‘Napoleon’ biopic is absolutely unhinged

Posted on February 3, 2024 by reelentropy
Images courtesy Columbia Pictures.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5.

Napoleon is a fat, slobbering pig of a movie that commands its 158 minutes like the emperor-general himself, taking what it wants when it wants simply because it was there. Absolutely unhinged. Bravo!

That biography you barely remember from ninth grade has left you with all you need to know of the plot. Napoleon Bonaparte (Joaquin Phoenix), a French military officer in the late 1700s, scores several key victories in North Africa. He returns home after the French Revolution to exploit the power vacuum, crowning himself Emperor Napoleon I and proceeding to invade everyone, conquering most of Mainland Europe before being defeated. As punishment, Napoleon was exiled to Elba, a small island off the coast of Italy, then he swims back to France and almost conquers Europe again!

Highlighted snapshots of this narrative are intercut about 50/50 with scenes from Napoleon’s love affair with Joséphine (Vanessa Kirby), his first wife and empress for the first six years of his reign.

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‘Holdovers’ is a beautiful window into an uninteresting past

Posted on January 19, 2024 by reelentropy

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All is true of ‘Saltburn,’ a modern Gothic class-war nightmare

Posted on January 19, 2024 by reelentropy

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Lionsgate packages ‘Hunger Games’ for the ‘Fantastic Beasts’ market, because it that’s been going so well

Posted on January 19, 2024 by reelentropy
Images courtesy Lionsgate Films.

Rating: 1.5 out of 5.

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is a horrendous title. It’s about three times as long as it should be, painful to say and somehow even more embarrassing than a placeholder like “Untitled Hunger Games Prequel” might be. By stretching to incorporate so much of the series’ symbolism, it’s not just inviting you up its own ass, it’s forcefully dragging you there merely for thinking about it.

Also, it’s so close to several perfect titles for what’s really going on here, like Hunger Games: The Snake eats its own Tail or The Ballad of the Dying Business Model.

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Watching, or not, as ‘Marvels’ fail

Posted on January 18, 2024 by reelentropy
Images courtesy Walt Disney Motion Picture Studios.

Rating: 1.5 out of 5.

For the past several years as Disney pivoted toward a streaming-first business model, the company line has been that instead of movies about individual heroes leading into a bigger crossover movie, they’ll have solo TV shows, and every movie will be those crossover-scale cultural events. The Marvels is the first execution on that concept, following up on characters and settings introduced in “WandaVision,” “Ms. Marvel” and “Secret Invasion,” and I’m not watching all that shit.  

This is actually kind of a painful thing, because I want to be the movie guy. I want to be the person you come to with backstory questions, but it’s 16 hours of “content” that’s cheap even by MCU standards, and I’m not doing it. I can’t do it, I have a job and a social life, but more importantly, I won’t do it. I have a shelf full of movies to watch that aren’t “content.” Disney’s explicit aim here is not to make more art, but to waste more of my time, and I’m not going to participate.

Framing this positively, The Marvels is a new experience for me! This is the first MCU movie for which I won’t have seen all the background content. How each installment stands or fails to stand on its own has always been a major issue for the MCU, and that issue is transforming. This superseries is 15 years old now. There are devoted fans who weren’t born when Iron Man came out.

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