omg I was watching the ridley scott napoleon recently what an ASS movie. I thought it'd be ass so I read a script online first which seemed awful but fun Enough in certain ways (it invented baffling yaoiful shots with barras in the first 30 minutes. constantly in his personal space) and completely ridiculous in writing but the film... cut out anything that might have redeemed it... terrible. the 1927 napoleon on the other hand is great and every day I thank wikipedia for having it for me
i have still not seen it fully, i just dont think im strong enough for all of that based on what scenes i have seen + ridley scott's god-awful attitude towards historians... it's absolutely normal for artists to draw inspiration from history and distort it more or less for artistic purposes, but 1) that doesn't mean we should have disdain for historians, whose work is what allows us to be inspired by history in the first place, so let us not be ingrates 2) taking a really interesting part of history and making it boring, and worse, and cliché, not something to be proud of my friend. it's such a shame, cause i have liked ridley scott movies, i love the idea of joaquin phoenix as napoléon, and with such a budget, we could have had theee most amazing depiction of austerlitz, of the siege of toulon, of vendémiaire, so on. all these moments i struggle to picture because they're on such huge scales. i did like the scene of brumaire well enough, although they downplay how incompetent and goofy napoléon was, if anything
but like you said, our friend abel gance gave us the only napoléon movie that matters :-) and that is a movie that takes a lot of liberty from real history (as it was known then), like by having saint-just deliver his final speech entirely when in real life he was interrupted right at the beginning, adding the force ghosts of the jacobins, and i dont think napoléon had a teenage girl stalker in his house. but i dont mind them cause abel gance clearly cared about the topic passionately, and these are all respectable artistic choices, cause abel gance was an artist with a vision. it's such a stunning, gorgeous movie!
i was skeptical of the 40 year old director casting himself as 26 year old saint-just, but he was so charming actually. possible one of my favorite fictional saint-just, which actually doesn't mean a lot cause he's mostly reduced to robespierre's cute sidekick or turned into an evil, charisma deprived petty tyrant child. at least abel gance has presence! i also really love the actor who plays napoléon himself, plus the stalker girl, plus marguerite gance as charlotte corday, and antonin artaud as marat. hello
also, have you read the script for napoléon by stanley kubrick? such a shame that it was never made, but it's incredible. and after seeing barry lyndon, i can definitely picture it in my mind
