Royal Family Documentary: Review and Commentary

My Rating: 2 our of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Not enough of value to see here to make it worth your time.

Royal Family, the 1969 fly-on-the-wall BBC documentary that chronicled a year in the life of Queen Elizabeth II and the royal family, which the Queen banned in 1972 for “cheapening” the royals by removing their mystique, recently resurfaced on YouTube and caused much consternation at Buckingham Palace.

Both Buckingham Palace and the BBC wanted the film to remain under wraps and so Youtube removed it for copyright infringement. Prior to the leak on Youtube, the documentary had also been brought back into the public’s attention this past year by the hit Netflix show The Crown, which dramatized the making of the film and the reaction to it.

Being the ever-intrepid film critic that I am, I tracked the royally blacklisted film down and gave it a gander, and I’m wondering what the Queen is all bent out of shape about.

The film doesn’t “cheapen” the royal family…the thing that has cheapened the royal family has been their sordid, low-rent behavior these past 50 years.

The film’s most shocking and most genuine scene, comes at the end, where Queen Elizabeth II recounts to her family how difficult it was to keep a straight face when meeting the U.S. Ambassador because he looked like “a gorilla”.

I suppose the Queen calling the U.S. Ambassador a gorilla could be seen as a big deal in 1969, but after the last 50 years of royal chicanery, it barely registers as a blip on the radar screen.

For instance, “Gorilla-gate” pales in comparison to Prince Charles being exposed as a spineless (and lacking another piece of vital male anatomy) coward for his treatment of his wife Diana, his affair with Camilla Parker-Bowles and his ugly divorce.

It also pales in comparison to the Prince Andrew-Fergie fiasco and the recent revelations regarding Prince Andrew’s pernicious sexual predation. 

And it isn’t nearly as bad as Prince Harry’s falling for the malignant malcontent Meghan Markle, and then the ensuing embarrassment of Megxit.

While the film closes with the mild chuckle of “Gorilla-gate”, what precedes that is an hour and a half of the most horrifically monotonous and mundane documentation of royal minutiae imaginable.

The most striking thing about the documentary is, like the royal family itself, how painfully dull, contrived, manufactured and repetitive it is.

The film aggressively tries to paint the royals as a “working family” whose family business happens to be being royalty. It incessantly refers to the Queen ‘going back to work’ or even while on holiday, and she seems to be perpetually on holiday, still being ‘on-duty’. What that duty is exactly is never quite clear.

Some of the most unintentionally funny scenes are of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip pretending to do paperwork. Like bad actors they poorly improvise scenes where they blankly look at papers and inanely talk to aides about it…and it’s hysterical. This happened so often it felt like the movie should’ve been titled “The Banality of Busy Work”.

The two of them are also perpetually looking at a bevy of newspapers, but like illiterate extras on a big-budget movie set, they don’t seem to actually read any of them, just scan them looking for pictures of themselves.

To be fair, the Queen does almost come across as human a few times, but the biggest takeaway regarding her is that if dead-eyed, mindless small talk were Olympic sprinting she would be Usain Bolt.

Not surprisingly since he is a pompous blowhard and jackass with a pilot’s license, Prince Philip comes across as a complete pompous blowhard and jackass with a pilot’s license.

As for Prince Charles, the documentary opens with a scene of him, then in his early twenties, water-skiing shirtless. The sight of the pasty Charles, a black hole of anti-charisma, as the allegedly athletic man out on the water in his swim togs isn’t exactly reminiscent of Sean Connery as James Bond as much as Mr. Bean as James Bland.

In a later scene the cartoonishly goofy-looking Charles plays Cello with his youngest brother and it made me think of the in-bred, mental defective hillbilly from Deliverance playing banjo.

The purpose of Royal Family was to humanize the royals and make them relatable to show they’re just like the rest of us. That premise doesn’t fair so well when the Queen goes through her stunning jewelry collection marveling at the glorious history of pillaging that has bequeathed her such impressive accoutrements. 

They also don’t seem very relatable as they castle hop from Buckingham to Balmoral to Windsor and back again, or travel the globe on their giant yacht or personal train.

The documentary isn’t so much ‘Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous’ meets ‘The Real Housewives of Buckingham Palace’ as it is an episode of The Contrived Chronicles of the Cold, Clueless and Criminally Comfortable.

If you like watching spoiled, mindless mannequins smiling vacantly and waving robotically as they live lavish, unearned lives and attend endless ceremonies and pageants in 1969, then Royal Family is for you.

If you prefer robustly absurd comedy mixed with seedy melodrama and sex scandals, then you’re better off skipping Royal Family and watching the daily news coverage of the royal family instead.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Netflix's The Crown is a Mirror of American Politics

Estimated reading Time: 3 minutes 33 seconds

Netflix’s acclaimed drama on the British royal family is back, but it feels eerily reminiscent of the trials and tribulations of the ruling class aristocrats running and ruining America.

The Crown, Netflix’s smash hit royal drama, premiered its much anticipated fourth season last week and I dutifully binged watched the whole thing.

The high-quality historical drama, which follows the travails of Queen Elizabeth II and the rest of the royals, is exquisitely produced, for the most part gloriously acted, reliably entertaining and somewhat perversely addictive.

But maybe I am suffering from presidential election PTSD, but as I watched The Crown I couldn’t help but be triggered into thinking about the horror show that is American politics….most notably because I simply had no one for which to root.

The Crown, like American politics, is populated almost entirely with villains…wicked, corrupt, cold-hearted, duplicitous, self-serving villains.

On one side we have the royal family, which reminds me of the Democrats. The show, like the establishment media here in the U.S., works hard to humanize these entitled elitists but it is a Herculean task for me to empathize with such a bunch of spoiled, self-absorbed, raging mediocrities.

This collection of modern royals is, like the decrepit and deceitful Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, well past their sell-by date.

The Queen, similar to our soon-to-be-crowned commander-in-chief Sleepy Joe Biden, is an empty vessel completely oblivious to reality, who becomes aggressively indignant when confronted with it.

The rest of the royal clan, the abrasive Prince Philip, the boozy Princess Margaret, the bitter Princess Anne and the depraved Prince Andrew, like the greedy harlots in the halls of American power, are arrogant and entitled knobs born on third base acting like they hit a triple.

Princess Diana (masterfully played by the luminous Emma Corrin), is similar to the Democratic firebrand Alexandra Ocassio-Cortez, as she is a young, pretty, dynamic breath of fresh air injected into the stuffy and stilted establishment.

As Ocassio-Cortez is thrown into the deep end of public life she will face the same existential threat as Princess Diana before her…either bend to the establishment’s will or be broken by it. The Crown shows us that Diana was broken by it, but AOC seems to be leaning more toward bending the knee, betraying her principles and kissing the right backside.

Then there is that silver-spooned sad-sack Prince Charles, who, like woke Democrats, mopes around his completely unearned luxurious lifestyle because he can’t be with the horse-faced women he loves, Camilla Parker-Bowles, but instead has to settle for the stunningly beautiful Diana. If ever there was a man who needed a punch in the face and a swift kick in the ass, it is Prince Charles.

As the indignant and self-pitying Charles gets all fussy over his love life like a baby in a wet nappy, I couldn’t help but think of Don Corleone in The Godfather slapping his weepy nephew Johnny Fontaine and telling him to “act like a man!”, something I’ve wanted to do to the whiny Democrats for the last four years.

On the other side of the ledger, at least this season, is the Iron Lady herself, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (Gillian Anderson – who is a disappointment in the role), who ruled Britannia from 1979 to 1990. Thatcher perfectly reflects the mindless, malignant and mendacious modern-day Republicans like Mitch McConnell and Mike Pence.

Thatcher, and her American counterpart Ronald Reagan, were loathsome and diabolical creatures who used flag waving and soaring rhetoric to deceive the masses and lead a conservative revolution that brought about the destruction of the two things it claimed it wanted to conserve – the nation and the family unit.

Most of our major problems of today can be directly traced back to Thatcher and Reagan’s revolution, which unleashed a tsunami of financialization, free trade and muscular militarization that destroyed unions and devastated the working class.

It is symbolically significant that both Thatcher and Reagan later in life suffered from dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease, as their demented approach to governing was fueled by a rapacious myopia, historical illiteracy, selective memory and a relentless lack of any foresight or consideration of consequences.

Republicans (and corporate/Clinton/Obama Democrats) still suffer from Reagan’s dementia, as they are completely incapable of coming up with a bold, new idea or any idea at all. Even Trump, who won in 2016 running against the economic globalism and neo-conservative foreign policy of establishment Republicans, suffered Reagan’s dementia as he unimaginatively governed like the swamp creature he promised to abolish.

Season four of The Crown shows that the royals despised Thatcher, who they thought uncouth and beneath them, just as much as Thatcher despised the poor men that she gleefully sends to war, as well as the working class union men she economically castrates.

The same is true in American politics, as both the Democrats and Republicans claim to be for the workingman but do everything in their power to crush the working class in favor of the investor class.

Even though The Crown triggered my election PTSD, it is a high-quality show I thoroughly enjoyed watching. The thing I liked most about The Crown was that I had the power to turn it off whenever I wanted…unlike American politics, where I am entirely powerless to put an end to the never-ending nightmare.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020