Reviews of the Ignorant: The Queen

What is this garbage (or, as the French would say, garbage)? Yet again, I am going to attempt at great personal risk to amaze the Internets by reviewing a film I have never seen and know nothing about, this time some British crapiola called "The Queen". Now, before I begin, in the interest of journalistic integrity, I must allow for some disclosure. First, while I have not seen this movie, my wife did put it in the DVD player and I did catch a glimpse of some British people yelling at each other when I went to turn it off after finding her asleep five minutes later. B, my wife did comment the next day that the movie was so boring that the synapses in her brain closed up and she spent the 55 seconds watching the movie just wishing that giant foot from Monty Python would crash through the ceiling and crush the whole crowd. Now, I am never one to pay any attention to my wife or respect her opinion, being the independent reviewer that I am. However, I cannot entirely dismiss that her lackluster comments on the quality of the film may have had some influence on my decision to throw the DVD across the room.

The Queen

So what is "The Queen"? To me, it sounded like some homosexual flick. When my wife explained it was British people, I figured maybe Boy George or George Michael. Then she said, no, it was the British royal family, and I knew it had to be Prince Charles. Well, that was close. It is something about Princess Diana and Queen Elizabeth and how Queen Elizabeth may have killed her or something. But then my wife said that the first 45 seconds she watched before she fell into a deep sleep was all about Tony Blair. Now why anyone would want to watch a film about Tony Blair is beyond me. I can't watch the man on CNN in real life without falling into a deep sleep, let alone watch an actor playing him in a movie that is over two hours long! (emphasis mine). So, unless Tony Blair is going to be revealed as the title Queen, plotting to kill Princess Diana with his bare hands while in a sordid love triangle with Boy George and George Michael, count me out. In reality, I expect, if my wife wasn't dreaming the whole thing about Tony Blair (which, given that she had eaten a pound of salami before sitting down to watch this mess, she very well may have), then this movie must be two hours of the man agreeing with anything George W. Bush has said until he has to resign, at which point maybe the ghost of Princess Diana will rip his head off and slate her thirst with his blood. Now that, that might make it worthwhile to fast-forward to the end.

But no, I only, vainly hope that this was the end. Who makes this junk and who do they think will watch it? Considering that it won a bunch of awards, I guess maybe it's made for the people who vote for awards. There are enough people in this country, apparently from some ingrained guilt from kicking the British's (Britisheses? Briti?) collective ass in the Revolutionary War, that think anything with a British accent is far and away superior to whatever America produces. Well, maybe not Benny Hill, but anything else. It's these people who cried on the news when Princess Diana died. Kids in America have to go to school with no pencils, no breakfast, and wearing the same clothes a week at a time, and Princess Diana dying is something to cry about. People in our country die horrible deaths because they can't afford the medication that allows them to fight off the simplest infection, and some fifty year old housewife is blubbering on the news because an anorexic, blond British woman was riding in a car going too fast without her seat belt. Please.

Besides, didn't we fight the Revolutionary War so we didn't have to do stuff like watch movies about kings and queens? In America, the only queen I would worship is the Queen of all Filmdom, Jennifer Connelly. THERE is a woman. If she played the Queen of England in this hot mess, I might actually not have to pay for the rented DVD I smashed trying to fling the thing as far away from my DVD player as possible. That would be a great film: Jennifer Connelly, in a tiara and a tight, white T-shirt, must fight Tony Blair and Boy George to prevent them from raising the corpse of Princess Diana and creating a flesh eating zombie. It could end with them all sped up, running around the park to that kazoo music they always played on "Benny Hill". Instead, though, we get "The Queen", which even my wife can't watch, and she can watch "Steel Magnolias". At least, if you still choose to befoul your DVD player with this, you should know to turn on the subtitles. How can a group of people be known as "English" and not even speak it? Whatever. All I need to know about this film can be summed up in three words: Awards, British, Over Two Hours. Wait, that was five words. Ok, how about this: Awards, British, Over-Two-Hours. Ye have been warned. Avoid this like the bubonic plague.

My Rating: A big, fat royal 0 Stars (or, as they say in Britain, "Zed").