Fred and Loathing on The Internet

The French Republic Gave Napoleon Some Elba Room

2023-Dec-14

This blog comes hot off the git commit presses. I had been wrestling with a URL >> template issue for more than I would have liked. The lessons learned tasted somewhat anticlimactic. Turns out flask cannot handle two routes using the same namespace. I had to make an explicit directory prefix so I could have two routes using the same type of name space. Everybody but the members of the development must find this to be some of the most pedantic shit. However, this blog was made for the expressed purpose of broadcasting the development woes of all the team members on Fredlambuth.com. There has been talk of drifting the purpose of this blog away from the original intent which is somewhat exaggerated. The big ideas and tiny peccadillos will faithfully be reported in the headline paragraph of each blog entry. If not, I’m sure it will be addressed.

On a brighter note, the refactoring of the frontend is going swimmingly, despite that heated missive about URL namespace sharing. The database, Flask views, and Jinja2 templates are matching up nicely, making all the development efforts pay off multiplicatively as the work moves through each renovation.

As for long written criticism of artistic subjects, we have Napoleon; the recent biopic put together by Ridley Scott and Joaquin Phoenix playing the French emperor from 1789 through death around the 1810s. The starring actor is a marvelous performer that never gave me any doubt that he would make acting choices that I’d find amusing in his portrayal of Napoleon. Ridley Scott had the higher hurdle to overcome based on my esteem of his work and the role the director has in a film. Ultimately I would say I came away underwhelmed from what I had hoped Ridley Scott could pull together for a sweeping grand biopic of a continental conquering warlord.

Hype aside I had for the creators of this film, I came away not having too much of a reaction either way to what I saw. The grain of historical accuracy of this film is not fine enough for me to nitpick about what had or had not really happened, so I have no bones to pick in that regard. I knew the timeline of Napoleon coming (mostly) up and down through his reign over post-revolutionary France. This movie did absolutely nothing to address how this came to be. Instead it advanced scene by scene displaying a Napoleon rising through his storied career without explanation as to how that could happen. I suppose the director supposes the audience knows even the most basic of historical trivia about Napoleon; namely that he was French, garish and wins most of the battles he fights.

For my part, it was a letdown. I was hoping to see somewhat of an explanation as to what made Napoleon Bonaparte such a magnificent leader. We see a few battles that demonstrate his wins and his big loss at Waterloo, yet not much is given to explain how those wins or losses came to be. What we have instead is a very personal look at Napoleon's relationship with Josephine. Apparently she had an outsized effect on him. More than you would expect for a warlord monarch. In that regard, the film gave a very close examination of how their love life affected Napoleon's policy decisions.

My last remark is that I came away from the movie wanting something I did not get. In retrospect, I’m not quite sure what a ‘Ridley Scott’ movie is or what I was expecting. He made a handful of movies I adore, scattered around a lot of forgettable ones.