jeffzeiter

This is how you make a biopic - get strong writing, immersive photography, rock-solid acting, and a director with the seasoned judgment to synthesize all those parts and escalate the story. Throughout, never let complexity degenerate into melodrama, because the story is only worth telling if the titular character is not complex - if they have a real doctrine. And Enzo Ferrari did have a real doctrine. By spending through the nose for the sake of winning, dispensing with hostile reporters, navigating love affairs, and inspiring his "troops" with personalized advice and a genuine philosophy of racing, he was the auto world's equivalent of Julius Caesar or Napoleon Bonaparte - an adventurer who developed a relentless, crystalline conception of warfare in a different realm. This film is the perfect counterpoise to Ridley Scott's disastrous "Napoleon." Well done, filmmakers.

This film is a turkey - not just because all of Ridley Scott's films on French history have bombed, or because brooding, drug-addict playing, mouth-filled-with-gravel Joaquin Phoenix completely misplays the part of Napoleon, or because Vanessa Kirby is a medium-talent actress playing a part way above her abilities - but because the script is very evidently horrible. Ridley's editing of that script during production is itself evidence that it's horrible, and it was undoubtedly made more horrible due to the director's ill-advised intervention. The proof is in the result - rather, the lack of a cinematic-quality result. This Thanksgiving season, I'm thankful that Sergei Bonarchuk, H. A. L. Craig, Vittorio Bonicelli, Mario Soldati, and Rod Steiger had the skill and vision to bring a pitch-perfect cinematic portrayal of Napoleon to the big screen in "Waterloo," which will stand all the taller in contrast to this hellacious piece of garbage.

The acting in this film is atrocious. The writing is below pedestrian grade. And the directing - well, the directing is unbearable, because the photography is so incompetent that as the film proceeds, or rather fails to proceed, you're left wondering just how large a quantity of hallucinogenic drugs it took to induce a group of people to make this horrendously awful project. Were people really this ignorant back in the 1960s and 1970s era of hippie cults? That's the question this film should be posing, and it would be posing that question if it were even faintly competent. Instead, you come out of it with the question, were a group of people actually found who were ignorant enough to make this project? There is poor filmmaking, and then there is the failed attempt even to accomplish poor filmmaking, and this is the latter.