Change Your Image
wstephenlee
Reviews
Billy the Kid (2022)
Did anyone look at a map?
This isn't really a review and I am not going to rate this series. I just started the first episode and had to wonder whether the makers regard the audience as idiots. The wagon traveling from New York City to Coffeyville, Kansas, somehow managed to pass in the shadow of the Rockies, and the episode set Coffeyville in a gulch between high hills. Travelers from New York would have had to go the long way around to get anywhere near the Rockies, and the terrain around Coffeyville is very flat. And why would anyone hire a wagon to take them from New York City to Coffeyville in the late 19th-century, anyway. The town literally sprung up next to a rail line around 1869. The story may be great for all I know, but the geography strains credulity.
Mysterious Circumstance: The Death of Meriwether Lewis (2022)
"Rashomon" on a Tennessee trail
From reading "Undaunted Courage" by Stephen Ambrose, I was acquainted with the suspicious "suicide" of the famous explorer Meriwether Lewis at a Tennessee "tavern." "Mysterious Circumstances" is an exploration of alternative versions of what might have happened, filmed with considerable attention to authenticity in locale and the era. Many historians have accepted the "suicide" version, but Lewis was traveling on a notoriously dangerous trail, and shooting oneself twice and then cutting oneself "from head to foot with a razor" is a suspicious "suicide," to say the least. The various accounts of the same event are evocative of Akira Kurosawa's approach to storytelling in "Rashomon" (1950), the one flaw being that the versions here are not clearly accounts by different witnesses to the same events but are perhaps rooted in later speculation by those who found the accepted version singularly bizarre. The first version depicted in this movie seems to be close to the version that prevailed, essentially by default. And it is, indeed, played as singularly bizarre. Two previous reviewers (action addicts, no doubt) rated this movie 1 star; 11 other previous reviewers rated it 9 or 10 stars. No way does this average 4.8. My quick calculation makes it about 7.6. This film is worth watching if you have more than a juvenile attention span and are intrigued by mystery.
Where the Crawdads Sing (2022)
Not quite plausible
I did not read the novel, so I cannot say how faithful the adaptation was. But I did grow up in the 1950's close enough to the area where it was set to be aware of many dysfunctional, brutalized families living hard scrabble existences in similar circumstances. I doubt an abandoned child would have survived much less flourished as the heroine did, even assuming she avoided that attention and intervention of the welfare authorities. But if you suspended disbelief or were ignorant of the region in that era, the movie was reasonably entertaining. In reality, many of the people would have been a lot rougher and the vernacular a bit less literate and coherent. Even the villain/victim, or maybe especially the villain/victim was just too polished. But I suppose the movie is a harmless fantasy.
Emma. (2020)
Deliberately mannered
I suspect what many viewers didn't quite get was that this version was deliberately "mannered" -- stylized almost to the point of parody but certainly in keeping with the artifice of Jane Austen's clever but mannered prose. As at least the fourth film version of "Emma" since 1995, a different approach was essential, and this somewhat tongue-in-cheek approach worked for me. All the versions since 1995 have strengths and weaknesses in casting and narrative. But this one was quite clever, even if its affectations occasionally seemed a bit over the top.
Pennyworth (2019)
Big, not-so-dumb fun
This isn't really a review, though the series is fun, if you can suspend disbelief and enjoy it for what it is. The actor portraying Alfred Pennyworth may or may not be channeling a young Michael Caine, as so many viewer reviews insist, but he's made up to appear practically a ringer for a young Dirk Bogarde.