Ridley Scott's Napoleon

[Zorral]

3 hours ago, The Grey Wolf Strikes Back said:

The Last Duel takes place in 1386 during the Hundred Years War, which is four centuries before Napoleon's time.

However, The Duellists (1977) is set in the Napoleonic era. Like The Last Duel and Napoleon, and others too, surely, it's men being silly with violence over Issues.

[williamjm]

5 hours ago, Loge said:

Deadline Hollywood claims that the movie "exceeded expectations." Apparently, those expectations were pretty low as far as box office revenue is concerned.

It's probably difficult to know what the expectations are for historical epics now given how rare they seem to be. It has already made more than twice what The Last Duel did.

[Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II]

6 hours ago, The Grey Wolf Strikes Back said:

The Last Duel takes place in 1386 during the Hundred Years War, which is four centuries before Napoleon's time.

Sorry meant to say duellists and napoleon being set in the same time.

[The Grey Wolf Strikes Back]

1 minute ago, Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II said:

Sorry meant to say duellists and napoleon being set in the same time.

NP!

Edited November 28, 2023 by The Grey Wolf Strikes Back

[polishgenius]

5 hours ago, williamjm said:

It's probably difficult to know what the expectations are for historical epics now given how rare they seem to be. It has already made more than twice what The Last Duel did.

 

It's not even necessarily the historical epic thing so much as the Apple TV thing. Even though on this occasion I don't think they have clarified a release date, people aren't going to go to see it as much if it's known to be made for a streamer and coming out soon. It's the same thing as Killers of the Flower Moon- which isn't being considered a flop generally, despite grossing 150mil on a 200mil budget. 

[Loge]

13 hours ago, williamjm said:

It's probably difficult to know what the expectations are for historical epics now given how rare they seem to be. It has already made more than twice what The Last Duel did.

Normally you expect a movie to at least break even on the production budget plus other cost. By a common rule of thumb that required a revenue of three times the production budget. Napoleon had a budget of 200 million, which would require about 600 million at the box office. So, if normal economics applied, it would be an epic flop. But as it was produced by Apple for streaming, the box office isn't that important.

[kissdbyfire]

On 11/24/2023 at 11:28 AM, Zorral said:

The very idea that Marcus Aurelius was concerned with restoring the Republic after all those centuries!  Stirrups! Riding a single horse all the way from wherever on the other side of the Alps to Hispania!  In a couple of days! 

This popped up on my YT and I remembered reading this exchange between you and @IlyaP.

 

[Zorral]

1 hour ago, kissdbyfire said:

This popped up on my YT

Hey, it's the movies and only entertainment, which we All Know, has no effect on Real Life thinking at all, so we don't care.  And neither should historians, or anyone who Actually Knows.  After all the director isn't even Just Like A General fighting a battle, he's (and almost always HE) Gawd too. Because movies and tv are far more important, for far more influential and believed in by more people than believe in Gawd.  Ha!

Edited November 28, 2023 by Zorral

[kissdbyfire]

7 minutes ago, Zorral said:

Hey, it's the movies and only entertainment, which we All Know, has no effect on Real Life thinking at all, so we don't care.  And neither should historians, or anyone who Actually Knows.  After all the director isn't even Just Like A General fighting a battle, he's (and almost always HE) Gawd too. Because movies and tv are far more important, for far more influential and believed in by more people than believe in Gawd.  Ha!

I love how he goes, " how do you effing know, you weren't there". The historian's reply is so much better though.

[IlyaP]

24 minutes ago, kissdbyfire said:

I love how he goes, " how do you effing know, you weren't there". The historian's reply is so much better though.

And on *cringe* Sky News, no less! That surprised me! (Sky News, over here, at least, is noxious extreme right-wing drivel.)

[Zorral]

This take on how language is depicted in Napoleon is thought provoking, or at least interesting, at least, perhaps, to a US viewer.

The French Are Not Happy About “Napoleon”
An English-speaking Bonaparte has provoked a surreal cultural dislocation and some unintended comedy among French audiences.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-french-are-not-happy-about-napoleon

Quote

 

.... But most of the arguments against “Napoleon” were about language in another way, and more nettled. “The film is not troubled by the fact that these two . . . warring factions speak the same language (English), which never ceases to feel odd,” a film critic at Le Monde wrote. “Directed by a Briton who has long reigned over Hollywood, Napoleon is a film that essentially reminds us that the Empire has changed hands since Waterloo.” (With that slightly gnomic formula, the critic means that Hollywood runs the world as once the French did.) One can, to be sure, only imagine how Americans would feel seeing a wildly expensive and elaborate movie made about the life of Abraham Lincoln with Gérard Depardieu in the lead, and with wartime Washington perfectly realized and Gettysburg thrillingly re-created, but with everyone from bedroom to battlefield muttering and roaring in guttural French and using idiomatic French expressions to summon up the American ones—“Ah, alors!,” “Sacré bleu,” “Monsieur le President,” and so on. Such a film would convey the surreal cultural dislocation, not to mention unintended comedy, that “Napoleon” provokes in native French speakers. This is not so much a vexed issue of cultural appropriation as a more straightforward one of comic incongruity. Though languages do not, in truth, enclose singular domains of meaning, there are still patterns of behavior, ways of addressing the world, acculturated norms of discourse and style, that affect all members of a linguistic practice.

To take one subtle and circular example, the French aristocrats in “Napoleon” are played mostly by English actors affecting upper-crust English accents that rather betray the equivalent speech pattern in French, which is not clipped and reserved but sonorous and rhetorically sinuous. (The foreign minister Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand would not hesitate to orate at his emperor, rather than interrogate him politely, as he does here.) That rhetorical tone of French conversation—still dominant now, and overwhelming in the very rhetorical early nineteenth century—is dislodged by the clipped manner of those Brits, not to mention the Method-y pauses and mumblings with which Phoenix works, in a style that is eerily Brando-esque. (Who also once undertook to play Napoleon.)

But this means that, when an actual British upper-cruster, in this case the Duke of Wellington, played by Rupert Everett, appears, he has to go way over the top in order to distinguish himself from the clipped Brits playing the French. He has to become a kind of outrageous caricature of English upper-crustness, all snorts and sneers, so that (this is the circular bit) he ends up performing exactly like the horse-faced and humorless Brits traditionally caricatured by the French, as in, for instance, the Astérix comics. ....

 

 

[kissdbyfire]

28 minutes ago, Zorral said:

This take on how language is depicted in Napoleon is thought provoking, or at least interesting, at least, perhaps, to a US viewer.

The French Are Not Happy About “Napoleon”
An English-speaking Bonaparte has provoked a surreal cultural dislocation and some unintended comedy among French audiences.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-french-are-not-happy-about-napoleon

 

Is it wrong that I now want to watch Depardieu playing Lincoln and yelling "sacré bleu!"?

[Myrddin]

Have the French produced an epic movie around Napoleon?

 

A quick google just showed me that Napoleon and Me was made in 2006. And more importantly, I somehow missed seeing a Monica Bellucci film. brb

[IlyaP]

2 hours ago, kissdbyfire said:

Is it wrong that I now want to watch Depardieu playing Lincoln and yelling "sacré bleu!"?

I now want Napoleon saying " This sitch is heckin leet bruh! Gotta have much rizz to be emperor!"

[Zorral]

3 hours ago, Myrddin said:

Have the French produced an epic movie around Napoleon?

 

A quick google just showed me that Napoleon and Me was made in 2006. And more importantly, I somehow missed seeing a Monica Bellucci film. brb

French  television has produced some very good scripted drama series around Napoleon.

I love Napoléon, adapted from a biography by Max Gallo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoléon_(miniseries)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0253839/

I can never encounter Talleyrand's name now without visualizing him as Malkovich played him.  Yes, it has battles.

 

[Heartofice]

Have to say I thought this movie was pretty bad actually.

Its like a 3 hour highlight reel for a very good multi season HBO show. It feels very much like a collection of epic scenes and moments.. with almost no connective tissue between them. 
 

There is this guy, Napoleon in it, but by the end I still don’t know anything about him, what his personality is, what motivates him, why he does what he does. I figured he loves Josephine but it’s not clear why, just does ok!

Then a bunch of stuff happens, and the stuff is pretty to look at. But it’s never really explained why stuff happens.. it just.. is. 
 

Im hoping that, like Kingdom of Heaven the theatrical release is total garbage but the directors cut fixes everything. I feel there needs to be another 3 hours of material to flesh this movie out however 

[IlyaP]

6 hours ago, Zorral said:

This take on how language is depicted in Napoleon is thought provoking, or at least interesting, at least, perhaps, to a US viewer.

Reminds me of many, many feelings I had when watching Enemy at the Gates, as I screamed internally.

[Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II]

1 hour ago, Heartofice said:

Have to say I thought this movie was pretty bad actually.

Its like a 3 hour highlight reel for a very good multi season HBO show. It feels very much like a collection of epic scenes and moments.. with almost no connective tissue between them. 
 

There is this guy, Napoleon in it, but by the end I still don’t know anything about him, what his personality is, what motivates him, why he does what he does. I figured he loves Josephine but it’s not clear why, just does ok!

Then a bunch of stuff happens, and the stuff is pretty to look at. But it’s never really explained why stuff happens.. it just.. is. 
 

Im hoping that, like Kingdom of Heaven the theatrical release is total garbage but the directors cut fixes everything. I feel there needs to be another 3 hours of material to flesh this movie out however 

Totally agree, also l like Phoenix but he was badly miscast for this one.He’s a better Commodus than Napoleon.

[Heartofice]

6 hours ago, Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II said:

Totally agree, also l like Phoenix but he was badly miscast for this one.He’s a better Commodus than Napoleon.

I don’t know what to make of his performance, it just seemed to be all over the place. I never got the sense of what type of character he was attempting to play 

[Veltigar]

13 hours ago, Heartofice said:

Have to say I thought this movie was pretty bad actually.

Its like a 3 hour highlight reel for a very good multi season HBO show. It feels very much like a collection of epic scenes and moments.. with almost no connective tissue between them. 
 

There is this guy, Napoleon in it, but by the end I still don’t know anything about him, what his personality is, what motivates him, why he does what he does. I figured he loves Josephine but it’s not clear why, just does ok!

Then a bunch of stuff happens, and the stuff is pretty to look at. But it’s never really explained why stuff happens.. it just.. is. 
 

Im hoping that, like Kingdom of Heaven the theatrical release is total garbage but the directors cut fixes everything. I feel there needs to be another 3 hours of material to flesh this movie out however 

I don't think it's possible to save this train wreck.