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Regal reality

Thursday, September 28, 2006

She won’t be amused. Tomorrow night The Queen opens the New York Film Festival.

Or at least Stephen Fears’ film of that title is doing the job, with Helen Mirren (pictured) playing Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom. And it’s bound to put audiences in mind of her Great-Great-Grandmama Victoria’s sniffy dictum about non-amusement.

 

Frears’ movie is a bold effort to take on one of the most lurid (and for Elizabeth II quite baffling) episodes of a half-century reign - the week that followed the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.

 

Amid much media madness, the British monarch and people that week seemed to diverge dizzyingly – appearing afresh to orbit in different universes, and raising the prospect, in some observers’ views at least, that the British might finally dump their once-beloved crowned head. It’s a challenging tale for any story-teller.

 

When Frears is not making glorious fictions full of subtle interpersonal conflicts, like Dangerous Liaisons, The Grifters, and Dirty Pretty Things, he cultivates a habit of directing well-researched fact-based narratives – also about subtle interpersonal conflicts, of course.

 

These factual enterprises have included most recently The Deal, about Tony Blair’s on-again, off-again arrangement with his finance minister Gordon Brown for handing over the reigns of power. And much longer ago Frears made the TV film The Road to Balcombe Street, about a London siege of IRA gunmen, for which (to offer full disclosure) I provided some of the journalistic background. It explored how Irish “active service units" operated in Britain during the movement’s bombing campaign. So I have some notion of how punctilious Frears can be in achieving his filmic authenticity.

 

The Queen is entirely believable, though not through slavish mimicry of real people or events. Considerable creative license gets exercised, inevitably, but the overall effect is one of convincing verisimilitude. The central tension, between the queen and her prime minister, is richly textured and nuanced.

 

Michael Sheen is persuasive as Blair, but Mirren’s performance is triumphant, not least in humanizing an often remote figure, even during events that for many observers demonstrated the queen’s least empathic qualities. Identifying with the character was perhaps a bigger stretch for the actress than many people might realize. She told me this week: “I grew up in a vehemently anti-monarchist family, and I embraced and clung to that feeling for a long time. But I found myself absolutely loving the Queen - and it’s deeply embarrassing”.

 

She didn’t seem all that embarrassed, since she laughed a lot at the thought.

 

 

 

“THERE’S TROUBLE IN YAHOO CITY”, to misquote from another, very different film. Hard on the heels of Yahoo Chief Executive Terry Semel’s disclosure that advertising revenue was tapering off compared with expectations, has come the previously unheard-of news (in just 11 years of existence, admittedly) that the company’s US offices will shut down over the Christmas holidays; most of the 10,500 staff will have to use up their vacations to get paid time-off.  What lies behind Yahoo’s new cost-cutting cautiousness is a trend getting more evident by the day in the internet’s financial life.

 

 

Closely-focused “search advertising” (which appears when you search for a topic related to the advertiser’s product) is making substantial inroads against the older and still more familiar-looking, generic “display” advertising.

 

 

Inevitably (since Google now rules the roost so unbeatably in internet searching) Yahoo gets to suffer. A new survey from the website analysts Hitwise shows that ads on Google send visitors to internet shopping sites at three times the rate that Yahoo achieves.

 

 

At the bottom of the pile, incidentally, Microsoft’s MSN (- do you remember MSN as a search engine? At all? -) manages to influence only about half the number of shoppers that Yahoo does.

 

 

TROUBLE IN PARADISE, TOO - that paradise for neocons and right-wingers generally, Fox News. Quite apart from the partisan fizz of its spat with an ex-President, variously seen as “Clinton Smacks Down Fox”, “Clinton Freaks Out” or “Clinton’s wild overreaction”, there’s an objective matter of substance to be concerned about … sheer moolah.

 

The so-called news network is trying to hike how much it charges cable companies for its “service”. In what is seen as either a haughty or a panicky move, it’s trying to quadruple its price from the accustomed 27-cents-per-subscriber up to one whole dollar. Industry observers calculate that nationwide this could bring in nearly $500 million a year extra to the Rupert Murdoch-owned operation - if, that is, it wins in the notoriously push-me-pull-you negotiations that characterize cable TV carriage deals.

 

Maybe Murdoch is more than a tad worried. Fox News’ primetime ratings have in fact fallen for eleven straight months now; they’re down 23% last quarter compared with the same period last year.