what was the last movie you watched?
- Thread starter Folsom Al
- Start date
Watched 65 (Netflix) on a whim. There is an interesting twist in this one, but it really can't help save the movie from itself. Not really giving anything away here (given the trailer and obvious inferences), but you have your standard:
- Dad piloting a ship full of folks in cryostorage
- Ship gets damaged during flight, crash lands on a planet
- Little girl that reminds him of his daughter is the only other survivor
- Have to survive long enough to get to an escape pod that crashed far away
OK.. So these are my favorite movies.. I pick my movies based on whether I can re-watch the movie and still be entertained.
I will have to edit and add things I am missing, because I know I will be..
Top tier Hollywood movies that are my favs.
Joker
The Zodiac
Urban Cowboy
Saturday Night Fever
The Secret of My Success
The Stepfather (most recent version)
Heartbreak Kid
Red Dawn
Boogie Nights
The Postman
Bloodsport
Greyhound
Kiss of Death
Face-Off
Leaving Las Vegas
8mm
Everest
Avengers Infinity War
Avengers End Game
Copland
Casino
Good Fellas
The Ring
The Jackal
Lincoln Lawyer
You Got Mail
Waiting
Lost Boys
License to Drive
Doc Hollywood
Natural Born Killers
Showgirls
13 Hours Secret Soldiers of Benghazi
Just one of the Guys
Colors
Bug
Shot Caller
Imperium
Cloak and Dagger
Death Sentence
Death Wish (new one with Bruce Willis)
Gotcha
Boys Don't Cry
Ed Wood
Edge of Tomorrow
Middle Men
The Founder
Kids
Bully (the one with Brad Renfro from 2001)
Robocop 2
Man on the Moon
The Thin Red Line
Napoleon Dynamite
Suicide Squad 2
Teen Wolf
Pain and Gain
A Christmas Story
Knowing
What's Eating Gilbert Grape
Kalifornia
Vacation (2017 version, 1983 version and the Euro Vacation in 1985)
Monster
Summer Rental
Dunkirk
Cap America Civil War
Wolf of Wall Street
Interstellar
Stuck on You
Now I am sure there will be more added to my favorite movies I have seen 100 times each... I might have said the same one twice too lol.
Here are some that are B-movies which I LOVE
Class of 1999
Bullet (Mickey Rourke and Tupac)
RIFFTRAX (Miami Connection)
RIFFTRAX (Birdemic)
R.O.T.O.R. (either the rifftrax version or regular version)
RIFFTRAX (Cool as Ice)
Stepfather 3 (from early 90s)
I will keep adding as I go.. But all of these are my favorite movies I seen 50-100 times. During the pandemic, I watched a LOT of movies!!! There are some that are AWESOME movies, but I don't re-watch very often like Dances with Wolves, Platoon, Saving Private Ryan, The Patriot (Mel Gibson not the Steven Seagal one), Braveheart and many others... You might wonder if I like a B movie over a movie like Saving Private Ryan... Hell yes, Class of 1999 is a better movie to me than Platoon based on wanting to re-watch it. weird eh?
I will have to edit and add things I am missing, because I know I will be..
Top tier Hollywood movies that are my favs.
Joker
The Zodiac
Urban Cowboy
Saturday Night Fever
The Secret of My Success
The Stepfather (most recent version)
Heartbreak Kid
Red Dawn
Boogie Nights
The Postman
Bloodsport
Greyhound
Kiss of Death
Face-Off
Leaving Las Vegas
8mm
Everest
Avengers Infinity War
Avengers End Game
Copland
Casino
Good Fellas
The Ring
The Jackal
Lincoln Lawyer
You Got Mail
Waiting
Lost Boys
License to Drive
Doc Hollywood
Natural Born Killers
Showgirls
13 Hours Secret Soldiers of Benghazi
Just one of the Guys
Colors
Bug
Shot Caller
Imperium
Cloak and Dagger
Death Sentence
Death Wish (new one with Bruce Willis)
Gotcha
Boys Don't Cry
Ed Wood
Edge of Tomorrow
Middle Men
The Founder
Kids
Bully (the one with Brad Renfro from 2001)
Robocop 2
Man on the Moon
The Thin Red Line
Napoleon Dynamite
Suicide Squad 2
Teen Wolf
Pain and Gain
A Christmas Story
Knowing
What's Eating Gilbert Grape
Kalifornia
Vacation (2017 version, 1983 version and the Euro Vacation in 1985)
Monster
Summer Rental
Dunkirk
Cap America Civil War
Wolf of Wall Street
Interstellar
Stuck on You
Now I am sure there will be more added to my favorite movies I have seen 100 times each... I might have said the same one twice too lol.
Here are some that are B-movies which I LOVE
Class of 1999
Bullet (Mickey Rourke and Tupac)
RIFFTRAX (Miami Connection)
RIFFTRAX (Birdemic)
R.O.T.O.R. (either the rifftrax version or regular version)
RIFFTRAX (Cool as Ice)
Stepfather 3 (from early 90s)
I will keep adding as I go.. But all of these are my favorite movies I seen 50-100 times. During the pandemic, I watched a LOT of movies!!! There are some that are AWESOME movies, but I don't re-watch very often like Dances with Wolves, Platoon, Saving Private Ryan, The Patriot (Mel Gibson not the Steven Seagal one), Braveheart and many others... You might wonder if I like a B movie over a movie like Saving Private Ryan... Hell yes, Class of 1999 is a better movie to me than Platoon based on wanting to re-watch it. weird eh?
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Meant to respond to this much earlier (read: when it was still relevant), but the dog days of August have been something of a lady dog to me and my family of late. So, apologies.
That said, pulled off the Barbenheimer double feature on release weekend. My wife and I hadn't been to a movie theater together for a new release since Parasite in February 2020. After a 5 hour marathon session, she says she's off the hook for another 3 years.
Overall I thought both were good, maybe even great, but were missing a certain <je na sais quoi> that would have me raving with mouth-foaming vigor as I did for Parasite and Everything Everywhere All At Once.
Barbie was admirably ambitious, with extraordinary wardrobe and set design, loads of clever writing and witty dialogue, pitch perfect leads (Robbie and Gosling deserve their accolades), several large and challenging themes that don't often reach a mainstream summer blockbuster audience, and an honest and unrestrained exploration and examination of a character and brand that is basically ubiquitous to the point of seeming shallow.
There are those who have qualms, to put it mildly, with the political commentary and satire and I'm not drudging up those radioactive warheads from a month ago. But one point I thought Gerwig illustrated beautifully that's really stuck with me: While people accuse Barbie of setting an expectation and standard regular people can never reach, those same people are guilty of setting an expectation and standard for Barbie a regular doll could never reach.
Glass houses, stones, I know you are but what am I, all that.
Still, I thought the pacing was uneven (moves really swiftly, even a little frantically to start, then drags toward the finish line for the final 40 minutes) not a fan of Will Ferrell and the cartoonish Mattel evil/not evil board of directors (although I think I see what Gerwig was going for, didn't quite hit for me), the main political and social commentary is more told, than shown, hitting the audience over the head with it (Gerwig at one point turns this into a self-referential joke seconds later, which was suave), and it didn't take the more sobering and grounded turn I anticipated given the "Movie Church" list - the closest being when Barbie experiences the complexity of real human emotion for the first time while sitting on a Venice Beach bus bench, and Gerwig said that nearly ended up on the cutting room floor.
Maybe that's me setting unrealistic expectations. Touche, Greta. #916ForLife
Nolan was at it again in Oppenheimer messing around with non-linear storytelling. It's like Tarantino's foot fetish; Nolan gets a weird thrill screwing with time.
Creates a jarring start to Oppenheimer as it rolls out three narratives in separate time periods simultaneously, edited to weave into and reference each other. If that wasn't complex enough, one is in black and white (because is isn't from Oppenheimer's perspective ... took me embarrassingly long to discover that) and another kicks off as young Oppenheimer stares into rain drops. Could take a bit to set your barrings.
Editing can be rather sharp, abrupt, and snappy - something in the vein of a, mercifully, toned down Elvis (2022) - and I remember thinking "I guess this is just how historical biopics are gonna be now" - but in truth, it works in establishing a fluid and efficient energy carrying you through 3 hours of dense history, science jargon, and about 1000 minor characters. At least until the main narrative, and probably the reason you bought the ticket - the Manhattan Project - ends, and you're left with 40 minutes of the other two.
Cillian Murphy really embodies the brilliant but haunted Oppenheimer and carries most of the runtime, with a heavily make-uped Robert Downey Jr. drawing focus for the third story line. I also enjoyed Matt Damon's turn as General Matt Damon, offering a fiery friendly foil to Murphy's Oppenheimer. Emily Blunt's been receiving a lot of praise as Oppenheimer's alcoholic wife, but aside from a very late scene when her character pulls out a savage uno reverse card on a crooked government lawyer - which frankly comes out of nowhere and is ultimately meaningless - she's really relegated to the background as little more than a nuisance to that point. If you like Florence Pugh you'll see a lot of her, just not in screen time*. Her character could have used more development, but that would have taken away time from men sitting in rooms arguing about atoms and commies.
I kid, but that's what Oppenheimer is - a political drama in the spirit of All The President's Men (1976) and Seven Days in May (1964) - and a very good one at that. When I saw Downey Jr. in his black and white scenes talking 1960s HUAC politics, I immediately thought it was a nod toward Good Night, and Good Luck (2005). Making a movie almost entirely about people talking, and making that engaging for 3 hours, is incredibly difficult to do. But I think Nolan mostly succeeds.
My lone disappointment with Oppenheimer the film that keeps it from entering the wildly rave tier, is that Oppenheimer the man's haunting conflicted guilt is what makes him so compelling a subject. The film touches on it with screen shaking panic attacks, subverting a scene of a cheering crowd by overlaying screams of agony instead of adulation, an ash corpse here, a face melt there, but it's honestly minor, and in my opinion, insufficient.
That's not to say I expected a condemnation or assault on the man. It's that I have watched Oppenheimer's 1965 interview in which he describes his feelings when the Trinity test was successful, and the now infamous phrase he uttered to himself, dozens of times. The early television static mixed with the pauses and flat affect as he stares forward wiping away a single tear, and says "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." That has never failed to give me chills. I was hoping, if not expecting, for those feelings to crop up during any minute from the 3 hours of Oppenheimer, and it just didn't happen.
This was an important movie. It was a good, maybe even great movie. And it was a really compelling expose on a fascinating man and immensely consequential time in history. I'm glad I saw it. I'm thankful it was made. And I'm thrilled people are flocking to theaters to see non-typical summer films and making them blockbusters (even if Nolan has always been a big audience draw, and Gerwig kills it on the mainstream awards recognition front).
But selfishly and perhaps unjustly, I think I wanted more. I wanted Barbie to be even more subversive and really bust some heads, with a whole movie of Barbie discovering complex emotions at a bus stop. And I wanted Oppenheimer to give me those same haunting chills the first time I heard "I am become death" and the first time I saw in person this:
Genbaku Dome, Hiroshima, Japan (2018)
There I go again with unfairly high expectations. Far too much to ask for a pair of 21st century summer movies. But you know what Barbenheimer, you were both two giant steps in the right direction.
Thanks for saving cinema.
* I did not expect the first utterance of the infamous "I am become death" quote to be during a sex scene. I'm betting that wasn't in Oppenheimer's memoirs.
That said, pulled off the Barbenheimer double feature on release weekend. My wife and I hadn't been to a movie theater together for a new release since Parasite in February 2020. After a 5 hour marathon session, she says she's off the hook for another 3 years.
Overall I thought both were good, maybe even great, but were missing a certain <je na sais quoi> that would have me raving with mouth-foaming vigor as I did for Parasite and Everything Everywhere All At Once.
Barbie was admirably ambitious, with extraordinary wardrobe and set design, loads of clever writing and witty dialogue, pitch perfect leads (Robbie and Gosling deserve their accolades), several large and challenging themes that don't often reach a mainstream summer blockbuster audience, and an honest and unrestrained exploration and examination of a character and brand that is basically ubiquitous to the point of seeming shallow.
There are those who have qualms, to put it mildly, with the political commentary and satire and I'm not drudging up those radioactive warheads from a month ago. But one point I thought Gerwig illustrated beautifully that's really stuck with me: While people accuse Barbie of setting an expectation and standard regular people can never reach, those same people are guilty of setting an expectation and standard for Barbie a regular doll could never reach.
Glass houses, stones, I know you are but what am I, all that.
Still, I thought the pacing was uneven (moves really swiftly, even a little frantically to start, then drags toward the finish line for the final 40 minutes) not a fan of Will Ferrell and the cartoonish Mattel evil/not evil board of directors (although I think I see what Gerwig was going for, didn't quite hit for me), the main political and social commentary is more told, than shown, hitting the audience over the head with it (Gerwig at one point turns this into a self-referential joke seconds later, which was suave), and it didn't take the more sobering and grounded turn I anticipated given the "Movie Church" list - the closest being when Barbie experiences the complexity of real human emotion for the first time while sitting on a Venice Beach bus bench, and Gerwig said that nearly ended up on the cutting room floor.
Maybe that's me setting unrealistic expectations. Touche, Greta. #916ForLife
Nolan was at it again in Oppenheimer messing around with non-linear storytelling. It's like Tarantino's foot fetish; Nolan gets a weird thrill screwing with time.
Creates a jarring start to Oppenheimer as it rolls out three narratives in separate time periods simultaneously, edited to weave into and reference each other. If that wasn't complex enough, one is in black and white (because is isn't from Oppenheimer's perspective ... took me embarrassingly long to discover that) and another kicks off as young Oppenheimer stares into rain drops. Could take a bit to set your barrings.
Editing can be rather sharp, abrupt, and snappy - something in the vein of a, mercifully, toned down Elvis (2022) - and I remember thinking "I guess this is just how historical biopics are gonna be now" - but in truth, it works in establishing a fluid and efficient energy carrying you through 3 hours of dense history, science jargon, and about 1000 minor characters. At least until the main narrative, and probably the reason you bought the ticket - the Manhattan Project - ends, and you're left with 40 minutes of the other two.
Cillian Murphy really embodies the brilliant but haunted Oppenheimer and carries most of the runtime, with a heavily make-uped Robert Downey Jr. drawing focus for the third story line. I also enjoyed Matt Damon's turn as General Matt Damon, offering a fiery friendly foil to Murphy's Oppenheimer. Emily Blunt's been receiving a lot of praise as Oppenheimer's alcoholic wife, but aside from a very late scene when her character pulls out a savage uno reverse card on a crooked government lawyer - which frankly comes out of nowhere and is ultimately meaningless - she's really relegated to the background as little more than a nuisance to that point. If you like Florence Pugh you'll see a lot of her, just not in screen time*. Her character could have used more development, but that would have taken away time from men sitting in rooms arguing about atoms and commies.
I kid, but that's what Oppenheimer is - a political drama in the spirit of All The President's Men (1976) and Seven Days in May (1964) - and a very good one at that. When I saw Downey Jr. in his black and white scenes talking 1960s HUAC politics, I immediately thought it was a nod toward Good Night, and Good Luck (2005). Making a movie almost entirely about people talking, and making that engaging for 3 hours, is incredibly difficult to do. But I think Nolan mostly succeeds.
My lone disappointment with Oppenheimer the film that keeps it from entering the wildly rave tier, is that Oppenheimer the man's haunting conflicted guilt is what makes him so compelling a subject. The film touches on it with screen shaking panic attacks, subverting a scene of a cheering crowd by overlaying screams of agony instead of adulation, an ash corpse here, a face melt there, but it's honestly minor, and in my opinion, insufficient.
That's not to say I expected a condemnation or assault on the man. It's that I have watched Oppenheimer's 1965 interview in which he describes his feelings when the Trinity test was successful, and the now infamous phrase he uttered to himself, dozens of times. The early television static mixed with the pauses and flat affect as he stares forward wiping away a single tear, and says "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." That has never failed to give me chills. I was hoping, if not expecting, for those feelings to crop up during any minute from the 3 hours of Oppenheimer, and it just didn't happen.
This was an important movie. It was a good, maybe even great movie. And it was a really compelling expose on a fascinating man and immensely consequential time in history. I'm glad I saw it. I'm thankful it was made. And I'm thrilled people are flocking to theaters to see non-typical summer films and making them blockbusters (even if Nolan has always been a big audience draw, and Gerwig kills it on the mainstream awards recognition front).
But selfishly and perhaps unjustly, I think I wanted more. I wanted Barbie to be even more subversive and really bust some heads, with a whole movie of Barbie discovering complex emotions at a bus stop. And I wanted Oppenheimer to give me those same haunting chills the first time I heard "I am become death" and the first time I saw in person this:
Genbaku Dome, Hiroshima, Japan (2018)
There I go again with unfairly high expectations. Far too much to ask for a pair of 21st century summer movies. But you know what Barbenheimer, you were both two giant steps in the right direction.
Thanks for saving cinema.
* I did not expect the first utterance of the infamous "I am become death" quote to be during a sex scene. I'm betting that wasn't in Oppenheimer's memoirs.
I am all about science, and am all about the early nuke tests and stuff.. I did NOT like Oppenheimer. At all.. Like, I have a copy of it and I had already deleted it. I think I deleted it because I already knew the story, and have researched it for years. I love Robert Downey Jr. but I did not like Oppenheimer.
OK for movie night.. Two movies... You know the show on FX "What We Do in the Shadows"? Well there is a movie version before the show that was done by the "Flight of the Conchords" creators and it's freaking funny as hell.. I saw it a long time ago, but watched it again recently.. Still holds up and is funny as all hell.
THE ENDLESS... Another which I had wanted to watch a long time ago but forgot all about it until I saw the "Three second time loop" part in a youtube video a couple days ago and it reminded me to watch this.. "The Endless" was made in 2017 or 2018. It's really hard to explain what it's about, but two brothers used to belong to this "cult" (cult depending on who you talk to), and they both left when they were children. They came back and the people are supposedly older by about 20-25 years but look the same. There is weird stuff throughout the movie, and OMG I was amazed... You need to watch it. ASAP.. It moves slow, but it is letting you know what's going on only a little at a time. Watch it...
THE ENDLESS... Another which I had wanted to watch a long time ago but forgot all about it until I saw the "Three second time loop" part in a youtube video a couple days ago and it reminded me to watch this.. "The Endless" was made in 2017 or 2018. It's really hard to explain what it's about, but two brothers used to belong to this "cult" (cult depending on who you talk to), and they both left when they were children. They came back and the people are supposedly older by about 20-25 years but look the same. There is weird stuff throughout the movie, and OMG I was amazed... You need to watch it. ASAP.. It moves slow, but it is letting you know what's going on only a little at a time. Watch it...
I watched Play Misty For Me, a Clint Eastwood movie in which he plays a radio DJ that is stalked by an obsessed listener. It's very similar to Fatal Attraction. It was made in '71 and I kept catching myself appreciating how things used to be made. Eastwood wrote, directed, and stared in this one and it was very good.
Been trying to get through the entire Bond series this year. Last night I watched The Living Daylights. It's taken a lot of hard work watching all of these old Bond movies to get to this point. This one has a pretty grimey fight scene of the Jason Bourne variety; The two men use every kitchen appliance imaginable to try to kill each other. Has a nice theme song that got stuck in my head. I like Timothy Dalton as Bond, better than Pierce Brosnan and damn sure better than aging Roger Moore. I'm starting to see actors, particularly villains, that I have seen in multiple movies that are newer than this one. I'd say this one was in the better half of the Bond movies.
Dad wanted to check out The Creator last night at the theater, so we went. Visually great, with various tidbits or pieces or "atmosphere/feel" that could be drawn from Blade Runner, Star Wars, and Avatar, among others, and a somewhat interesting (but also somewhat predictable) story, but it never seemed to just "put it all together" as well as it should have.
There are tidbits in there that are just head scratching (spoilered just in case anyone wants to go see it) - probably why it felt "off":
There are tidbits in there that are just head scratching (spoilered just in case anyone wants to go see it) - probably why it felt "off":
Stuff like:
- Robots that sleep - like, why??? Recharge, yes - but you don't need to close your eyes and sleep in a hammock / bed as a robot.
- Robots doing human-type drugs?
- Robots you can easily turn off with a switch at the neck, apparently
- a sky/space based superweapon that shows a targeting reticle vertically downward (cool effect) to target things to hit with very powerful rockets (firing vertically downward), but later in the movie they launch the same missiles and they start flying across continents instead - so why the complex targeting reticle sequence if they already know where these bases are and can launch from basically anywhere?
- Complex AI communities have weapons, etc., but no air-to-air missiles or other weapons to protect themselves from the military's flying superweapon?
- It seemed like things were often glossed over or given no real attention or were very inconsistent - military vehicles showing up out of nowhere, being able to track people or robots through cities, etc., yet not being able to see them at transportation checkpoints, people you think are dead as they were involved in a massive explosion or airship crashing and they are still alive later, stuff like that
- an ending sequence involving a massive super-tank thing (reminds me of something that you would see from the military in Avatar) that just didn't really seem to be necessary or serve a specific purpose other than "shock and awe" - but wasn't that also what your super-duper sky/space weapon is for?
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My wife and I went to see The Marvels in the theater last night and both enjoyed it. Not a great movie by any means, but entertaining and fun. It is shorter and "breezier" than many of the other Marvel flicks. I thought they overplayed Brie Larson's bit just a tad in a couple of spots, but not a big deal overall.
The one part of the movie a good friend of mine didn't like was my wife's favorite part.
Wait for the one mid-credit scene.
The one part of the movie a good friend of mine didn't like was my wife's favorite part.
I'll just say my wife is a fan of Glee and singing shows and leave it at that.
Wait for the one mid-credit scene.
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I hadn't been to a movie theater in awhile but I went to see Napoleon after work yesterday and found it to be a pleasant surprise. I expected epic action scenes and Joaquín Phoenix mumbling through corny dialog in his inimitable style and both are here in abundance. The staging of Austerlitz in particular (which features heavily in the trailer) is visually masterful and recalls the best moments of Ridley Scott's past work. I'll get to Phoenix's portrayal a little later...
What I did not expect was a surprisingly modern tone that dabbles in juxtaposition and swerves deliberately into farce (I was reminded in places of Yorgos Lathimos' The Favourite) yet somehow manages to humanize a man who has often been treated with a curious degree of historical reverence in his native France considering he used a populist uprising to seize power for himself and kicked off a chain of events which would lead to all out war in Europe and nearly 20 million dead a century later.
It's not uncommon for Ridley Scott's movies to sail over the heads of both critics and audiences. The ironic thing here is that Sir Ridley is going to take a lot of flak for refusing to lionize a brilliantly successful historical figure, choosing instead to focus on Napoleon's relationship with Josephine (drawn, it should be noted, from his own letters) while in the past he was criticized for doing exactly that with his idealized portrayal of Christopher Columbus in 1492: Conquest of Paradise. Only with Gladiator in 2000 did he manage to land the historical epic that people wanted at exactly the time that they wanted it.
Today, in 2023, Ridley is widely seen as the historical epic director and when you make a movie in your mid 80s a stodgy classicist approach is what people expect. The advertising department at (checks notes) Apple Studios
did the movie no favors by cutting together an ad campaign that promises Gladiator scale thrills and portent. And maybe that's what we will get in the 4 hour Apple Streaming exclusive version. I can only comment on the version I have seen which is a briskly paced, slyly humorous tragedy about the perils of ambition.
Most of the commentary on this movie has focused on Joaquin Phoenix being wrong for the lead role. I couldn't disagree more. He plays Napoleon as a socially awkward misfit whose obsessive genius for military strategy (more precisely, where to point his big guns) might today be viewed as evidence of Autism Spectrum Disorder. Is this a historically accurate portrayal? I have no idea. Is it considerably more interesting than a more conventional approach to the role? You bet.
Such is the nature of art that even 400 years after his death the romantic poeticism of William Shakespeare's Elizabethan-era court drama remains the de rigeur style for dramatizing the past. We expect our historical figures to strut across the stage/screen speaking with wit and irony, commanding respect, and earning their place in history as great men and women worthy of reverence. Ridley Scott's Napoleon is not interested in any of that and while the joke will be "what do you expect when you have an Englishman make a movie about Napoleon Bonaparte" -- the more cogent assessment is that Sir Ridley has, against all odds, chosen to make a movie which tells the story of one of France's great heroes in the irreverent language of France's great filmmakers and were it not for the inconvenient fact that he is not himself French, the resulting film might have become the definitive interpretation of our day.
So while this might not be the Napoleon movie anyone was asking for in 2023, is it actually good? I think so. Maybe even great. Will it eventually find its audience? As is often the case with Ridley, only time will tell.
What I did not expect was a surprisingly modern tone that dabbles in juxtaposition and swerves deliberately into farce (I was reminded in places of Yorgos Lathimos' The Favourite) yet somehow manages to humanize a man who has often been treated with a curious degree of historical reverence in his native France considering he used a populist uprising to seize power for himself and kicked off a chain of events which would lead to all out war in Europe and nearly 20 million dead a century later.
It's not uncommon for Ridley Scott's movies to sail over the heads of both critics and audiences. The ironic thing here is that Sir Ridley is going to take a lot of flak for refusing to lionize a brilliantly successful historical figure, choosing instead to focus on Napoleon's relationship with Josephine (drawn, it should be noted, from his own letters) while in the past he was criticized for doing exactly that with his idealized portrayal of Christopher Columbus in 1492: Conquest of Paradise. Only with Gladiator in 2000 did he manage to land the historical epic that people wanted at exactly the time that they wanted it.
Today, in 2023, Ridley is widely seen as the historical epic director and when you make a movie in your mid 80s a stodgy classicist approach is what people expect. The advertising department at (checks notes) Apple Studios
did the movie no favors by cutting together an ad campaign that promises Gladiator scale thrills and portent. And maybe that's what we will get in the 4 hour Apple Streaming exclusive version. I can only comment on the version I have seen which is a briskly paced, slyly humorous tragedy about the perils of ambition.Most of the commentary on this movie has focused on Joaquin Phoenix being wrong for the lead role. I couldn't disagree more. He plays Napoleon as a socially awkward misfit whose obsessive genius for military strategy (more precisely, where to point his big guns) might today be viewed as evidence of Autism Spectrum Disorder. Is this a historically accurate portrayal? I have no idea. Is it considerably more interesting than a more conventional approach to the role? You bet.
Such is the nature of art that even 400 years after his death the romantic poeticism of William Shakespeare's Elizabethan-era court drama remains the de rigeur style for dramatizing the past. We expect our historical figures to strut across the stage/screen speaking with wit and irony, commanding respect, and earning their place in history as great men and women worthy of reverence. Ridley Scott's Napoleon is not interested in any of that and while the joke will be "what do you expect when you have an Englishman make a movie about Napoleon Bonaparte" -- the more cogent assessment is that Sir Ridley has, against all odds, chosen to make a movie which tells the story of one of France's great heroes in the irreverent language of France's great filmmakers and were it not for the inconvenient fact that he is not himself French, the resulting film might have become the definitive interpretation of our day.
So while this might not be the Napoleon movie anyone was asking for in 2023, is it actually good? I think so. Maybe even great. Will it eventually find its audience? As is often the case with Ridley, only time will tell.
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