When is a TV movie.... not a TV movie?

When it's got a cracking cast, a good script and a award winning film director I guess.

The Queen








http://www.thequeenmovie.co.uk/


A performance by Helen Mirren in the title role that must surely earn her BAFTA and Oscar nominations , if academy memories are good enough come next year.

On a side issue, Odeon http://www.odeon.co.uk/ are still showing the Superman version of the anti film piracy trail before all their movies at the moment. Clips of "Superman Returns" pepper the trail...in increasingly poor quality/ reduced size, supposedly highlighting what those choosing to buy dodgy carboot/ street corner DVD copies are putting up with. Forgoing, for example, the "Stunning visuals" of which the trail boasts. It ends with the tag line "it's the experience that counts".

Somewhat ironic when you consider I went to see Superman Returns at that very cinema and had to endure the film repeatedly going out of focus.. then having to wait a few minutes (squinting all the way) for a member of staff to come and adjust it again.. only to find the focus slipping once more a few minutes later. This process was repeated throughout the showing. Several customers left the screen to complain and to ask for a member of staff to fix the problem .. however when the film ended all members of staff were surprisingly "busy else where". The foyer, box office and corridors were all akin to the Mary Celeste (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Celeste) on the Odeon employee front. Odd that... almost as if they knew people might complain and ask for an apology or their money back ;) Cynical? Me?! Never :)

I sent an e-mail to customer services, a week later the reply arrived informing me that"the cause of this was due to the print physically 'shedding' its coating. This results in the film going out of focus as the dirt sits between the film and the gate causing focus problems. This can only be compensated for by the projectionist so much which is why you may have seen intermittent 'fuzziness'. The problem with shedding is suprisingly common and all we can do is make sure everything is as clean as possible before shows and that if a print is particularly bad then try to get the distributor to replace it. Generally it occurs and then naturally stops after its first few runs through a projector but with the recent high temperatures / humidity within the projection rooms the problems have become evident on screen to our guests"

A new one on me it has to be said, blaming a heat wave for damaging something designed to pass in front of a painfully hot bulb in the projector several times a day.. was intersting. But whatever the reason, they clearly knew there was an issue beforehand and a warning when purchasing the tickets might have been good (and basic) customer service .... after all it is the "experience that counts".