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Grape Soda's avatar

Astute. Yet I’m quite sure the Trump movie made him look worse than he is. It’s possible it will become just another point along his redemption arc. There’s a non zero chance he’ll you end up on the other end like Lincoln if he does the job he completes the job he’s set for himself. His superpower - the thing his haters don’t and can’t understand - is that he does love this country. It’s been interesting to see the entire weight of our propaganda apparatus brought down on his head. As a cultural figure he was entirely a harmless lightweight before he got into politics. In Tucker’s interview with Billy Bush, Bush describes having a ton of laughs with Trump and says he never once brought up a political matter. His besetting sin is pushing his way into a game he wasn’t invited to play. I still wonder what was the inciting incident so to speak. The fact that, as a builder, he knew that steel doesn’t melt like that?

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Pat Robinson's avatar

I read it was Obama at the presidents dinner publicly mocking him?

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Grape Soda's avatar

That will certainly make the script

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forumposter123@protonmail.com's avatar

I haven't seen the most recent Napoleon movie because I've heard it's pretty bad.

Apparently tries to give him the Hitler treatment. There are certainly historians that see him as a kind of proto-Hitler.

The conclusion of the review I read said that the hardest part to believe in the movie was his return for the 100 days. After watching a movie that cast him as some kind of bumbling proto-Hitler with no redeeming qualities, why did the whole country rally to his return despite it being almost certain doom?

To have a satisfactory answer to that question you'll need a more balanced view of the man and his life. Hence, he can't be proto-Hitler.

You would have the same problem with Hitler. Even if you believe he was evil (just as you can believe Napoleon was evil) you've got to answer the question of why so many people supported him and fought and died for him. Which means you're going to have to give some account of whatever virtues caused that. And we can't have any virtues in Hitler or his cause, even if they don't come remotely close to redeeming.

He's not a man anymore, even a very evil man. He's demonic. He's Secular Satan. He's the embodiment of pure evil. 100% EVIL! He's the one guy you can't have a Disney Live Action Remake of where it turns out he was just a misunderstood good guy.

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Michael A Alexander's avatar

Napoleon was bad because they made Napoleon boring. There was almost nothing in the film that indicated why or how he was so successful.

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A. Hairyhanded Gent's avatar

In my opinion it is of the utmost importance when evaluating ideas to separate the conveyor of the idea from the idea, itself. Hence, very valuable information/ideas can come from an utterly corrupt and compromised individual, and very poor information/ideas from an engaging and charismatic one.

Then, after analyzing and evaluating the information, you are free to make a second pass and properly castigate, or praise, the conveyor of the information, if you like: be objective with the content first, and you can afford to be subjective about the those you received the content from. You now have full use of the content, after all.

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David Perlmutter's avatar

It's much easier to portray Trump and Hitler in comic terms than serious ones. A reflection of the fact that some people still see (and saw) them as jokes.

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Matt Price's avatar

TV Tropes used to call this Truffaut Was Right. He famously said you can't make an anti-war movie, because putting anything on screen inherently glamorizes it. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DoNotDoThisCoolThing

But in answer to your question, yes, I think there's a certain kind of person who does want their enemies portrayed as absolutely evil and totally inhuman. When I pointed out that the characters in Zone of Interest had no redeeming qualities at all, I was harangued in the comments and accused of being a Nazi sympathizer.

https://open.substack.com/pub/toomuchfilmschool/p/propaganda-and-the-banality-of-zone

https://open.substack.com/pub/toomuchfilmschool/p/self-reflection-and-cinema-nazis

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