But Will There Be Corgis? Thread Where We Discuss Netflix's THE CROWN

https://s30886.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/9-22.jpg

this was the puppet i was put in mind of (not stupid spitting image garbage, fuck that)

my wife watches this so I caught a wee bit last night. thatcher being a class warrior at balmoral and in her cabinet shuffle: this all seems very ahistorical and wrong. thatcher, like heath, obviously petit-bourgeois, and this was a change for the tories who always had an inbred toff patrician at their helm before this period, but I don't really ever remember hearing anything about thatcher railing against the aristos, though I'm sure Dennis made an arsenal of himself in front of the royals

yeah when she was quoting chartist poetry at the Queen I was lolling. This represents a calming in me because a few years back I'd have been swearing and yelling blue murder at the tv.

Instead of some 19 year old squaddie from Castlemilk or some some guy on his way home from painting a fence at a British Army base, this was a rare instance of the IRA blowing up the right people

phil with enaged bared teeth in every scene now, charles turning into a woebegone goblin sculpted from a collapsing rotten pumpkin

enraged tho engaged also works

my wife watches this so I caught a wee bit last night. thatcher being a class warrior at balmoral and in her cabinet shuffle: this all seems very ahistorical and wrong. thatcher, like heath, obviously petit-bourgeois, and this was a change for the tories who always had an inbred toff patrician at their helm before this period, but I don't really ever remember hearing anything about thatcher railing against the aristos, though I'm sure Dennis made an arsenal of himself in front of the royals

Now look here, this revisionist take on Thatcher has already given rise to several Oscar/BAFTA winning performances, so it must be true.

it would have been news to Viscount "Everybody PM needs a Willie" Whitelaw that Thatcher's first cabinet bloodbath of wets was class warfare!

don't know if it has any historical sanction at all but i'm enjoying margaret's instant appalled dislike of -- and targeting of -- thatch, presumably partly to wind up her big sister

she digs up some interesting skeletons in the family closet in ep 7, which was quite unexpected.

if there was any doubt that the Queen Mother isn't Hitler, it all gets sorted in ep 7.

turns out the poem abt it being good to have enemies is indeed one she liked -- apparrently this was mentioned in a bbc dcumentary a while back? -- and that the poet, charles mackay, was indeed a chartist!

(i highly doubt she quoted it at the queen or that she wd have glossed him as a chartist as well as a poem)

also discovered while factcheck-googling: samuel smiles, who she was often compared to (i re his version of victorian values) was also a chartist at one point

as well as a poet, i mean

I stopped last season right before Philip's mother comes on the scene and it kind of seems like she'd make a better biopic subject than her kid or daughter-in-law.

her episodes were my favorites of s3, really beautiful & poignant

Diana Fashion sidebar - good thread showing side by sides of some of the excellent wardrobe recreations (lol at one hilar typo: gingham mispelled/autocorrected as gangam)

So I took the time to match some of the outfits inspired by Princess Diana that The Crown recreated (a thread).

Starting with the yellow overalls.

Also, please give that department all of the awards it deserves. #TheCrown #TheCrownSeason4 #TheCrownNetflix pic.twitter.com/9R49jqu7fH

— Simona (@simona_ka) November 17, 2020

lol the CROWN version of the visible outfit is like a PLAYSCHOOL presenter just abt to introduce charlws to big ted and little ted

I can remember wearing dungarees in the 80's. But of course I wanted to look like oor wullie!

Lots of tories have been moaning this show is so beastly to thatch. One of the BBC Royal correspondents was moaning it was beastly to the Saxe Coburgs. You just can't win in this game!

https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-YNU-12joiVk/WwO27g5dOAI/AAAAAAAAHV4/kuFQh-E9Q6gzhiGPj1OWT5jCbchUjgQsgCLcBGAs/s1600/FB_IMG_1447965984555.jpg

very much loving the far-right freak-out at the (it says here) insulting and inaccurate portrayal of thatch lol: good! cry more u contemptible fvcks

even tho i also think this rendering of thatch is very much out of key with the project and not actually particularly good except as a weird impressionist's sore-thumb stunt-turn for GA

A: bcz MT's dialogue is all tell-not-show text-not-subtext in a way that no one else's is
B: the reading of the early thatcherite project as the final clear-out of a specific narrow upperclass layer (one-nation poshos aka wets) is not wrong!
BUT
i: i doubt MT wd have conflated this layer with the royal family (very different layer, interconnected but different political role)
ii: she wd never have expressed it with such e.p.thompsonite clarity lol (she didn't have a marxist self-analysis of her "alderman's" perspective)
iii: she is known to have been somewhat dramatically obsequious to eiir, this is just chilly plastic performance of that as fakery
iv: which (as of e2) magnifies super-rude margo as the extremely unlikely hero of the piece lol (i mean i enjoyed this but it's bullshit)
C: there is indeed an extreme formal clash between herself's reading of the needful politics in divided times (a unified people! through the monarch's performance and intercession!) and MT's (it's time to go to war on the enemy within)
D: use the "enemies" poem out loud by all means, to dramatise C -- it absolutely states MT's approach to politics and nullifies eiir's (eiir's in this reading blah blah) -- but don't have her announce let alone justify her attraction to it by saying mackay was a chartist (even oddly enuf tho he was)

way way way upthread i was arguing w/tuomas abt why it's good not bad that this show hasn't - as part of its explicative structure -- appointed a figure who stands for our modern critique of the monarchy as an institution. well tbh i think it just did appoint one -- turns out it was thatch all along.

and i was right (and tuomas was wrong lol): this move immediately massively sentimentalises both sides (which is to say distorts them). the point of the project so far has been to explore what it was like inside the disorted reality field, what the values are that enable the distortion, what the distortion turns you into. the idea that maggie and di between them signal with their simultaneous arrival the beginning of the quiet wreckage of eiir's doggedly dutiful conception of her role* is shrewd enough -- and as ever the writing is good at creating seemingly balanced effects while subtly tweaking them in unexpected directions (di's seeming acceptance of the world she's entering and its acceptance of her being the SPOILER ticking time bomb lol)** -- ………

BUT they don't find a way for magz to express her underlying possibly even unconscious role (as achieved via the unfettering of the city, the banks, let management manage etc -- her known intent -- and the shattering of all institutions and movements that stood to contain these forces) except as a bluntly out-out marvel-villain personalised statement of intentions, and a highly anachronistic war on "privilege" that likely existed only as pullulating unexpressed baffled resentment as she actually confronted it when at balmoral

*i'm guessing (as of e2) that this is how s4 as a whole unfolds
**also im imagine di is the spirit of margo's revenge on her sister for decisions made in s1-3

"out-out" = "out-loud" tho works as is also

It's all building towards the 1:48 ep where the issue of sanctions against SA and Magz disdain for these "beastly savages in funny headwear" that is the commonwealth makes her and Bess political enemies ready to go one on one - no blades! Lots of artistic licence taken no doubt, after the excellent Fagan ep and the also moving hereditary one, it felt like a damp squib to me.

a weird impressionist's sore-thumb stunt-turn for GA

Thatcher was a weird impressionist's sore-thumb stunt-turn though.

starting e3 tonight i guess (i have always doubted it could arrive at the recognisable present w/o coming to pieces a bit)

(i don't have high hopes of the project in the medium term, i think it's bitten off more than it's likely to be able to chew, but so far i've been surprised and impressed)

― mark s, Thursday, 15 December 2016 17:14 (three years ago) bookmarkflaglink

incidentally i am tending to read anything peter morgan is quoted as saying as more a sly masking of what he's up to than any kind of reliable or open admission

this sudden rage from the downton-unbothered set isn't bcz of PM's belated leftie heel-turn, it's bcz ppl hasn't been watching remotely carefully since the outset: the smash of forces was always ready immanent from the outset sorry if this offends

xp yes which creates a "behind the mask" issue which neither script nor GA's performance solve in themselves, as well as (only semi-related) a clash of dramatic schools or approaches, which undermine one another

how do you solve a problem like thatchia

I'm three episodes from finishing Season 2 and hope to see y'all in a couple days.

actually come to think of it the behind-the-mask issue is presumably why ALL the portrayals of the various prime ministers have seemed slightly off: successful politician = successful at wearing a mask (to paper over divisions)! but we only get see behind eiir's mask and the other mask-worlds just flash by w/o deep (or any) exploration of similar contradictions

My fave two fictional pms on this have been the two Harolds. And Supermac as a domestic doormat and a cuck was good entertainment.

Churchill was the usual dross.

churchill is simply unplayable now i suspect but choosing a US actor for the role wasn't a terrible idea -- establishes "mask" upfront w/o having to do a lifetime's work giving it backstory -- and it was also fun seeing him repeatedly bested by the child-queen as his mind went lol

tbf it wasn't half as bad as the Oldman vanity project in a Churchill mask, but that is a low bar!

also i liked that the crux of the fog ep was him being horny for his (invented) young secretary who died

lol that was a bit twisted!

some of invented sec's dialogue in that ep was almost as risible as Oldman's Churchill giving a speech on the tube in that very very bad movie!

churchill is simply unplayable now i suspect but choosing a US actor for the role wasn't a terrible idea -- establishes "mask" upfront w/o having to do a lifetime's work giving it backstory

otm -- and Lithgow played FDR in a 1994 TV film lol

i have not watched the oldman-as-old-ma film tbftm ("on the tube" made me think of muriel grey angrily grilling him)

I would love to see Patrick Stewart doing Churchill just because of how terrible and funny it would be!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sikpgjoKVQ

There should be moratorium on Churchill being portrayed on film and television for at least a decade, but I can't blame actors for loving to win awards without having to do much actual acting.

I love that scene when pathetic brat Charles says: I need to talk to you mummy. And she retorts: If this is going to be about your marriage, then stand on your feet like it is the privy council, so we can at least keep it brief.

lol, respect!

4 episodes in and still irritated by how much time characters spend in piss-poorly lit rooms than anything else

I like Rod Taylor (Australian) playing Churchill as a horrible old man in Inglorious Basterds

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5Azs_6uaCA

Oh my god, morto for Diana over the anniversary present. Horrendous.

lol her horrible flat-mates toasting the engagement: "and to one day, not too far away, BEING THE FUCKING QUEEN"

let me wack yalls on the noodle with this giant mace-shaped DRAMATIC IRONY

Yeah, only three episodes in and the heavy-handed HERE IS FORESHADOWING DO YOU SEE???? with the paparazzi and being followed in the car and everything is just getting to be way too much.

i mean tbf not sure how you could do it any other way, that element was always already way too much, we knew that instantly

herself living to be 10,000 yrs old tho, this was not known 40 yrs ago

I mean, sure, but it seems a little ott so far. I much preferred the scenes with her reckoning with the sudden change in her life. Love the scene of her roller skating and the shot of her slouched in the chair, dejectedly watching the kids show.

that mere kids show is the iconic Bagpuss!

charles being played as a wizened pervy beast thinking only of himself (accurate)