Is it wrong that I feel such satisfaction watching that witch locked up in the looney bin?!
Very interesting cinematography and entirely too long, but a good story.
And shit has hit the fan for Claire (and her pretend witch friend).
Claire gets first hand the unjust treatment of women who did not abide by the repressive society who saw women of intellect as in league with the devil. Unfortunately for Claire, that also includes being killed for being a witch (which was punishable by death). But with Jamie out of town, Ned the lawyer is the only person in her corner to help her.
What I do love about the ep is seeing the frienship between the two women. Seeing Geillis stop with pretense and reveal herself as just a smart woman who married for convinience and ended up with Dougal over shared politics. She is no witch, just a woman ahead of her time.
Unfortunately for Claire, she has made enemies in an obsessed teenager. Even more surprising is seeing the Father who had failed to save a young poisoned boy use religious furvour against Claire, playing the part to woo the judges against her. The two things that will always be used against women: the jealousy of other women and men's inability to deal with women more powerful/intelligent than them.
In order to save herself, Claire must turn against her only friend, but she will not turn her back. Claire is loyal to a fault and also from another time. And in the biggest turn of events, Geillis takes the blame for witchcraft and also reveals herself to Claire as also being from the future, from 1968. Geillis' witch knowledge was just as Claire's, knowledge from a future time. Did NOT see this coming! Also Jamie coming in to save Claire at the knick of time with sword and dagger ready to throw down.
And finally we get Claire revealing to Jamie she is from the future, when he confronts her of being a witch, of having the same mark as Geillis, the scar from a smallpox vaccine. And Jamie's love for Claire is so great, he believes her and she lets him in to her story, no more pretense, no more made up stories. So great his love for Claire that he lets her go. He takes her to the very rocks on the hill that brought her to him, and he'll let her go back if that's what she wants and to keep her safe from the dangers of his time. Oh Jamie, you are grade A hubby material.
Love the scene of Claire looking at her two wedding rings, one representing Frank (and the future) and the other being Jamie (and this past/present), literally having to choose between which wedding band she will stay loyal to. Frank in gold and Jamie in iron. She chooses strenght and stability over a gliterring maulable maybe. She chooses Jamie. No longer is she stuck in the past, she is now choosing it with wide eyes.
5.5/10. It's funny, when diving back into the series, I realized that I couldn't really remember how Barney and Quinn broke up. Aside from the fact that I was not necessarily super-attentive when I bulldozed my way through this season the first time, I think it's because their break up doesn't make much sense, and feels like a reversion for both characters, and in some ways, everyone else too.
The Barney who would have a knee-high prenup demanding weekly weigh-ins and providing for "wives 2-8" doesn't feel like the same guy who was ready to throw out his old mugs, or who didn't mind his apartment being turned into a Hello Kitty shrine so long as Quinn was still there. It feels like a quick fix to shift us into hyperdrive toward Barney and Robin getting together, without nearly enough build or progress to that front to make their break up seem real and well-motivated. It just sort of happens because it needs to happen for the big plot arc of the series to get where it's going, and that's not good enough, or enough grounded in the characters and relationship we've gotten to know over the past season to really work.
Plus, the whole episode devolves into a pretty crass battle of the sexes, the type of cliche the show normally subverts rather than gives into. There's some solid character beats there -- Ted wanting to play the hero but not being able to stomach Klaus's eccentricities in particular feels in-character -- but for the most part it's a series of contrived conflicts that don't really have enough time to breathe in the episode of hoary tropes. (For instance, Marhsall and Lily's argument over how to play with their son could have been interesting but feels really slapdash and cartoony crammed into the rest of the episode.) And having the characters just announce directly how they feel (cue Futurama's Robot Devil) comes off as lazy rather than insightful.
It's not all so rough. For whatever reason, Robin's kink of being turned on by watching herself do the news (replete with a hilarious wink to future self) really tickled by funny bone in how absurd it was. And I forgot how much Bob Odenkirk is in this show! Even if he too goes pretty broad, his reunion with his dog, Tugboat was oddly sweet. Plus, even if I didn't like the execution, I like the idea of trying to contrast Barney's relationship with Robin down the line with his one with Quinn in the present as a means to show that he trusts Robin and that's why this is different. But it's a really loud, obvious way of doing that, which leans way more into the "tell" than "show" side of storytelling.
I don't know. HIMYM was once a show that, as Ted puts in a meta-gag, had big comedy but let you really care about the characters. But as the show grows long in the tooth, that comedy gets bigger and bigger, less grounded in anything approaching reality or genuine human interaction, and those characters start feeling less and less like real people and more and more like cartoons or cardboard stand-ins to hang cheesy jokes on. I remembered Season 8 being a pretty big nadir for the show, and my hope was that a rewatch would help me to remember the bright spots like it did with Season 7, but we're off to a pretty rough start so far.
Good to see you Mr. Sweeney!
Poor Maia. Almost everybody wants to make her the bad girl.
F*ck you Kresteva! (Bravo Matthew Perry)
This show gets better and better.
Maybe, it didn't go as well as it could've been, but the story itself is quite refreshing. Besides, Daniel Radcliffe hasn't made me think of Harry Potter even for a moment, and that means a lot!
This was a good movie! I enjoyed it, despite an interesting choice to make Elliot a fuzzy (?) dragon. Bryce Dallas Howard gave such a stellar performance I thought she was Jessica Chastain, (high praise) until someone pointed out she was Ron Howard's daughter. Some of you will recognize Karl Urban as Star Trek's Bones (McCoy), and, I don't care how old Robert Redford gets, he's just plain sexy. I give this movie a 7 (good) out of 10.
Decent monster of the week episode but also disconcerting with the lack of the episodes dedicated to this season's big bad: The Darkness. only 4 episodes to go with nothing new to report...
Some might view this as British humour but it most certainly is not. It's an American view (from an extreme distance) of what they perceive the English essence of wit might be. It warps whimsy, balls up bravado and not even Paul Bettany can push past it.
I wasn't a huge fan of how similar this was to Episode 2 which did the concept of "foreign party controlling what you see/hear" a lot better. The analogy was a bit too on the nose in those one. Yes, it's a metaphor for the Holocaust. We get it.
7.3/10. I've been a big fan of South Park's trying out more serialization in recent seasons, but it means that, to some degree, we're in a brave new world when it comes to the show. If this were a Season 15 episode, I might call it unfocused. There are several stories in play: the titular member berries, Garrison vs. Hillary, the identity of skankhunt42, Cartman as a PC crusader, and the reboot of the national anthem. Sure, plenty of these stories intersect, but that's a lot of plates spinning and few of them get to any real resolution by the end of the episode. In a different season, that would be a knock.
But we're in Season 20 now, and what might have been scattershot in a prior season feels like it's setting things up to be resolved down the line in the current one. Who knows where the show is going to go with the Presidential election, or the reveal that {spoiler]Gerald is skankhunt42[/spoiler]. In the mean time, there's some of the show's usual biting satirical commentary, like connecting the recent push toward nostalgia-focused bits like the new Star Wars film with a Trumpian desire to go back to the "good old days." It's the neatest parallel the episode draws, while throwing in other bits about how we turn meaningful political acts into sideshow entertainment and co-opt it until it loses any meaning it might have had in the first place.
But maybe the most interesting person amid the tumult of this episode is Kyle. After last season, there was a push for Kyle to step aside a little bit, to not be so involved or active. The show connects his standing on the sidelines with the idea of collective guilt, with the notion that apathy, benign neglect, has its own form of culpability, and how in contentious times, people get painted with the same brush. Again, much of the episode takes the form of set up for things that will no doubt be developed further down the road, but it's an interesting place to start.
The comedy worked well regardless, whether it's Cartman's sarcastic (but maybe earnest?) comments about how women can be funny and seemingly showing off his troll bona fides, to the ridiculousness of the member berries, to bringing back the Douche vs. Turd dichotomy, to the way Congress fetes a reclusive and mystical J.J. Abrams to make things seem new again while reminding people of what they'd like from the old days. As a standalone episode, it's not the best South Park has to offer, but as the entree to a new season, it's a promising and intriguing beginning.
Claire running around in her high heels and out running a T-REX is the most ridiculous thing I ever saw in a movie. Almost killed all illusion of disbelief...
I can see any of the top 4 being the winner, they all deserved it, my favorite top 4 in such a long time :heart:
Another great entry in The Crown‘s fourth season. This episode jumps a few years ahead and deals with The Queen‘s relationship with her four children. Therefore we also get to see Prince Edward and Prince Andrew for the first time in the show I think. At least at an adult age. The episode also shows us the beginnings of the Falklands War, which was quite interesting. Olivia Colman and Gillian Anderson are as brilliant as always.
[7.9/10] I low key hate The Crown’s Philip. He insists on sending his son to a haven of cruelty that Charles is plainly unsuited for. He yells at him for being weak. He threatens his wife with a messy divorce over it all, after having cheated on her multiple times. Sure, he recognizes the bullshit around the monarchy better than most royals, and he’s got more than a few witty bon mots. But in the confines of the show, he’s a bad person.
And yet, through it all, he means well toward his son, and he is a fair bit better father than he ever had. “Paterfamilias” is a tough episode to watch, because you feel for the show’s version of young Charles. As my wife pointed out, he’s of a piece with the subject of Saturday Night Live’s “Wells for Boys” skit: shy, sensitive, and bullied at every turn. Seeing him subjected to such cruelty by one parent, who puts his foot down and threatens to destroy his marriage to prevent the other from putting a stop to it, is gut-wrenching.
But Philip isn't doing this to be cruel. I’m on the same page with him when he tells Charles that their life isn’t the real world, as servants cut his food for him. I understand his concern that sending his son to an uptight boarding school would produce a molly-coddled twit, unprepared for the rigors of the real world. The goal to give his son a crucible that will strengthen him, give him discipline, is not unreasonable, even the results are abominable.
More to the point, you feel for the show’s version of young Philip here as well. He too is a boy who faced difficulties in the way of bullying and separation anxiety. He too was treated harshly by the other boys based on who he was and where he came from. The experience was a miserable one for him too. And in the part we see, maybe the most miserable.
Because however rough Philip’s parenting is, he is Mr. Rogers compared to his own father. In a tragic series of events, young Philip gets into a scrap with another student at Gordonstoun, which prevents him from going home to visit his favorite sister over break due to his punishment. Without Philip coming to visit, the sister chooses to fly to a family wedding instead. And the plane she and her born mid-flight child take crashes, killing all aboard.
The boy blames himself. Rather than seeing this as tragic happenstance, his already wounded heart crumples to ashes. He reasons that if he’d behaved, he could have stopped this butterfly effect from happening. The scenes of this devastated child, suffering nightmares of his closest family member’s dead body, ready to do god knows what in the lake by his school, stopping and crying in the funeral procession, are truly harrowing.
But nothing tops the trauma of his deadbeat father, the one who’s supposed to have the adult wisdom to know this was a horrible coincidence and not the fault of an innocent child, laying the blame at his grieving son’s feet. The Crown’s Philip is a bad man. His father is a monster.
Thank god for Uncle Dickie. In past and present, the man is a saint. He is a release valve for Charles in the here and now, and he gives young Philip the support he needs in the flashback scenes. For someone presented as a conniving operator in season 1, he’s a remarkably kind and empathetic soul in season 2.
But young Philip doesn’t want empathy. He wants absolution. He wants penance. He wants to wring the guilt from his bones. So he finds salvation in his labors, punishing himself by building the wall whose construction was meant to be his sentence for fighting with his bully. In that, he breaks himself down, working himself to the bone, until he cannot help but ask for the assistance from his fellow students and headmaster. It is in that crestfallen moment, that Philip finds the strength, and the camaraderie, to build himself back up.
It is rousing, even inspiring in the moment. But in truth, I don’t love it. I’m amenable to the idea of letting people work through grief in their own ways. But the headmaster, who genuinely seems to care and to want to forge a better world, could do better than allow a traumatized young man to revel in an act of self-flagellation he doesn’t deserve.
Despite it all, the effort works, or at least works well enough, because there is an inner strength in Philip which, however lamentable, these sorrowful events bring to the fore. We see it in the cold shower scene, where Philip’s fellow students hype themselves up for two seconds of a freezing water wash, and Philip stands stoic beneath the spigot, proving his mettle to those who doubt them. He may want nothing but to curl up with his favorite sister, but that resolve is there within him.
It isn't in his son. I know little of the real Charles. But in the presentation of the show, this is a boy who is simply not built for this. He wants to make his father proud, but doesn’t have that same mettle, the same inner strength that simply needs to be summoned by the hard times to make better men. For a well-for-boys kid like him, the rigorous process is a futile one, and thus a cruel one, which results only in the suffering of someone not made for it who will fumble in pain for that which they cannot achieve.
Philip cannot see that. He can only see his own struggles, the way parents inevitably see themselves in their children, without realizing that this meat grinder is not the ladder out of them for Charles that they were for him. His intentions are noble and understandable , but at some point, to knowingly let it continue despite seeing the consequences, verges on abusive.
Uncle Dickie gives the cinch of the piece. He tells a young Philip that he may hate his father now, but that one day he will hopefully know what it’s like to be a heated father and yearn for forgiveness. Who knows, maybe Philip’s dad has his own complicated backstory to explain his actions. But he earns his son’s hatred fairly here. And whatever life raft Gordonstoun gave Philip in his hour of need, it produced a philandering scumbag who seems far less than a role model for anyone (in the show, at least).
But now he knows what it’s like to be on the other end, to hope that you’re doing the right thing and that one day your child will thank you for it, or at least forgive your mistakes born of good intentions. As the closing text tells us, Charles tried to do better for his own kids, but is having his own intergenerational struggles as we speak.
There is no perfect way to do this. Everyone makes mistakes in caring for the next generation. All we can do is strive to do a little better each time. I sympathize with the Philip of The Crown, for his unspeakable traumas and for his desire to give his son the same strength he forged through hardship in the frozen reaches of Scotland. But I sympathize more with a poor helpless boy, made to suffer cruelly and needlessly, as old sins find new purchase once more.
[8.2/10] I’m reminded of two pieces of received wisdom. “The grass is always greener” and “There’s no right way to be a woman.” “Dear Mrs. Kennedy” is an illustration of both ideas at once. Two iconic figures of the twentieth century -- Queen Elizabeth and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, are envious of one another’s lives, which spurs each to try to put down or top the other. But in the throes of the tough expectations placed on each, they recognize one another’s plight and find common cause, as one of the only two people who know what it’s like to be women in this kind of spotlight.
The episode writes it all on the screen a little too much for my tastes. Aside from the final scene, there's no internal thought either woman, or any character really, has that doesn’t get vocalized or beat the audience over the head with. But the performances are spectacular. Claire Foy is superb as always. Conveying Elizabeth’s self-loathing, her attempt at openness, her hurt quality, her triumphant joy, her queen bee preening, and her deep sympathy -- nothing’s too much for Foy. And guest star Jodi Balfour does a great job as Jackie O, giving the sense of her as the picture of glamor in public, but also a wounded dove behind closed doors.
But what I most like here is the trajectory of The QUeen’s feelings toward her erstwhile confidante and rival. The swings back and forth between hating and sympathizing with Jackie, trying to upstage her and trying to comfort her, in ways that feel true to the character and interweave perfectly with historical events.
You sympathize with Elizabeth when she gets a look in the mirror at the wrong angle on a rough day and starts to feel bad about herself. So when a woman comes to London who’s the same age, but who is the talk of the town for her beauty, charisma, and education -- three things that Elizabeth is already insecure about -- you can understand why she’s so put out. It doesn’t help when the Queen Mother and Elizabeth’s own husband fawn over Jackie. And while I think the show goes a little overboard in conveying the sense that Mrs. Kennedy is this adored object of fascination and desire, it soundly sells the idea of why Elizabeth would bristle at this interloper who seems to be everything she’s not.
And yet, if only to keep Jackie away from Philip, the Queen invites her closer, rather than pushing her away. There's a magnanimousness to Elziabeth here, allowing Jackie a certain intimacy despite the fear that this woman is outshining her, and her ignorance of decorum (watching the private secretaries balk at the Kennedys using the wrong protocols and titles was hilarious). They bond over mutual shyness, over being married to strong-willed men, over loving animals. With an olive branch, Elizabeth turns a potential enemy, someone she’s jealous of, into a friend she can relate to. If the episode had stopped there, it would have been good and interesting enough.
Instead, the pendulum swings the other way to devastating effect, when word gets back to the Queen about some harsh things Jakcie said at a local dinner party. (As an aside, I love the fact that Margaret is the one who stirs up trouble with all this, being practically vindictive in her efforts to undercut her sister’s joy.) By all outward appearances, Jackie betrayed the Queen and, as Elizabeth herself later puts it, “the spirit” of their interactions.
Elizabeth invites Jackie into her private spaces within Buckingham palace, the most inaccessible and reserved areas of her home, and Mrs. Kennedy’s purported response is to call it run-down and dilapidated. Elizabeth opens herself up to this stranger, and the report she gets back is of personal insults that cut her to the bone: about her age, about her “incuriousness”, about her responsibility for the declining state of the U.K.’s place in the world. The combination of envy and apparent camaraderie put Jackie in a unique position to wound Elizabeth, and the bombs she lobbed more than do the trick. Foy sells the hell out of the QUeen’s hurt to hear the report.
But Elizabeth doesn’t take it lying down. I’ll admit my ignorance of the big Ghana trip. I thought this was a plot that ended in, if not tragedy, than at least embarrassment. The Queen felt stung by being seen as a “puppet” and wants to upstage Jackie’s ability to smooth things over for the Americans in Paris. So she makes an ill-considered jaunt to an African country that's been sidling up to the Soviets in a bid that all of her advisors, formal and informal counsel against. Ghana President Nkrumah’s self-aggrandizing reception of her only further suggests it’s a grievous error and she’s being used.
Only then, she dances. I’ll admit, in an episode that's fairly blunt, it's hard for me to perceive how a simple foxtrot is able to win over Ghana’s leader back to the Commonwealth’s side. But as with the Kennedys, it’s a hoot to see stuffy British functionaries fret like schoolgirls over their beloved monarch daring to do a box-step. And taken generously, you can read it as the Queen being willing to show respect to another leader, relax and let out some of that personality that Lord Altrincham implored her to demonstrate. Even if it was mostly for show, you can see Elizabeth practically glowing at the gesture’s success, a subtle message to her arrival in Washington that two can play at this game.
Except things are not so wonderful for Jackie, despite Elizabeht’s image of her. That's what I most appreciate about the episode -- the reveal that each woman puts the other on a pedestal to some degree, and that each struggles to see the ways in which they’re both fighting against the same forces. It’s no coincidence that the direction and editing focused on Elizabeth during the Kennedys’ visit to London mirrors the direction and editing focused on Jackie at one of JFK’s speeches. The same subtle looks and worries about a wandering eye, the same fears that she’s being humiliated by her husband’s attention to their women, reveal that however much there's a perceived rivalry, Jaqueline and Elizabeth are in much the same place.
(As an aside, it has to be said -- I’m a big fan of Michael C. Hall from Dexter and Six Feet Under, but he is pretty awful as JFK. His accent sounds atrocious, and his acting style here seems dissonant from the other performers in The Crown.)
Jackie learns from her husband (who gives Philip a run for his money in assholery), that the whole Ghana trip was spurred by Jackie’s comments. Again, the show writes it all on the screen ehr, but I appreciate that knowing ehr comments got back to Elizabeth makes Jacki want to express her contrition.
The differences in presentation between the two women’s first meeting and their second is striking. The tour of Buckingham is reserved, intimate, personal. The latter reception at Windsor Castle is grandiose, formal, showy. One was to invite someone in. The other was to show off the weight of your office. This is Elizabeth not trying to be the bigger person, but instead to be the grander person, feigning an uncaring air about Jackie’s statements, even as everything from the dolled up guards to the formal tea service to the slathering of jam on crumpets screams “I’m confidently better than you.”
Only this time, it’s Jackie who opens up. She talks about her own hardships with Elizabth, intimating the troubles at home and the reason she was so apt to want to shine in Paris. She talks about the jealousy she dealt with from her spouse, with hints of abuse. She speaks of being basically drugged against her will, all giving Elizabeth an insight into the plight of this person whom she’d formerly seen as a mean demigod. And most importantly, for my purposes anyway, Jackie expresses her regret because of how much she admires Elizabeth -- for her grace, for her leadership, for being , in so many ways, all the things that Jackie fears she herself isn’t. There's a subtle implication that on both sides of the equation, these efforts to outshine or put down was a product of each woman looking at the other, and feeling less than.
That is profound and pathos-ridden. As I’ve said before, I see the central mission of The Crown to be to reveal the underlying humanity of these distant figures. And it’s hard to imagine what could do that better than showing that even these exalted, iconic women feel measured by one another, pitted against one another, envious of one another, when each is facing battles public and private that give them common cause and common understanding. It is, like so much on this show, a metonym for broader societal changes and societal pathologies that are still with us today.
The end result of it all is sympathy and a desire to support one another. It doesn’t excuse Philip, but I take Elizabeth’s quip on happiness to indicate that while she still bristles at Philip’s flirty behavior and general unruliness behind the scenes, she recognizes in Jackie that it can be worse. And so when those grim events of 1963 take place, she sees Jackie’s strength and defiance in the famous deliberate choice to wear the same outfit with her husband’s blood on it. She uses the levers of state to pay tribute to her and to her loss. And she writes a personal letter, not as a rival, but as a friend, as one of the few people who can understand what it’s like to feel the pressures of that envied but unenviable position, as an icon, and as a woman.
Therein rests the cinch. With the weight of gendered expectations, both of these admired women feel like they don’t measure up and yearns for the other’s life. But when they get to see it up close, truly understand what it entails, in the end, all they can feel is kinship.
Mathew Goode is an excellent actor, I like him, but he's completely miscast in this, sadly
[7.3/10] This is a weird episode. It seems meant as a resolution to the marital difficulty storyline that's been percolating through the opening of this season. The shit finally hits the fan, as the Parkers’ divorce goes public and suddenly the shining good feelings that seemed to wash over both Elizabeth and Philip are overwhelmed by the torrent of rumors and speculation that follows in that wake.
The problem is that The Crown all but gave away the game in the opening of the season. We already saw Elizabeth and Philip sniping at each other in the aftermath of all this as the opening scene of the season. So there’s not much in the way of dramatic tension here. We know that things will explode. We don’t know exactly how, but given what was set up in the prior two episodes, it’s not hard to guess. SO much of this episode feels like playing out the string.
There is some personal investment in seeing Elizabeth react to Philp’s affairs not just being a personal challenge, but now being a public humiliation that she’s forced to deal with and have paraded around in the papers. Once again, since The Queen must be reserved in everything, seeing Claire Foy emote or betray clear hurt, anger, and bewilderment as this state of affairs, while putting on an air of placidity on the surface makes for a masterclass of acting.
Otherwise, though, there’s a lot of shots of people looking pensive on beautiful vistas, or a score of grand drama playing over a tabloid newspaper story. As much as I admire the production design and impeccable cinematography of The Crown, it all starts to feel like a bit much.
I also find Philip’s reaction to Mike Parker kind of odd. The tenor isn’t “Well, we’re both shits and it got out. Sorry, but you have to take the fall on this.” Instead, it’s for him to chastise Mike for writing about it and “breaking the rules.” It’s not crazy behavior from a self-absorbed philanderer like Philip, but I don’t know. Something about the presentation makes it feel like the show’s on his side at least a little, and I have trouble sympathizing with the side of “Shame on you for writing an indiscreet letter that shined a light on our misdeeds.”
That said, strangely enough, I found the non-royal parts of this one much more interesting. I’ll admit my ignorance of modern English political history once more. But purely within the confines of the show, I find the persona of Anthony Eden fascinating. The idea that he wasted his best years in Churchill’s shadow, waiting for the man to retire, and by the time he was too desperate and in too ill-health to make an impact as Prime Minister is its own kind of tragedy.
Elizabeth seems to recognize that. And while the man’s fiery speeches show he’s already doomed, you get the sense that he was played by a conniving operator in Harold MacMillan, which only makes his downfall seem more like a sad end. Despite his flaws and mistakes, he gets a certain absolution from the Queen for his predicament, which makes us apt to sympathize with him too. It doesn’t excuse, you know, an unnecessary war and supply crisis that he had a firm hand in, but it makes him an interesting and pathos-ridden character on a personal level.
ALso outside of the explicitly royal circle, Eileen Parker is kind of my hero. I’ve made no secret of my disdain for prickly Tommy Lascelles. So seeing him try to come out of retirement to lean on ehr to delay making any public announcement of the divorce, only for her to tell him off as a shill and a sucker, is a hell of a hoorah for me as a viewer.
More substantively though, despite sympathizing with Elizabeth, I like the way she kind of tells of The Queen even more. I’ll confess, at one point in this episode, I told my wife that it was hard to take some of this interpersonal conflict as seriously as high drama when there are legitimate national and international crises going on just beyond the Queen’s windows. So there’s something roundly satisfying about the Queen personally asking this (I think?) commoner to delay her announcement as her favor, only to be told that she’s already suffered through years of any unhappy marriage as a “favor” t o the Crown, so as not to disrupt thing during Margaret and Peter’s to-do, and that Elizabeth is ignorant of how many such royal “favors” have wrecked lives and marriages to date.
I kind of love that. The interpersonal issues among the royals are interesting from a television narrative perspective. But I like Eileen’s part of this story as an acknowledgement and rebuke that such drama rests atop real people, who aren't insulated by the same kind of wealth and privilege, who have to live their far more regular lives in the shadow of the monarchy’s needs and pleasures. To have some say “enough is enough” and do what they need to do for their own sanity and well-being in that situation is courageous and low-key inspiring.
All that said, I do feel for Elizabeth in this. It’s not subtle, but I like the scene where she welcomes the new prime minister who laments “Eden’s War”, only for the Queen to balk a little, remind MacMillan that he supported the war, and make the point that one must “clean up their own mess.” She’s clearly dressing down MacMillan when she means to dress down Philip, who’s inconveniently absent. But I like that as a nice bit of psychological projection, showing how the personal bleeds into the political.
That said, I don’t know how I feel about the resolution to all of this. The conversation between Elizabeht and Pihlip in Lisbon is still an excellent bit of acting and dialogue-crafting. But it doesn’t have that much more power now than it did in the season premiere. We already knew that Philip had been having affairs. The firm details don’t matter that much. So while I don’t mind watching it again, it’s not as if the context changes much the second time around.
But what I find particularly odd is that the solution to the problem is...giving Philip the royal title of prince? Okay, I guess? The dialogue tries to dress it up, basically saying that Philip wants a title to command some respect from the palace stagehands who infantilize and micromanage him. But it’s a strange ransom to not cheat on your wife, especially since Philip seemed to already have his “Come to Jesus” moment about the error of his ways in the last episode.
I don’t know how it solves anybody’s problems. Maybe that's the point. Maybe it doesn’t, and we get plenty more of this stuff in the episodes to come. (I wouldn't really look forward to that -- three episodes is plenty.) But considering it’s the climax these three episodes have been building too, the connection between the marital issues the Windsors have been aching and the answer of basically giving Pihlip a promotion seems strained. (Plus hey, I’m sure it’s true-to-life, but it doesn’t help that Philip looks pretty darn silly in his floofy crown and furry cape.)
His closing conversation with Mike is a little more interesting -- an acknowledgement that a certain era is over. And the commentary about Elizabeth’s views of her children as mere appendages of the crown, reminders of her own death and replacement, is intriguing as a possible future tack toward exploring that part of her world -- something that's been mostly kept to the side until now. But the suggestion of more kids as a response to all this also feels like a peculiar connection to make.
Now look, this is history (at least kind of) not fiction. The writers are stuck with the events as they happened. But the way they draw lines between personal or psychological reactions and major public developments lacks a certain narrative catharsis. Framing matters. Juxtaposition matters. The suggestion of cause and effect matters. People are strange creatures. Their choices and reactions don’t always fit neatly into narrative boxes or straightforward plots. But as a three-episode arc at least, The Crown struggles to weave its historical facts into a comprehensible, meaningful, or complete story.
[7.6/10] It’s nice to get an episode focused on Philip’s personal journey. He’s had subplot before, but making him the protagonist for an episode allows the series to dig deeper, explore what’s going through his mind with more conviction. I haven't loved The Crown’s Philip as a person, but I have found him fascinating as a character: a compelling mix of personal shittery but professionally in favor of royal reform, with a good smartass wit to go with it. It’s too much to call him an antihero, but he has enough of a mix of good and bad qualities to make him stand out enough to support the hour.
What I find particularly engrossing about “A Company of Men” is that, by god, the time away really did settle Philip. I don’t know if it’s exactly in the way that either Elizabeth or the Queen Mother intended. But by hook or by crook, he comes back not merely chastened from the experience, but appreciative of what he has and even homesick. I imagine the real life Philp’s transition wasn’t nearly as neat or cinema-ready (if he had such a transition at all). But as a character story, I love the idea of someone going away only to realize the value of what they left behind.
To the point, as another character describes it, Philip and his private secretary, Mike, are on what is basically a “five month stag party.” They pal around with the seamen aboard the royal yacht. They canoodle with the local indigenous population, which is uncomfortable at multiple levels. They smirk through various official functions and make goo goo eyes at reporters and just generally act like frat boy pricks.
It causes trouble at home. And in an episode that puts the spotlight away from Buckingham Palace, it’s nice to see someone only tangentially connected to the Royal Family (at best) get to lead the B-story. Mike’s wife, Eileen Parker, has had enough and is ready to file for divorce, only to find that she needs hard proof of Mike’s infidelity or worse to be able to get one.
I like the choice to show her trials and travails to wrangle what ought to be hers by right on multiple levels. For one, it’s a fascinating case study of the institutional thumb on the scales of marriage in the 1950s. For another, it’s a good vehicle to explore the culture that permitted, if not promoted, this sort of behavior for powerful men and left few avenues for their spouses to do anything about it. For a third, it shows the royal apparatus that sees one woman’s visit to a solicitor work its way through a byzantine collection of amateur tennis players and ladies who lunch back to the Queen’s private secretaries. And it neatly sets in motion the letter that presumably set up the blow-up between Philip and Elizabeth that opened the season despite Philiip’s apparent change of heart at the end of this episode.
That change of heart comes from a reflection on his own childhood and difficult life that's prompted by the reporter who used some long distance flirting to set up a veritable journalistic ambush. I like the show highlighting the fact that Philip’s own father had his mother committed and then abandoned the family to take up with his mistress. The revelation both establishes that Philip didn't exactly have the best role model himself for being a good partner, and it forces him to reflect on how that situation made him feel as a son, in a way he doesn't want to repeat.
So when we see a little bit of nobility from him, using his status to rescue and return a local sailor, it’s cause to reflect. He sees a father welcomed home. We see him look at happy children, basking in joy with their parents. We see him...implied to take advantage of the indigenous’ women’s generosity. So it’s nice that the show doesn't simply pretend that he woke up one morning and completely changed his ways. But the experience gives him a lot to think about.
One of my favorite scenes in the show happens when Philip and Elizabaeth trade Xmas radio addresses. Both of them can’t exactly speak frankly with an audience of millions. But each also expresses their love and longing for one another amid their separation. The fact that they’re unable to connect by phone makes this one of the few opportunities to speak when they know the other will be listening. Philip speaks about his regret and missing his family, understanding what he has, even if it’s not in so many words. And Elizabaeth’s revised opening statement that basically gives him an open invitation, is reservedly and unreservedly sweet, in that characteristically English way. Taken with her note, it reminds him that whatever the flaws of the family he grew up in, he has a new one, and the chance for it to be a better one.
Obviously, there’s still storm clouds on the horizon. But despite the rocky waters to come, it’s nice to see smartmouthed, bristling Philip have a chance to pause, reflect, and reevaluate, and maybe strive to do better than his own father ever did for his family.
I'll start off by saying that I did enjoy this movie, and I'm satisfied with the experience it gave me.
Other than that, I'm a little disappointed in the way the story is told.
the first half of the movie is extremely confusing. The pacing is so fast, it felt like watching the trailer of the movie instead of the actual picture. It was such a bizarre experience, I really was wondering why was it going so incredibly fast, it was super hard to keep up and grasp all the info since I didn't actually know Elvis's story at all before this movie.
Also, the scene where he is walking on the street and Doja cat starts playing, no. Just no. It doesn't mix AT ALL with the rest of the movie, it's so out of place in my opinion. Thank God it was pretty much the only moment when they went modern with the music, the rest was kept in line with Elvis style.
So, first half of the movie, really confusing, most of the info felt like it was thrown at my face instead of told and the cinematography felt really intrusive.
Second half of the movie? It got better, because they actually took their time, focusing on less events and giving them their due screen time. Narrating stuff with more calm and detail, the scenes definitely felt more developed and important, the way the first half of the movie should have been told pretty much.
Overall it's a good movie, the story gives a decent look into Elvis.
The actor for Elvis is insane, he looks precisely like him, he acts and moves like him, I've seen videos after the movie and the amount of detail is insane.
It's a worthy experience, but the first half of the movie should really be slowed down A LOT.
Maybe something inferior to the first, but just as entertaining and Angelina Jolie continues to do just as well.
A shark is coming and Lara gives her a punch, very realistic :-)
I think this is my favourite show at the moment. There was a period where I was watching this (The Good Friend, as my sister and I stupidly refer to it) as well as Big Little Lies and Feud, and I couldn't have been happier. Strong, female-led drama is what I crave in a TV show (one of the stereotypically gay things about me). This season has been a belter, as well. They're playing with the form of television, having started to break the mould set by network television in the first couple of seasons, now they are going all out to see how far they can push the medium, and still tell a compelling, dramatic and at times, hysterically funny story.
The confrontation referred to in the episode title is just one of the moments where the show breaks out of traditional television narrative to great effect. There are odd moments when people start singing (I can't even begin to understand what was going on with Michael Sheen singing the Jackson Five song "I'll Be There" over the closing moments of a recent episode), and real-world back stories to the events in the show are told in song, with accompanying animation. These disparate elements really should not work together, but somehow the whole is greater than the sum of its parts (and the parts are already fairly heavyweight, amazing cast, showrunners honed on a decade of network television, being let loose on a niche streaming service).
Even if you never really got into The Good Wife, this show is still worth a look.
If you are, like me, in Australia, The Good Fight is available weekly on SBS.
https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/program/the-good-fight
there is something so awfully interesting about lucy and fallon to me. I would read a whole novel on that dynamic
Music in the movie is brilliant, I can't wait for the soundtrack to come out. The movie in itself is very good. Artsy, but you'd expect that from Jarmusch. It's still worth the watch. It's not a typical, trashy vampyre movie, and I love that. I like the story, the way it's told, and the acting is superb (Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston are perfect for their roles). The only downside is it's very slow-paced.
This was as good an episode as the show is when it's at its best. They handled the time jump well and in contrast to last season this premiere sets a clear direction for what's to come next and makes the show's themes and plot progression a lot tighter. Something that majorly flawed last season.
9.2/10. There's a line in Season 8 that feels like the show's mission statement. Ted's describing a german television show as big comedy, but points out that you still really care about the characters. And I feel like that's HIMYM at its best, balancing goofy, out there humor and structural experimentation with grounded, human moments, and that's basically what each of the stories here were.
The story of Marshall trying to keep he and Lily's "pause" going as long as possible, including trying to "bang his wife to sleep" is a pretty zany sitcom plot. But the premise has juice in it, and it has a lot of great comedic performances from both Jason Segel (especially when talking to himself) and Alyson Hannigan. But then they unpause, and you get this raw, kind of ugly fight between the two of them, where Marshall brings up Lily leaving for San Francisco and (most shockingly to me) calls her dream of being an artist "a hobby." Lily is visibly hurt by all of this, and talks about Marshall's broken promises and the extremely legitimate point that he lost the right to have them calmly discuss this when he agreed to become a judge without talking to her about it. It's a legitimate conflict of conflicting dreams, and that makes Lily's storm out feel meaningful and not just a stunt. The pause/unpause dynamic represents the show's ability to go back and forth between those painfully real moments and the broad comedy perfectly.
The same is true in the Barney/Ted/Robin storyline. The idea of reaching a level of drunkenness that you basically become a passive truthteller is pure sitcom hokum, and yet the show has so much fun with it. From callbacks to his claims to sleeping with secretaries of state to the recurring bit about Barney and Ted's mom to the whole ring bear(er) fake out, the show uses a pretty exaggerated narrative device to good comedic measure. Turning the reveal of what Barney's job is into a tale of him getting revenge on the guy who stole his girlfriend and prompted him to become "awesome" is a little too tidy for my tastes, but Barney's job has always been a pretty outsized part of the show, so I'm okay with it having an outsized, pretty convenient resolution.
But then the show stops using that device for comedy and starts using it for character. Robin and Barney have always been a hard sell for me as a viewer, but when Ted asks Barney how he's doing with the whole wedding, and Barney says that he's nervous but good, that he always felt a little broken but that he doesn't feel that way with Robin, and that he loves her and will do everything he can to show it, you'd have to have a heart of ice not to be at least a little moved by that. Maybe it's just that I have the same feelings about Mrs. Bloom, but however convenient and unlikely the truth serum device is, hearing these as Barney's true honest feelings about the woman he's marrying helps make their relationship at least feel like something you want to root for, even if the show hasn't exactly earned or proven that the two of them can work.
But more importantly, it's a great example of how this show can take something it uses to wring humor out of a pretty wacky set up and then turn it around to make you care about the characters and their hopes and dreams and damage a little bit more. It's the reason that this show was something more than just a gimmick, or a flash and the pan, or a series that gave into its worst impulses of lazy humor and convoluted plotting. It's a show that knows how to go big and zany, and how to go small and personal, and that ability lets the show move me even as it nears the end of its run here.
8.2/10. So this has most of the things I hated from "The Final Page": implausibility issues, people lying to those they claim to love, and characters intentionally making each other miserable. So why do I like this so much better?
There's a few reasons. The firs and easiest is that his is supposed to be for laughs, rather than the flashpoint for people deciding to get married. Setting up this elaborate scheme to give Barney the best night of his life by giving him the worst night of his life in order to prank him is a surprisingly fun premise. This isn't an attempt to trick Barney into marrying anyone or the thing that convinces him someone is right for him; it's just a wild and wacky lark, which makes it easier to swallow.
(It's also just one night of terror for him, not days and episodes of it.)
Also, it flows the right direction. I like that Robin is the architect of this because it's one of the few things in the past few seasons that have shown that she actually "gets" Barney. It makes way more sense that Barney would be impressed and enthused at an elaborate scheme to fool him than that Robin would be convinced to marry him by his pulling a similar trick.
And last, but certainly not least, it's damn funny in the process. Bringing back Quinn was a nice choice, and the idea of her putting on a show for everyone but Barney was amusing. (I have to admit, I'm still a little Team Quinnson). Pairing up Robin with Barney's Mom and showing them talking about sex was broad but enjoyable awkward humor. Ted and Marshall arguing over who should be the hostage and other details of the plan was cute. And bringing in Ralph Maccio, who, to Barney's chagrin, is a lot like him despite his hatred, and then revealing that the clown was the "true" Karate Kid the whole time was a neat little reveal.
Overall, this was a fun lark that, in contrast to "The Robin," new how to play its scheming for fun rather than for drama.
