The Queen
— Comes highly recommended to even the hardest republicans.”
- Director: Stephen Frears
- United Kingdom, 2006
If before seeing The Queen you caught the two-part television drama Elizabeth I, then you probably admired Helen Mirren’s preface to her glorious turn as our current monarch.
The Queen paints an intimate portrait of Elizabeth II during the aftermath of Diana’s death in 1997. Any portrayal of the private activities of the Royal Family is mere conjecture, of course, but there’s something direct and sympathetic about Mirren’s stoical, wise and occasionally vulnerable figure. It’s a performance well deserving of a 2007 Oscar and the same might be said of Michael Sheen’s Tony Blair, which wasn’t nominated.
Even if its audience disdains the monarchy or our present joke of a government, The Queen somehow manages to transcend all that and deliver something truly sympathetic and humanistic in its characters.
See also:
The Departed
The older generation still runs things round these parts.
- Originally published: 26 Feb 2007 in Film
Parenthood
The film that taught us that every family is dysfunctional in some way!
- Originally published: 22 Jan 2007 in Film
Fargo
A masterpiece of underplay and a black comedy à l’époque, Fargo is a Coen watershed.
- Originally published: 25 Feb 2007 in Film
In Bruges
Possibly the finest black comedy of the decade. F**king Bruges!
- Originally published: 21 Apr 2008 in Film
Walk the Line
Demons and diamonds in this biopic of the late Johnny Cash.
- Originally published: 21 Nov 2006 in Film
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Hello you, I'm Mike Padgett. I'm not a Princeton curator, Knoxville mayoral candidate, Kentuckian pastor or Arizona journalist, I just share the same name. In fact, I am a consultant working in user experience and information design.
I also enjoy travel, concerts, films and walking.
I'm originally from Yorkshire, England but nowadays I live in Belgium. My current favourite Belgian beer is Black Albert.
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Over a year in the making, Dopeology.org is my latest personal project: a topology of doping in thirty years of European pro road cycling.
I collected information from thousands of sources, then I modelled and published it via a lightweight user interface.
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