Brideshead Revisited, Color Me Kubrick, & The Queen

Brideshead Revisited is a British TV miniseries (again Granada, not BBC, like The Jewel in the Crown) that my parents have been telling me to watch for a long time. They recently rewatched it as well, alternating that with discs of the first season of The Wire. Sometimes my parents are actually sort of cool. It's number ten on the list that had The Jewel in the Crown at 22. I've actually seen quite a number of these, or at least the ones that are not just news-y things. This one has Jeremy Irons (who has never not looked old (he was only in his early 30s in this, and he was playing a college student), who is quite excellent. It also had Laurence Olivier, Claire Bloom, John Gielgud, and Diana Quick, so the acting was uniformly strong. I did not mean to watch this right before a theatrical film came out, and only discovered the existence of that film when I first IMDB'd this one. The book is all about Catholic repression and British upperclass repression. It's all a big bunch of repression.

Color Me Kubrick is John Malkovich playing a gay con man, Alan Conway, who convinces people he's Stanley Kubrick. I sort of wish that Kubrick had actually been able to make some of the movies described in the film. I do recall reading about this guy back in the 90s, especially after the Frank Rich scene, which just jogged that in my mind. Malkovich is, as normal, quite good, and the director, Brian W. Cook actually worked with Kubrick on Eyes Wide Shut, The Shining, and Barry Lyndon. A brief bit of fun for those interested in a weird-ass story.

The Queen was about the Royal Family and Tony Blair's week after the death of Princess Diana. I was never a big fan of the Royal Family, or Princess Diana for that matter, and Tony Blair's been permanently lowered in my estimation by his love affair with W, but the movie still worked very well. Even as an anti-monarchist, I felt myself siding with Blair against Campbell and getting sort of teary when the Queen came to her senses. Stephen Frears is an immensely talented director, and he does quite a good job, although the stag bits were a little heavy-handed. But the use of archive footage, blended seamlessly with the footage made to look archive was quite excellent. I do want to say that naming your female child Laurence (as in Laurence Burg, the Princess Diana stand-in in the film) is just going to make me think that there was a weird message being sent, but nope, just a woman with a man's name. Silly French. Also, weirdly, there was a film called The Deal made in 2003, that stars Michael Sheen as Blair and was written by Peter Morgan and directed by Stephen Frears. I wonder if all that was a coincidence...