Skip to main content

The Latest Season of The Crown: Not My Favorite

 





I recently binged my way through....

The Crown Season 5 on Netflix: Diana's interview, Prince Charles' breakdancing, and more. (slate.com)

It was very well done. As the show moves through the decades, the cast keeps changing. So for example the part of Queen Elizabeth II was played by Claire Foy when she was a young woman, seasons 1-2, by Olivia Colman at greater age (seasons 3-4), and now by Imelda Staunton in season 5. 

Staunton is best known, or has been best known until now, as one of the great villainesses of the Harry Potter books, Dolores Umbridge. 

Staunton has not dislodged Colman as my personal favorite of the Elizabeths here. It was Colman who played off against Margaret Thatcher (Gillian Anderson) in some epic scenes, and against the younger version of Diana, Princess of Wales (as played by in season 4 by Emma Corrin).  Those three actresses had a great dynamic triangle going in that fourth season.

The fifth?  Thatcher is gone. Neither John Major nor Tony Blair offers a dramatic foil of analogous weight. And  Elizabeth Debicki is not as stunning a Diana as Corrin was. 

Nonetheless, the material is gripping, even where some liberties are taken with it. 

Labels:

Comments

  1. Paul D. Van PeltNovember 17, 2022 at 6:11 PM

    Yes. When life imitates art, there is room for forgiveness. When things go the other way 'round, there is too much room for misinformation and/or; historical revisionism. This evening, a local figure was on the News. He talked about political change. Where recently we may have seen or read commentary referring to scare quotes ('....'), this man called them: air quotes. I had not heard that before. Don't know where he got it. He has been in state politics for several decades.
    Maybe, too long?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
17 comments
Read more

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...
4 comments
Read more