andrei1981-1

Ridley Scott has tricked me. I really thought I was going to watch a movie about Napoleon. But two hours into it I realized I'm actually watching a movie about the English. Scott made short shrift of Napoleon's victories and spent 40 minutes on Waterloo. One of the greatest tactical minds in history and the man who terrorized the whole of Europe is reduced here to a grotesque caricature. Phoenix, otherwise an excellent actor, lacks charisma as Napoleon and the two protagonists (Napoleon and Josephine) have zero chemistry. Given the hype created around it, I consider the movie a flop. Scott has fallen knee deep into the trap of artistic hubris, as he arrogantly believes he's entitled to remake and reshape historical figures with impunity. If he wants full freedom, there's always fiction, an endless reservoir of stories, but when you're bringing to the screen one of the most (in)famous characters in history, more reverence is needed. Scott's iconoclastic bravado is now being punished by the public. It makes me very nervous to think that he's working on a new Gladiator. That's truly bad news.

GoT was such a hot mess. The producers left nothing out. Dragons, knights, zombies, medievalism, orientalism, Egyptian pyramids, God of Light, they threw in everything but the kitchen sink. The setup lacks originality and their writing strategy is to distort historical cultures, rather than create something different. It's very obvious to any educated viewer that Westeros is medieval Western Europe, the Wall is Hadrian's Wall, the raiders from the cold north are the Vikings, the Dothraki are the horse-riding Mongols, the exotic cities of the east embody the decadent Orient with its slave based society (some colonial flavor here) and the list goes on. On top of all this mess the viewer has to make sense of a bewildering number of characters. Some simply disappear from the story for half a season. Some of the main characters never meet and some of the stories never connect or you have to wait several seasons for them to be tied in some way. You watch season after season wondering how the situation on the Wall connects with the one in Meereen and the other places visited/conquered by Khaleesi. It feels like you're watching two different shows on the assumption that at some point it will all be tied together. GoT lacks focus more than any other show I've seen. If this wasn't enough, the viewer has to put up with graphic violence and pointless nudity which to me is the ultimate hallmark of mediocrity in moviemaking. It's basically like saying: we give up, we don't really have much going on here, so we'll throw in some soft porn scenes and some hands getting chopped off to draw in the audience (sensationalism sells). And that is all very clear when you pay attention to the events and developments, many of which make no sense. So basically between the writer's obsession with male sexual organs (cutting them, in particular) and female prostitution and the effort to figure out what the characters are about the viewers inevitably end up prating for the damn dragons to grow up faster and put everyone out of their misery.

Great acting from Cillian Murphy and Helen McCrory and the guest superstars Tom Hardy and Adrien Brody. Some good scenes in seasons 1-2. Everything else is repetitive. The script is very derivative as the show turns into Godfather meets Scarface type of story. I can tell Brody had fun playing a stereotypical New York Italian gangster, but really added nothing to the genre and this is just one egregious example out of many. Also, Birmingham gypsies speaking Romanian, seriously? More depth and more professionalism was needed to make this a high quality series and not just a popular one, catering to the plebs only.