Almost five years ago I watched the Kevin Brownlow resoration of Napoleon on Blu-ray on my TV. It was incredible, but I've since wanted to watch it in a theatre the first opportunity I got.
This morning I got on a plane, and flew to Paris to watch the newly finished seven hour restoration by Georges Mourier at the Cinematheque française. It was utterly staggering. I'm exhausted, yes, it is for obvious reasons tiring to sit and watch a movie…
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
This is a long one, and quite personal, so feel free to skip it, the short of it is that the film is incredible, you should see it if you haven't, and you should see it again if you have.
Despite this being the 5th time seeing this film, I have many thoughts and need to write them down.
I think one of the reasons this film connects so deeply for me, is that I see so much of myself…
I might be too in love with Paul Mescal but I loved this. Denzel is obviously electric, the score is phenomenal and the set pieces are all really fun. Easily the worst parts of this are the quite forced ways in which it ties itself to the original, but even that is handled with a modicum of grace and hand waving away of the details.
Not all films should have a sequel, and Joker certainly shouldn't have. Not least because it wasn't very good, but my own gripes aside, the first one was perfectly self contained, and required no elaboration, so the only thing a sequel can do is bog it down.
Which it undoubtedly does, but I actually found it marginally more compelling than the first one nonetheless. There's a pretty good film in here, but boy is there a lot of excess.
Cut…
Holy fuck the set-up with the [redacted] near the beginning, coming back right at the end with [redacted] is legendary.
This film is so fucking good. Like honestly, everything is just incredible. With that said, I'm not gonna talk about that, cause I'm only gonna talk about the writing (also known as the best bit). The writing in this is in a word, fantastic. The dialogue feels natural, even when it makes no god damned sense (yet), and the pacing…
