I was excited for this as Christopher Lee is one of my all-time favorite actors and he’s only been the subject of pretty flimsy, amateurish documentaries up to now. I have mixed feelings about this film by Jon Spira, who made the excellent Elstree 1976. Both the content and the presentation are fairly straightforward, even routine, and I didn’t learn anything that I didn’t already know just as a fan. Possibly to compensate for the absence of either compelling storytelling or a unique angle to develop, Spira opted to use animation – always a red flag for me. A marionette of Lee appears on screen, narrating his own story, and a voice-actor impersonates Lee not terribly well. I’ve heard much better impressions of Lee. The actor gets the accent right, but captures none of Lee’s grand cadence. It’s hard to believe this was the best they could do. These complaints aside, Lee’s story is so impressive on its own that it’s hard to screw up a faithful retelling of it, which the film does well enough. The strongest material consists of a few moments of Lee himself seen in newsreel footage or interviews, especially towards the end of his life when he was enjoying not only a Knighthood and a side career as a metal opera singer, but a major resurgence in his 80s thanks to appearing in The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars and the films of Tim Burton. Oddly, only a few luminaries appear to appreciate Lee on camera; (Joe Dante, Peter Jackson, and John Landis are the only directors interviewed, and Dante and Landis don’t even discuss the films in which they directed Lee). Where are Burton, George Lucas or Martin Scorsese, all of whom directed Lee within the last decade of his life? I would really have preferred some more in-depth discussion or analysis of the connecting themes in Lee’s many roles, such as apostacy and sorcery, or even his swordsmanship. Bottom line: it’s a standard biographical documentary, which is fine, and it’s well worth seeing.
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