michaelstep2004
Joined Jun 2005
Welcome to the new profile
We're still working on updating some profile features. To see the badges, ratings breakdowns, and polls for this profile, please go to the previous version.
Reviews9
michaelstep2004's rating
Chronological fuzziness and overdrawn fictional characters aside, this fairly small budget Russian historical series still offers a fascinating, often opulent panorama of Russia and the Eurasian steppes during the period of Mongol domination in the 13th and 14th centuries. It's a brilliant evocation of a place and time period most of us know nothing about, and an insight into the Russian experience that very few other Europeans could understand.
I have some criticisms: 1. I think -- though I'm no expert -- that harem politics are over-emphasized in the Mongol context -- what's depicted here seems a later development in other Central Asian and Islamic states, and 2) the stubbornness and sheer stupidity about "love" of various of the fictional characters are adolescent fantasies that don't exist in reality, and detract from the credibility of the story. Very romantic, of course, but...really.
I saw this in a binge on Amazon Prime. Highly recommended for unusual context and content, good performances, cinematography and other qualities. Not perfect, but very good.
I have some criticisms: 1. I think -- though I'm no expert -- that harem politics are over-emphasized in the Mongol context -- what's depicted here seems a later development in other Central Asian and Islamic states, and 2) the stubbornness and sheer stupidity about "love" of various of the fictional characters are adolescent fantasies that don't exist in reality, and detract from the credibility of the story. Very romantic, of course, but...really.
I saw this in a binge on Amazon Prime. Highly recommended for unusual context and content, good performances, cinematography and other qualities. Not perfect, but very good.
A lot of people here seem to believe that the fantastic 13-hour score of Victory at Sea was composed by Richard Rodgers -- it was not. Rodgers contributed 12 short themes composed on piano, which were then expanded and orchestrated by the great Robert Russell Bennett, who also wrote of lot of extra music for this show not inspired by Rodgers. Rodgers always gave the credit to Bennett, saying that he made the music sound so much better than it really was.
I watched this show repeatedly as a child, since it was rerun on TV continuously well into the 1960s. The episodes combine an obvious respect for the Allied sailors and soldiers who won the war with a sort of bumptious patriotism that was absolutely pervasive on TV in the 1950s. Good memories!
I watched this show repeatedly as a child, since it was rerun on TV continuously well into the 1960s. The episodes combine an obvious respect for the Allied sailors and soldiers who won the war with a sort of bumptious patriotism that was absolutely pervasive on TV in the 1950s. Good memories!
On June 18, 1815, all the promise of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution were snuffed out in a single day. Since then, we in the West have been ruled almost always by cynical oligarchs focused on greed and the privileges of the elite. We have played recklessly with nationalism,experimented cruelly with arid socialism, and cynically dabbled in democracy. We have come close to self destruction, and may yet accomplish that deed. Sadly, that could all have been avoided except for the Duke of Wellington and Napoleon's stomach cramps.
Despite two centuries of (non-French) propaganda about his power-corrupted self-centeredness, Napoleon was a true visionary revolutionary with an extremely advanced notion of European political, social and economic relationships. Had his dream of a single Western polity come into being after 1815, the world would have suffered much, much less from fraternal and genocidal conflicts in the past century. The conventional wisdom of the victors -- that Waterloo was the last scene of a heroic struggle of freedom loving peoples to defeat French tyranny -- tries to conceal the fact that all the victors actually did was reimpose the tyranny of the ancien regime.
So...thank you, England, and William Pitt, Jr. Thank you Prussia, Stein, Hardenberg and Queen Louise. Thank you Austria, Kaiser Franz (the father in law of Napoleon) and Metternich. And thank you Russia and Alexander. Through your work in destroying Napoleon and the promise of the Enlightenment we have gotten to enjoy:
Two World Wars; Vicious natonalism on both left and right; Hitler and Stalin
The British officers in this movie are so ridiculous -- all of them are gorgeous and perfectly groomed aristocrats with not a hair out of place, not an ugly, inbred throwback in evidence -- though of course there were plenty of those. Plummer's portrayal of Wellington is a decent recreation of England's greatest commander. The music at the Countess of Richmond's ball, a beautifully shot sequence, is all wrong -- Vienna 1890, not Brussels 1815. But it's a lovely extended scene.
The Prussians are exactly what you would expect with a Russian director -- mindless proto-Nazis.
The French, of course, are very brave, and very foolish. They die noisily, but magnificently.
Rod Steiger is not the actor one would want to play Napoleon, despite superficial resemblances from several angles. Yes, Napoleon got a bit chubby in later years, but not double-chinned. And where is the handsomeness, the charisma, the EYES that flashed and commanded? Not here. Steiger blusters and shouts instead. And the script's depiction of Napoleon's supposedly tortured inner thoughts is dubious at best.
The Battle of Waterloo, which takes up the last third of the movie, is utterly stupendous, even better than director Bondarchuk's Battle of Borodino in his Russian epic, War and Peace (1968). Nowadays, this would have been done using CGI, and wouldn't have been half as thrilling.
Despite two centuries of (non-French) propaganda about his power-corrupted self-centeredness, Napoleon was a true visionary revolutionary with an extremely advanced notion of European political, social and economic relationships. Had his dream of a single Western polity come into being after 1815, the world would have suffered much, much less from fraternal and genocidal conflicts in the past century. The conventional wisdom of the victors -- that Waterloo was the last scene of a heroic struggle of freedom loving peoples to defeat French tyranny -- tries to conceal the fact that all the victors actually did was reimpose the tyranny of the ancien regime.
So...thank you, England, and William Pitt, Jr. Thank you Prussia, Stein, Hardenberg and Queen Louise. Thank you Austria, Kaiser Franz (the father in law of Napoleon) and Metternich. And thank you Russia and Alexander. Through your work in destroying Napoleon and the promise of the Enlightenment we have gotten to enjoy:
Two World Wars; Vicious natonalism on both left and right; Hitler and Stalin
The British officers in this movie are so ridiculous -- all of them are gorgeous and perfectly groomed aristocrats with not a hair out of place, not an ugly, inbred throwback in evidence -- though of course there were plenty of those. Plummer's portrayal of Wellington is a decent recreation of England's greatest commander. The music at the Countess of Richmond's ball, a beautifully shot sequence, is all wrong -- Vienna 1890, not Brussels 1815. But it's a lovely extended scene.
The Prussians are exactly what you would expect with a Russian director -- mindless proto-Nazis.
The French, of course, are very brave, and very foolish. They die noisily, but magnificently.
Rod Steiger is not the actor one would want to play Napoleon, despite superficial resemblances from several angles. Yes, Napoleon got a bit chubby in later years, but not double-chinned. And where is the handsomeness, the charisma, the EYES that flashed and commanded? Not here. Steiger blusters and shouts instead. And the script's depiction of Napoleon's supposedly tortured inner thoughts is dubious at best.
The Battle of Waterloo, which takes up the last third of the movie, is utterly stupendous, even better than director Bondarchuk's Battle of Borodino in his Russian epic, War and Peace (1968). Nowadays, this would have been done using CGI, and wouldn't have been half as thrilling.