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I finished watching The prisoner of the Chateau d'If, and did finally feel something (and there were a couple of songs that I actually liked, though I'm not sure why there were any songs in it at all, as this isn't a musical and there were only a handful of random songs at wide intervals throughout). The reason why there seemed to be "an awful lot of plot to be covered in the final episode" turns out to be that it is much longer than the other two, which are about 65 minutes each while this one runs about ninety minutes...
Even so it still seems quite rushed, and I don't see the point of including such characters as Valentine de Villefort and Maximilian Morrel when the subplot involving them has been entirely removed (also an issue, as I recall, with the Robert Donat version!) I was able to follow more of what was going on in this episode thanks mainly to my familiarity with the original plot, although where departures from this took place I was quickly confused. I assumed the mysterious man in the bushes who attempts to shoot Dantès after the abortive duel with Albert was Fernand (and wondered if there would be a final uncanonical but cinematic face-off between the two older men); but apparently (he was pretty unrecognisable behind all that greenery) it wasn't Fernand at all, in which case I have not the slightest idea who he was or what he was doing there :-p
(The Internet Movie Firearms database refers to him as
"Count de Morcerf's trusted person (uncredited)"!)
I still don't understand why the part of the young Edmond was apparently doubled with that of Albert de Morcerf, and whether this was supposed to be plot-significant. I don't think Mercedes says anything about it during her confrontation scene with Edmond, although I can't work out exactly what she does say :-(
It did occur to me that it is an extraordinary coincidence in Monte-Cristo's favour that the wife of Danglars should just happen to have had an adulterous affair with de Villefort of all people, when the two men had no connection with one another other than being quite separately involved in Dantès' arrest -- but that element is Dumas' own over-convenient contrivance!
I found myself presented by YouTube with a compilation of all the songs included on the soundtrack of the *real* sequel to the 'Soviet Musketeers', i.e. songs for Mordaunt and the characters in "Twenty Years After". Just as with my initial acquaintance with promotional discs for "Love Never Dies" and indeed Lloyd Webber's "Sunset Boulevard", I had to guess from a list of uncredited performances who sang which song and where it fitted into the plot, and given the amount of guesswork involved in making anything out of Russian lyrics that are often highly poetic and allusive if and when you get to see them written down, I didn't have a lot of confidence in my guesses! But I did generally like the songs, so I probably have a viewing of that film in my future at some point, however much of its dialogue I am inevitably going to fail to understand :-(
YouTube also linked me to a collection of songs which were apparently *removed* from the soundtrack of "D'Artagnan and the Three Musketeers", e.g. a song for the nuns at the Carmelite convent when Milady arrives there. I didn't gather whether these formed part of a stage version before or after the film's release, or were cut from the original soundtrack; the good(?) news is that it was definitely an improvement to omit them, I'm afraid :p The song of the nuns is one of the more appealing numbers, but the majority of them don't seem to be a patch on the songs that were actually included in the film, which is already pretty densely studded with musical numbers, and using the 'extra' music would just have slowed the running time to very questionable gain. They definitely kept the best ones!
I watched the first episode of the BBC's new drama "This City is Ours", mainly because it *was* the first episode and I often miss the beginnings of things and then have no interest in watching the remainder. But I shan't be bothering with any further episodes, I'm afraid. Thanks to thick accents and Method mumbling, the experience was uncannily similar to watching unsubtitled Soviet drama (not aided by the fact that there turned out to be *two* separate dodgy characters with squished faces and beards), and I spent quite a lot of time trying to work out who was who and what was supposed to be going on, without ever coming to care about what happened to the characters. Nothing like as good as Better, the last BBC drama about a crime family that I watched...
The second half/series of Sous le Signe des Mousquetaires was actually very intriguing as a set-up, because since they had (like the BBC "Musketeers") abandoned canon and were apparently writing their own material using the established characters and setting, pretty much anything was up for grabs and you couldn't tell which way the story was going to come out. In the first few episodes the supervillain, the Iron Mask, actually ends up starting to look very much like a classic swashbuckler hero, dancing around evading the forces of the law, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, calling for an uprising against oppressive government, defeating multiple opponents at once with his sword when they think they have him cornered, and always escaping miraculously at the last minute. By contrast our heroes find themselves representing the forces of oppression against the populace, while d'Artagnan actually gets himself thrown out of the Musketeers by bringing disgrace on them through his over-enthusiastic attempts at uncovering the Iron Mask's true identity, with Treville currently still being furious with him for the humiliation he and his men had to suffer. Meanwhile the Cardinal is trying and failing to deal with this new threat, and is being made the victim of plots rather than instigating them.
It gets a little more predictable once it is established that yes, the greedy merchant Manson actually *is* in league with the Iron Mask and Milady (the unexpected scene where he, too, is robbed by the Iron Mask and demands justice from the Cardinal turning out to be simply a feint), and yes, Milady is the villain again -- although it's not entirely clear which of the masters she is purporting to serve she plans to betray in the end. She is currently spying on Manson for the Cardinal while manipulating the Cardinal for the Iron Mask's benefit, and also claiming that she is going to help Prince Philippe escape the schemes of the Iron Mask and Manson, although this may well be another piece of manipulation to get Philippe to co-operate... because yes, we now have a 'real' Man in the Iron Mask in the shape of an imprisoned twin brother who is for some reason wearing the same iron mask as the supervillain whom he pretty certainly isn't. And the villains have obtained a copy of the King's ball-dress and are clearly planning to carry out a substitution, so slightly disappointingly we are clearly back in canon territory, only with the story of "The Vicomte de Bragelonne" displaced into the reign of Louis XIII instead of that of Louis XIV. (It is a little disconcerting to have mentions of the King's real brother, Gaston d'Orléans, and the plotting of their mother, Marie de Medicis, suddenly cropping up, when they had been completely airbrushed out of history during the preceding series...)
But I still have no idea about the identity of the Iron Mask, who may of course, as the characters have already pointed out, be more than one person doubling up in the same distinctive costume!
At least d'Artagnan has finally confessed to lying to his friends about Milady's supposed death (although Athos nobly points out that, having, as I had suspected, guessed the truth some time previously, the fault was as much his in not speaking out earlier; even though he doesn't share the background of Dumas' character, this animated version of Athos is actually one of the few who looks and feels 'right' to me)
Even so it still seems quite rushed, and I don't see the point of including such characters as Valentine de Villefort and Maximilian Morrel when the subplot involving them has been entirely removed (also an issue, as I recall, with the Robert Donat version!) I was able to follow more of what was going on in this episode thanks mainly to my familiarity with the original plot, although where departures from this took place I was quickly confused. I assumed the mysterious man in the bushes who attempts to shoot Dantès after the abortive duel with Albert was Fernand (and wondered if there would be a final uncanonical but cinematic face-off between the two older men); but apparently (he was pretty unrecognisable behind all that greenery) it wasn't Fernand at all, in which case I have not the slightest idea who he was or what he was doing there :-p
(The Internet Movie Firearms database refers to him as
"Count de Morcerf's trusted person (uncredited)"!)
I still don't understand why the part of the young Edmond was apparently doubled with that of Albert de Morcerf, and whether this was supposed to be plot-significant. I don't think Mercedes says anything about it during her confrontation scene with Edmond, although I can't work out exactly what she does say :-(
It did occur to me that it is an extraordinary coincidence in Monte-Cristo's favour that the wife of Danglars should just happen to have had an adulterous affair with de Villefort of all people, when the two men had no connection with one another other than being quite separately involved in Dantès' arrest -- but that element is Dumas' own over-convenient contrivance!
I found myself presented by YouTube with a compilation of all the songs included on the soundtrack of the *real* sequel to the 'Soviet Musketeers', i.e. songs for Mordaunt and the characters in "Twenty Years After". Just as with my initial acquaintance with promotional discs for "Love Never Dies" and indeed Lloyd Webber's "Sunset Boulevard", I had to guess from a list of uncredited performances who sang which song and where it fitted into the plot, and given the amount of guesswork involved in making anything out of Russian lyrics that are often highly poetic and allusive if and when you get to see them written down, I didn't have a lot of confidence in my guesses! But I did generally like the songs, so I probably have a viewing of that film in my future at some point, however much of its dialogue I am inevitably going to fail to understand :-(
YouTube also linked me to a collection of songs which were apparently *removed* from the soundtrack of "D'Artagnan and the Three Musketeers", e.g. a song for the nuns at the Carmelite convent when Milady arrives there. I didn't gather whether these formed part of a stage version before or after the film's release, or were cut from the original soundtrack; the good(?) news is that it was definitely an improvement to omit them, I'm afraid :p The song of the nuns is one of the more appealing numbers, but the majority of them don't seem to be a patch on the songs that were actually included in the film, which is already pretty densely studded with musical numbers, and using the 'extra' music would just have slowed the running time to very questionable gain. They definitely kept the best ones!
I watched the first episode of the BBC's new drama "This City is Ours", mainly because it *was* the first episode and I often miss the beginnings of things and then have no interest in watching the remainder. But I shan't be bothering with any further episodes, I'm afraid. Thanks to thick accents and Method mumbling, the experience was uncannily similar to watching unsubtitled Soviet drama (not aided by the fact that there turned out to be *two* separate dodgy characters with squished faces and beards), and I spent quite a lot of time trying to work out who was who and what was supposed to be going on, without ever coming to care about what happened to the characters. Nothing like as good as Better, the last BBC drama about a crime family that I watched...
The second half/series of Sous le Signe des Mousquetaires was actually very intriguing as a set-up, because since they had (like the BBC "Musketeers") abandoned canon and were apparently writing their own material using the established characters and setting, pretty much anything was up for grabs and you couldn't tell which way the story was going to come out. In the first few episodes the supervillain, the Iron Mask, actually ends up starting to look very much like a classic swashbuckler hero, dancing around evading the forces of the law, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, calling for an uprising against oppressive government, defeating multiple opponents at once with his sword when they think they have him cornered, and always escaping miraculously at the last minute. By contrast our heroes find themselves representing the forces of oppression against the populace, while d'Artagnan actually gets himself thrown out of the Musketeers by bringing disgrace on them through his over-enthusiastic attempts at uncovering the Iron Mask's true identity, with Treville currently still being furious with him for the humiliation he and his men had to suffer. Meanwhile the Cardinal is trying and failing to deal with this new threat, and is being made the victim of plots rather than instigating them.
It gets a little more predictable once it is established that yes, the greedy merchant Manson actually *is* in league with the Iron Mask and Milady (the unexpected scene where he, too, is robbed by the Iron Mask and demands justice from the Cardinal turning out to be simply a feint), and yes, Milady is the villain again -- although it's not entirely clear which of the masters she is purporting to serve she plans to betray in the end. She is currently spying on Manson for the Cardinal while manipulating the Cardinal for the Iron Mask's benefit, and also claiming that she is going to help Prince Philippe escape the schemes of the Iron Mask and Manson, although this may well be another piece of manipulation to get Philippe to co-operate... because yes, we now have a 'real' Man in the Iron Mask in the shape of an imprisoned twin brother who is for some reason wearing the same iron mask as the supervillain whom he pretty certainly isn't. And the villains have obtained a copy of the King's ball-dress and are clearly planning to carry out a substitution, so slightly disappointingly we are clearly back in canon territory, only with the story of "The Vicomte de Bragelonne" displaced into the reign of Louis XIII instead of that of Louis XIV. (It is a little disconcerting to have mentions of the King's real brother, Gaston d'Orléans, and the plotting of their mother, Marie de Medicis, suddenly cropping up, when they had been completely airbrushed out of history during the preceding series...)
But I still have no idea about the identity of the Iron Mask, who may of course, as the characters have already pointed out, be more than one person doubling up in the same distinctive costume!
At least d'Artagnan has finally confessed to lying to his friends about Milady's supposed death (although Athos nobly points out that, having, as I had suspected, guessed the truth some time previously, the fault was as much his in not speaking out earlier; even though he doesn't share the background of Dumas' character, this animated version of Athos is actually one of the few who looks and feels 'right' to me)