Dreaming of the Queen

[Enjoying this run of late-season warm weather we've been having, I strolled down the hill after work yesterday mulling what to do with my evening. I could go home and work more on my room. I could go get a drink or two. I could plot the overthrow of the capitalist insect that preys on the life of the people.]

[Or I could go to a movie. I've been agitating for a couple of weeks with everyone I know to go see Shortbus, but everyone's on different schedules, so whatever. There I was at the Embarcadero Cinema. Shortbus was playing in one theater at 5:20, while The Queen was playing in like, twelve, on the half hour. I still harbor fantasies of seeing the Mitchell film with someone I can talk to about it afterwards, so I opted, like everyone else, for The Queen.]

[Helen Mirren was great, as expected. She played QEII as I imagine her, which means as we all imagine her: competent, unglamorous except when required to be, and a bit out of touch, mostly thanks to the influence (pernicious, at least here) of her mother and her husband. The physical resemblance and the mannerisms: Mirren had HM down cold. The movie was as much Michael Sheen's (as Tony Blair) as it was Mirren's, and he did a good job, too, showing what a modernizing politician faces when paired with an institution for which modernity equals extinction.]

[As I'm sure you've read, the movie takes place against the backdrop of Diana's death, and it was in necessary long explanations about why this was such a big deal that I thought the film bogged down. For whatever reasons, I've been a British Royal Family watcher my whole life, and I found that I knew what the characters were going to say before they said it. This involved exposition was certainly necessary for most people who have little to no idea what roles the Queen, her family, and the prime minister play in the British constitution, but I didn't learn much.]

[What did strike me is how much I remembered from that summer of 1997. (Yeah, yeah; it's all about me.) John paging me thru Rafe (this was before most of us knew people with cell phones) with the news of the accident; watching the Queen's belated televised speech while working a temp job at San Francisco's local access TV station (it was odd knowing snatches of dialogue before Mirren uttered them); watching part of the funeral procession on the TV in that apartment on Russian Hill.]

[This is one of those movies which I anticipate will get one and only one Oscar nod, and Mirren will deserve it.]

Previously Next