wilted flower against the equally character assassinated Napoleon who is turned into bipolar incel who will go from literally slapping her and demanding she call him the most important person in the world to one scene less than 30 seconds later crying and saying the reverse to Josephine when she commands him to and says he's nothing without her and his mother (???).
Random jump cuts into sex scenes where he comes off as a gross impotent ineffectual lover like something out of a shitty gross early 2000s comedy. The movie basically shits on Josephine and Napoleon both to the point where it feels like two cuts of two different movies and have been spliced together.
It's like he read a wikipedia blurb that they had a toxic and sometimes tumultuous relationship and made a movie about two random people having a tumultuous relationship and those two people are definitely not the historical figures of Napoleon and Josephine.
And then you have the loads of random blacks spread throughout the movie randomly. The one (1) black general in the French army at the time shows up in the background a lot. He's in all the Egypt scenes which is fair he was there but he shows up multiple times afterwards when in reality he was rotting in a dungeon in Naples (iirc) the entire time those scenes take place.
You can frequently spot a black extra or two in most scenes with lots of people. After his defeat he talks to a group of young sailor boys, one of whom is literally a frizzy haired half black mulatto mutt.
I imagine this has to be what learning about Napoleon in an anglo public school is like. Just rushing through headline tier topics with the occasional bald faced lie from generations of propaganda passed down now presented with apathy instead of malice.
I don't know who this movie is for. Pivotal parts of Napoleon's life are completely absent (even parts that sound straight out of a movie) meanwhile completely made up bullshit is everywhere all over the movie.
It can't be for a historically accurate biopic about the life of Napoleon Bonaparte it skips to 1789 (technically although it shows Napoleon once in a place he wasn't at and then jumps forward in time) from the start and broad strokes his life through the rest of the movie. It can't be about Napoleon and Josephine because it omits loads from their relationship, fabricates stuff, and totally fumbles any sort of chemistry whilst making them BOTH severely unlikable. Josephine is portrayed as a 21rst century BPD schizo slut who goes back and forth between being an irredeemable whore to a poor wilted flower against the equally character assassinated Napoleon who is turned into bipolar incel who will go from literally slapping her and demanding she call him the most important person in the world to one scene less than 30 seconds later crying and saying the reverse to Josephine when she commands him to and says he's nothing without her and his mother (???).
Random jump cuts into sex scenes where he comes off as a gross impotent ineffectual lover like something out of a shitty gross early 2000s comedy. The movie basically shits on Josephine and Napoleon both to the point where it feels like two cuts of two different movies and have been spliced together.
It's like he read a wikipedia blurb that they had a toxic and sometimes tumultuous relationship and made a movie about two random people having a tumultuous relationship and those two people are definitely not the historical figures of Napoleon and Josephine.
And then you have the loads of random blacks spread throughout the movie randomly. The one (1) black general in the French army at the time shows up in the background a lot. He's in all the Egypt scenes which is fair he was there but he shows up multiple times afterwards when in reality he was rotting in a dungeon in Naples (iirc) the entire time those scenes take place.
You can frequently spot a black extra or two in most scenes with lots of people. After his defeat he talks to a group of young sailor boys, one of whom is literally a frizzy haired half black mulatto mutt.
Definitely seconding this recommendation it's a pretty excellent cradle to grave biography in an easily digestible package for beginners.A Chinese opium den wrote: ↑ December 6th, 2023, 22:44If anyone is actually interested in Napoleon, I would highly recomend the book Napoleon: A Life by Andrew Roberts. I came out the other end of reading it convinced I would have probably enlisted in the French imperial army and probably died at 20 for that man, but I wouldn't expect a Hollywood crypto jew to comprehend much less depict anything related to him tastefully.
Last edited by Vergil on December 8th, 2023, 08:11, edited 1 time in total.
- rusty_shackleford
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I don't disagree, I just don't like how a lot of male characters looked very… weird.
And I'm more referring to the 10s/20s I think. I've watched a lot of 30s movies(esp. the Universal monster movies, a favorite of mine), and they don't have the same issue.
Last edited by rusty_shackleford on December 8th, 2023, 08:35, edited 1 time in total.
It's pretty good. Clavier does a pretty good job but it does have a touch of the same issue 2023 has where he looks way too old for the first third or so where he's supposed to be in his mid 20s and clearly isn't. However it's not nearly as bad as Jokerquin Phoenix and his performance is good so it's not as noticeable and by midway through it's not so bad. The rest of the casting is pretty great, I don't think there will ever be a better Josephine on screen than in that series.wndrbr wrote: ↑ December 7th, 2023, 00:44I heard the 2002 miniseries is supposed to be good. Didn't watch it myself because of Christian Clavier. He's a good actor, but each time I see him all I can think of is his character from Les Visiteurs.
Is it the pure phenotypes, now nearly extinct? Or the caked on makeup and fake eyebrows?rusty_shackleford wrote: ↑ December 8th, 2023, 08:33I don't disagree, I just don't like how a lot of male characters looked very… weird.
And I'm more referring to the 10s/20s I think. I've watched a lot of 30s movies(esp. the Universal monster movies, a favorite of mine), and they don't have the same issue.
I'd wager it's probably the makeup. The combination of this still being the real early wild west of cinema coming out of physical theater performances and extra attention being paid to appearance since that's all you were getting back then probably seems really uncanny now. Personally I like it and think it looks interesting.
Most early black and white silent movies were made using blue-sensitive or orthochromatic film. These film stocks were insensitive to red light which meant that, in early black and white movies, reds looked black and natural skin tended to look dark and dirty on the screen. Applying stage make-up in the traditional way proved to be a problem and many screen actors resorted to using bright blue, green and/or yellow make-up to achieve a suitable result.
Studios also used mercury vapor arc lamps that put out blue-green light.
Panchromatic film replaced blue-sensitive film in the late 20's.
Studios also used mercury vapor arc lamps that put out blue-green light.
Panchromatic film replaced blue-sensitive film in the late 20's.
Last edited by Emphyrio on December 8th, 2023, 08:55, edited 2 times in total.
99% of movies today are made for women, wine aunts more specifically.