Headspace

Over a period of the weekend holidays, I did some work and watched all the good movies of 2006.

The Queen
It wasn't a portrait of the Queen the advertisements led me to believe, nor one of Blair in his early days. It was more a carefully observed inside gossip made up with fictional dialogue. We don't know what the Queen personally thinks about the whole affair but that is how she had behaved. Where there is fiction, it sits uneasily with the rest, badly imagined. (The bit about the stag, for instance, is sweet but feels like a foolish and out of place sentiment.) It was to me a documentary and the treatment of all in it, fair and sympathetic.

Ahem, found sgfilm.com where others more intelligent say something else very complimentary about the stag bit.

Confession of Pain
HK movie industry churns out fantastic stuff about police and thieves and this is one of them. High drama the way I like it. I was squeezing my bag in joy over this one. How I love the denouement, the inevitable conclusion and the inordinately apt English title - so many Chinese movies have bad titles. (The Chinese title Shang Change was less suitable due to its grandiosity.) The presentation of the problem as a detective story and the investigation dragged the story but it is only a blot in the dark horizon.