RichardSRussell-1

Well, after I had earlier figured that "Oppenheimer" had a lock on the Oscars for costume and set design, along came "Killers of the Flower Moon". And now, to top that off, we've got "Napoleon".

Well, it's a good thing that Ridley Scott got so many of the little details right (over and above his specialty of huge, multi-extra mass-carnage sequences), because some of the things we normally take for granted in a huge-budget production were mysteriously absent.

For example, where were the sound engineers when Joaquin Phoenix and Vanessa Kirby were mumbling to each other? How was it that probably the only political figure in world history with as much charisma as Julius Caesar, Adolf Hitler, and Donald Trump was portrayed as a stolid, dessicated stick? We KNOW Phoenix is capable of so much more than that; it had to be the direction.

What was Bonaparte's motive for trying to conquer all of Europe? Just because he thot he could? Nothing else? Movie does not say, nor even offer hints.

The occasional on-screen captions were nice when used, but why were they used so sparingly? It was difficult to tell where many of the key scenes were occurring. And, even tho this clearly wasn't intended as a straight, historically accurate documentary, would it have killed the momentum of the plot to illustrate developments with a few maps?

With that much cash to throw around, this could've been one for the ages. Instead it's one for a few weeks.

Boy, I really wanted to like The Marvels, which opened yesterday. But I didn't. It was chaotic, jumbled, and arbitrary; assumed way more knowledge of backstory than reasonable; tried too hard for unearned sentiment; and featured a wooden performance from nominal star Brie Larson. It was not redeemed by its one brilliant touch, the use of the song "Memory" during the main hypercat scenes.

I know that superhero stories are nominally science fiction, because they're supposed to portray things that could really happen in the real world, without use of magic or divinity, if we're willing to grant them a couple of wild cards, such as the assumption that we've been able to figure out faster-than-light travel. And I'm OK with a COUPLE. Anything more than that, and we're dealing with fantasy. This one was way too fantastic. And I don't mean that in a good way.

There must be a ton of fans of previous movies in this franchise who boosted its opening-weekend box-office totals, because nobody walking into the theater cold would've had a clue what was going on. The movie jumps all over the timeline and the map without warning; there's no clue who any of these people are or how they're related to each other; the dialog is puerile, stilted, and repetitious; and the ostensible star of the film, Jamie Leigh Curtis, spends most of her time either unconscious or in a hospital bed, saying that it's her duty to go and kill the killer, but she never even gets close.

I used to see every SF and fantasy film released (about 80 a year), so I've got a sense of what a truly bad movie is, and this one qualifies.