The Boy and the Heron.

    Miyazaki did it again. As a non-member of Japanese culture, I could not understand half of the movie. There is a vague suspicion that there is a back story of "Old Japan", which disappears with the Tower vs. "New Japan" emerging out of the flames of war but this is the end of my understanding. The movie borrows the premise of a boy traumatized by the fiery death of his mother during American bombing of Tokyo and succumbing to living in the world of imagination from "Pan's Labyrinth" and grossly underappreciated "A Monster Calls". Dwarf-heron is a trickster connecting world of the dead (the Past) and the world of the living (the Present) provides some cohesiveness to the story to this Western barbarian. 

Bradley Cooper. Maestro.

    

         A remarkable feat by Bradley Cooper. A major American director is born. Furthermore, after Ridley Scott's ornate but listless "Napoleon", he demonstrated how biopics can be made without excessive stretching of a screen time or cursory scenes, not understandable without reading bad, plagiarized 1400 pp. long biographies. Cooper is brilliant as Bernstein. Carey Milligan as his much-suffering wife is perfect. Party dialogs, half-silenced by an ambient noise are perfect, camera work is perfect. Presentation of serious music in a feature movie is perfect. I was not particularly touched by the film, but again, this may be it was my jealousy for Irina Shayk. 😀 

Napoleon by Ridley Scott

     

     It is hard for me to understand the rave reviews of Napoleon. Equally hard for the viewers is to understand the origins of Napoleon charisma from the movie . The history is twisted and garbled. For instance, it were Russian-Austrian allies who took the heights above the Austerlitz battlefield, and Napoleon's camp was below. The uphill attack of the strong position by the French, contrary to all contemporary tactics, decided the battle. In the current political climate I would not expect anything smacking of fairness in showcasing his Russian debacle, which broke the backbone of the Napoleonic system. Yet, the omission of Trafalgar and Volkerschlacht ("Battle of Nations") at Leipzig, the whole 1813 German campaign does not make sense. The absence of Metternich is as awkward as would be a movie about American Revolution missing Adams, Madison and Hamilton. 

    The most enduring heritage of the First Empire was the Code Napoleon. It is absent in the movie. Instead, the sex of Napoleon and Josephine, doggie style, is demonstrated at least twice. Why?

    Joaquin Phoenix, a great actor, simply was not given enough substance to act. Alexander I, who was 30 during the meeting on the Niemen and 37 after the fall of Paris -- a quite mature man in then scheme of things -- is shown as a youngster. Contrary to the historical feat of two emperors meeting on the raft in the middle of the river, they talk in an unremarkable park. The only brilliant act is Rupert Everett's Wellington in (again) poorly shown Battle of Waterloo. The whole failure of the Napoleonic enterprise is attributed to Waterloo, which was elucidated in a much better 1970 movie with Rod Steiger as Napoleon. General Arthur Wellesley, not yet even the Duke of Wellington, sitting as the head of the table before two emperors and three or four kings, is as incongruent as the Orthodox Church scene in Catherine the Great. 

    The 1814 act of abdication is not clear at all. In fact, after the Russian Army took Paris, Napoleon did not consider his position as hopeless. The people of Paris, who were not very important, but also his marshals forced him to abdicate simply because of general weariness of more than twenty years of warfare.