NAILED IT IN ONE TAKE.

A number of my neighbors must have been of like mind last Friday, taking advantage of the post-prandial and senior discounts to watch Napoleon.  I hope they at least had a restful midafternoon to go with the popcorn and free refills for members of the frequent viewers' club.

The people who do military history as a vocation or avocation have been all over it, and we have the kind of consensus normally seen in Wisconsin where the suckitude of the Bears is concerned.

At the beginning of his review for The American Conservative, Sumantra Maitra quotes a previous biographer who captures the essence of the thing.

The historian Adam Zamoyski once quipped about Napoleon’s greatness by recounting an apocryphal incident of Napoleon trying to pick up a lady of the night at Paris’s famous red-light district a couple of years before the Revolution that wrecked Europe. An eighteen-year-old young gunnery officer with a funny accent, he finally succeeded. Then, Bonaparte, being who he was, wrote about it all in his diary elaborately. What was important in that peculiar confessional was not that he managed to finally bed a paid working girl, but that he tried the same thing and failed thrice before. Zamoyski observed drily that, if an officer of the French artillery cannot manage to pick up an escort, there are reasonable arguments to be made that the performance might not be considered as some hallmark of forthcoming greatness.

It is interesting to note that Count Zamoyski himself is of aristocratic stock, with a family name and crest dating back to the fifteenth century. His bemused disdain towards the Corsican upstart was in some ways part of a noble European tradition—it is in the blood of aristocracy to make fun of classless upstarts.

Yes, and it is in the blood of contemporary writers and directors to turn every story into Dynasty, or perhaps Keeping Up with the Kardashians with hand-sewn costumes.  It's. A. Contemporary. Movie.  If it leaves people with the impression that Josephine's menopause was the proximate cause of a decade of misery east of the Rhine, so be it.  Anything can happen in a cartoon, or a soap opera, even one set up as a blockbuster movie about a Corsican corporal.  Mr Maitra has a suggestion.  "Yet to those rare few, genuinely interested in historical inquiry of the tumultuous 19th century, I’d humbly suggest reading good old history books and a trip to some older art museums over watching [director Ridley] Scott’s latest."