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Reviews
Shirkers (2018)
Why should we care?
This documentary came highly recommended from sources I trust and is either praised to the rafters or leaves the viewer completely indifferent. I can understand why people clicked with this movie; I'm not confused why they enjoyed it but the euphoric reviews baffle me. For my part I found it sappy and trivial.
The documentary follows a woman, talking 20 years on, trying to piece together a lost film from her childhood in Singapore. The result is it's terribly self-important for someone who made two short films. Great documentaries, no matter how intimate or grand the subject, convince the viewer they're talking about something important. This element is missing. The film they were making didn't even look promising. To me it's no less vain and uninteresting to watch your average student filmmaker wax lyrical about their creative process but somehow this has more importance ascribed to it because... it's an older person saying it? There are great examples of documentaries about personal drama, about relationships, about the making of movies, yet this one lacked the punch and relevance of -any- of those.
The documentary also mentions Werner Herzog's film Fitzcarraldo - that film spawning the sweeping making-of documentary Burden of Dreams. Unintentionally this only serves to remind me of a filmmaker who actually did something noteworthy with their craft.
I will say as a documentary itself, it has a pleasing aesthetic and I can find no real technical faults. This is perhaps owing to the original film's film stock that nowadays evokes nostalgia in its viewers. This film also benefited from its audience seeking it out; it mainly attracted people who would enjoy this and I thought I'd be in that group. I'd be interested to see how a larger audience would react to this.
Ultimately it's the life story about someone who's not that interesting to listen to; a tale of a friendship that's not endearing; a making-of of a movie that didn't look good to begin with. Although what happened is terrible and unjust, it must unfortunately be admitted that the film world was at no great loss without that film and probably wouldn't be without this one.
War and Peace (1956)
True Hollywood Melodrama
I am a devout fan of period movies, especially this period, and I love the novel. Unfortunately, this movie was not worth the time of day.
To start, it looked cheap and everything looked like a set. It looks so very staged and phony that the 1968 movie makes this look like an elementary school play.
The casting was atrocious. Henry Fonda cannot play Europeans. He sports such as aggravating American accent that you begin to wonder if he's playing a Russian or just playing Henry Fonda. Mel Ferrer is lifeless, and would have more interesting if he was played by a corpse. In this film, Audrey Hepburn is more of a Hollywood face than an actress. Herbert Lomm acts nothing like Napoleon, and seems to know nothing about the character he was approaching. All around the acting was too lifeless or far too campy.
The settings were also very corny. The grand entrance to Moscow looks like a kid's park. For the "duel in the snow" scene, the director couldn't be bothered to do it outside, so he did the logical thing; artificially create a snowy set, which turned out to be a laughable effort.
The battle scenes were plain terrible. They were short, unimpressive, the uniforms were cheap and inaccurate, and they made the massive battles of Austerlitz and Borodino seem like brief skirmishes.
Overall, this was made as a commercial effort and as far as acting, sets, and direction go, it is difficult to stomach. At no point did it resemble the novel; it seemed like a bad soap opera.
Napoléon (1955)
Quite possibly the worst Napoleon movie ever!
There are people who despise Napoleonic love films, and I am one of them, because they have almost nothing to do with the true character of Napoleon. There are so very few Napoleon war epics that finding this seemed great. This movie makes those sappy love films look good.
I start off by saying it is incredibly boring; practically unbearable. Second, cramming Napoleon's life into such a short time frame is ludicrous; that's a job for Kubrick.
Now, most people don't like to nitpick, but I do, and these things not only make for a bad historical film, but just a bad film in general.
1. Too much reliance on narration; almost no speaking lines.
2. Toulon taking place on a bright sunny day? 3. Napoleon's 1790's uniform looks like it was made by a 4th grader's mother.
4. "Whiff of grapeshot" taking place on a bright sunny day? 5. Tell me the point of the garden dancing scene.
6. Napoleon's charge at the Bridge of Arcole mysteriously morphs into a painting.
7. Napoleon's Egyptian servant was a black man in a Santa Clause costume? 8. To transition from the young looking Napoleon to the older Napoleon, the director uses a "new haircut" scene, in which he just switches the actors. Tell me that isn't clever film-making! 9. The mighty Battle of Austerlitz in interrupted by a giant green laser. I'm not kidding.
10. The helmets of the Imperial Guard troops are about three times as large as they should be. You cannot look at them without laughing.
11. During a battle with Austria, an Austrian grenadier randomly decides to do an awe-inspiring front flip while charging down a hill. Bravo.
12. The spectacle of Moscow burning is obviously a model set up 3 feet from the window set piece.
13. Waterloo was pathetic. Napoleon had one poorly dubbed line in the entire scene. A British soldiers gets smacked in the face with a cherry bomb. The Old Guard sings. The suspense of whether it was French or Prussian reinforcements lasts about half of a second. French and British troops charge each other, reach each other, and then stand there.
14. Orson Welle's "me not talk-talk" acting technique makes him look like Frankenstein in a British uniform.
15. Napoleon returns as a zombie at the end of the film.
16. The "The End" title card looks like it was borrowed from "West Side Story".
This film is good to laugh at, but as far as a Napoleonic film goes, or a film in general, it is by no means worth your time. Avoid it like the plague. Try Abel Gance's "Napoleon" or perhaps "Waterloo".