The Wild Blog in the West

Oh man.  A few posts ago, I mentioned that I read a major spoiler for the series.  Yep, it was for this.  I started having suspicions that this would be the episode when the previews didn't feature anything heavy.  Edith gets offered a newspaper column!  Ethel burns the souffle!  That meant they were hiding something.  Hmm. I was never as attached to Sybil as many people, mainly because I never felt that the thing that made her most popular -- her total ease with shedding class conventions -- was terribly realistic.  However, she was still a likable character, and her death was a shock that has sent the Internet world reeling.  In reality, Jessica Brown Findlay wanted to leave to pursue a movie career, while Allen Leech (Branson) wanted to stay, so it makes sense that Fellowes couldn't just send the Bransons to Ireland to disappear forever.  Still, it does feel as though Sybil left behind so much unfinished business... not the least ...

I briefly thought of entitling this "Men Are Stupid," but that didn't seem quite fair, since at least Matthew was intelligent in this episode. What to say about Lord Grantham.  I haven't begun to dip into all of the supplemental reading for  Downton Abbey , so I don't know whether Julian Fellowes meant for Lord Grantham to come across as a useless tool.  But surely some of it must be intentional.  He can't have made him that way without thinking, could he?  Could he? Plot Synopsis Despite having a staff far too small to support Downton Abbey even during the best of times, it turns out that Lord Grantham is a wastrel.  Matthew takes a hard look at the books and discovers that the estate is being woefully mismanaged.  Yet when he tries to bring it up to Lord Grantham, the latter manages to dodge the issue.  You almost get the feeling this has happened before.  Maybe that's why Downton apparently has no estate manager -- because he left...

Will Edith never catch a break?  Did Julian Fellowes model her after someone who once ran over his cat?  Because seriously, what the hell? Plot Synopsis The first red flag in this episode is that Edith is happy.  It is now a May 1920, and Downton is busy preparing for her wedding.  "Something in this house is finally about me!" she gushes.  Of course that won't go unpunished. Edith is really excited about the wedding, but her fiance, Sir Anthony Strallan, is still having doubts about their age difference.  Edith tells him repeatedly that she doesn't care that he's older and disabled, that she intends to make him her life's work.  Still, as the wedding day approaches, Sir Anthony's face keeps getting sicker and sicker, which is the second red flag.  Finally he stops the wedding just as it's begun, and tells Edith not to throw her life away tending to him.  Edith is devastated, but Violet tells her not to fight it.  All...

So Shirley MacLaine didn't appear in the first episode until the very end.  Or rather, the very middle, because in the U.S., Episodes 1 and 2 were merged together in a two-hour premiere.  Let's just say her appearance did not live up to the billing. Welcome back, Downton Abbey !  This is the first time I've been able to watch a series as it unfolds.  Since it had been over a year since I last watched the show, I had forgotten many of its positives.  The opening credits, with the urgent "Something important is happening within these walls!" music.  The smooth cutting between the "upstairs" plot lines and the "downstairs" plot lines.  The generally swift pacing.  Of course the weaknesses were also on display, which I will get to in a bit.   Plot Synopsis   In the first "half" of the episode,   Matthew and Mary are preparing for their wedding.  Since Sybil and Branson can't afford to travel from Ireland, Violet secretly ...

Seriously, it bothers me.  At the beginning of Series One, Lord Grantham was 42 years old .  That means he was born in 1870.  Men of that generation tended to grow moustaches and beards when they reached adulthood, like this guy .  Or this guy .  Or these guys .  Once they grew older, they tended to keep their facial hair.  While men of the younger generation , like Matthew or Thomas or Branson, might be clean-shaven, it stretches plausibility that Lord Grantham, Carson, or Bates wouldn't at least have a moustache. There, I said it.  Just had to get it off of my chest. While Downton Abbey has sometimes been criticized for historical inaccuracies, I doubt many people thought of the male characters' facial hair.  Although it's small and unimportant, to me, it's another sign that while Downton Abbey  is history, it's history designed to prevent us from being too uncomfortable.  It's uncommon for grown men in the 21st Century to ...

Just thought that I would give a brief update about my plans to blog Downton Abbey to those who are still interested in reading.  My intention is to have a general post about the show up sometime tomorrow, and then post a critique of each episode the same day the next episode airs.  I don't have enough speed or time, unfortunately, to post a critique soon after each episode airs. That is my plan anyway.  The reality might end up being a little less organized, owing to two things: an unexpected spike in my work load, and the fact that I'm in the final important chapters of my novel and have had a difficult time writing them.  It is only a draft, but I want everything to be good and believable.  So both of these things might take me more time than expected, which means that I might not get my blog posts out like clockwork.  However, I still intend to critique every episode of Downton Abbey Series Three, and I still intend to post content at least once a wee...

So now I've seen Les Miserables twice, and I should be seeing it once or twice more within the next couple of weeks.  I'm happy to report that things that bothered me the first time bothered me less the second time.  Mostly.  I still think that "The Attack on the Rue Plumet" is horribly butchered.  I also didn't warm to Russell Crowe's vocals, but the only parts where I would say he's really bad are the introduction scene with Valjean/Monsieur Madeleine and the "Runaway Cart" scene.  Both call for him to sing some notes that are really out of his range, and he ends up sounding whiny. Even though I was less bothered overall, there are parts that I wish had stayed in:   Parts of the Musical That Should Have Stayed In 1.  "And now I know how freedom feels..."   As I mentioned in the review, changing sung parts to dialogue does nothing to improve the Prologue.  The part where Valjean steals the silver and is caught is handled so ...