The award shelf at BBC Wales must be straining under the weight of awards, with the show having had another clean sweep at the TV awards last night. However in sad news, it has been announced that Nigel Kneale, often considered the father of TV sci-fi having brought us Quatermass back in the 1950’s, has died at the age of 84. Certainly the original TV serial of Quatermass And The Pit stands out as a fantastic example of how to do compelling TV sci-fi within the confines of the medium, and is something I enjoyed watching years after it was first shown.
Monthly Archives: November 2006
The Queen
One of the recent movie releases I’d particularly wanted to see was the critically acclaimed Stephen Frears film The Queen, which won two awards at this years Venice Film Festival. The film follows Stephen Frears acclaimed and controversial TV drama The Deal looking at the relationship between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and features Michael Sheen repeating his role as Blair.
Although in most cinemas the movie has slipped off the current listings we were lucky to spot a screen in Reading that was still showing the movie – although as an aside we realised quite how spoilt we have become with DVD, and our trips to digital cinema screens in London, as after more than a month of daily showings the print was really quite poor in places which was a shame.
The movie primarily covers the events of the first week of September in 1997, following on from the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in a car crash in Paris, although it also includes prologue and epilogue scenes set at the time of the election win by Blair in May 1997, and late October 1997. Unexpectedly though there wasn’t any explicit caption clarifying how factual or fictitious what is shown on the screen actually is. The official line is that it is a fiction, however the writer Peter Morgan apparently had access to a number of off-the-record sources on which to base the story. I have to say, whether fiction or not, in general the movie is very convincing.
There are points where perhaps the characters behave as parodies of the real people, but in general the characters seem like real people. Also, although there are moments of amusement in the film, the characters and events are dealt with well – important considering that the majority of the characters involved are still alive. Care had also been taken to ensure that main characters in the drama who are played by actors always appear as actors, so for example the newspapers and TV reports of the day are re-edited to include images of the actors, whilst those aspects where the real people are used, for example Diana herself and Earl Spencer, are cleverly interwoven.
Probably the best actor in the whole movie is Helen Mirren in the title role, who delivers a fantastic and utterly convincing performance. Whilst some of the other actors, although delivering good performances, never quite convince, by the end you’d be forgiven for forgetting that Helen Mirren isn’t actually the Queen herself. In reality, this is the whole reason the movie works, because Mirren is so compelling, and convincing in exploring what might have been going on behind closed doors during that week. Whilst we really know very little about our Queen as a person, we know enough to make what is shown during the movie utterly compelling and convincing.
Whilst it’s unlikely that you’ll find the movie on at the cinema for much longer, I can certainly recommend it when it invariably comes out on DVD and is shown on TV.
Memory Upgrade
So I’ve finally got around to upgrading the memory in our iMac G5. Back when we got our first Mac, it was recommended as pretty well the first purchase for the machine. At that time, Apple shipped their consumer machines with a paltry 256Mb of memory on board, so it was pretty well essential to avoid a lot of waiting around. When we got this machine, they were shipping with 512Mb of memory, which is pretty much adequate, and it only really causesproblems when we you try to multi-task a lot of applications, or load something big.
Unfortunately, as time has gone on and our iPhoto collection has grown, and our iTunes database has expanded, loading either application tended to result in a large lump of the active memory disappearing, and then a good deal of disk activity as the operating system starts swapping memory off to disk, so I decided that it was about time I upgraded. MacOS X, like Windows XP likes as much memory as it can get.
Anyway, I pointed my browser at Crucial Technology, and stepped through their useful Memory Advisor tool that makes sure you get the right memory modules. The iMac has two memory slots, each of which can take up to 1Gb, and ships with a single 512Mb module in one slot. Although it is quite happy to take different types of module in each slot, it runs better with a matched pair, so after some going back and forth, I decided to go the whole hog and get the full 2Gb upgrade. My figuring is that iPhoto and iTunes are only going to get larger, so whilst 1Gb may be adequate for now, we may as well do it in one step, and then there is only one redundant module rather than two.
The upgrade turned up in the post yesterday, and I grabbed a copy of the Apple Upgrade instructions. Because of the compact design, the upgrade is a bit more involved than the equivalent upgrade for an eMac. To do the job on an iMac G5 you have to loosen three screws, and flip open the entire back of the machine, giving a good view of the whole of the innards of the machine, including the processor, the hard drive and the motherboard. The memory slots are pretty obvious and easy to get to, and the actual process of putting in the new memory is pretty quick. The only slightly complicated bit is ensuring that the clips at the top of the back slot back into place.
Having said that, it’s made a big difference to the performance, especially with iPhoto which comes up noticeably quicker. My thought is that with the lower amount of memory iPhoto is loading and almost immediately swapping memory out to the disk, resulting in a good deal of the disk access. Certainly it will be interesting to see what else runs faster, but if you’ve got a Mac with 512Mb memory I can certainly recommend beefing it up a bit.